Cities of Egypt,

Preface

This work, a reprint of articles on the Cities of Egypt mentioned in the Bible, has been written with the object of awaking such a popular interest in the famous sites described as may lead to their farther exploration. The Biblical notices of these cities, slight as they often are, have been chosen for their liveliness and human interest as the key-notes of each subject.

REGINALD STUART POOLE.

October 1S82.

Chapter I. Introductory

PAGE

Aspect of Egypt — True limits — Formation by Nile-deposit — Names of Egypt and the Nile — Conflict of the Nile and the desert : its place in Egyptian mythology— How the Hebrews regarded Egypt and the desert i

Chapter II. Memphis

Necropolis alone remaining : its grandeur — Foundation of city — Dyke of Menes — Names of Memphis — Religion — Great temple : remains described by ’Abd-el-Lateef —

The Pyramid-field — belief of Egyptians in the future state the cause of their costly tombs . . . . . 1 5

Chapter III. Hanes

Identity of Hanes with Heracleopolis proved by Mariette — Religion of city — Heracleopolite Kings of Egypt : their period a blank — Hanes in the time of the Assyrian Wars — The Tablet of Naples — Need of exploration . . .30

X

CONTENTS.

Chapter IV. Thebes

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Splendid remains of city — Origin — Site — Names — Worship — History — Temple of El-Kamak : edifices on western bank : tombs 46

Chapter V. Zoan

Historical importance of eastern border : its peculiar population— History of Zoan — The Shepherd Kings — The Hebrews — The Empire — Zoan rebuilt asRameses — Shemite influence on Egyptian literature — Zoan during Oppression — Decline — Names — Religion — Description by an ancient Egyptian scribe — Ruins — Field for exploration . . . .64

Chapter VI. Goshen

Local tradition as to Exodus untrue — Identification of city and land of Goshen — Local worship— Shemite colonists — History of Hebrew sojourn — Present state of the district and of the site of the capital 89

Chapter VII. Pithom

Story of the Oppression of the Hebrews — Town of Pithom — Fragmentary Egyptian illustrations of the age — Brickmakers represented at Thebes — Shemite colonists in Goshen— Excavations would supply more information . 102

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xi

Chapter VIII. Migdol

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route of the Exodus — Geological changes in Lower Egypt — Chain of lakes between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea— Migdol, the last camping-place, identified — Place where the Hebrews crossed — Dr. Brugsch’s theory of the route 1 12

Chapter IX. On

On, or Heliopolis, the Egyptian university — Origin — Names — Religious centre — The temple as described by the Ethiopian king Pianchi — History of city — Influence of the university on Alexandria — Teaching at Heliopolis —

Its survival at Cairo — Remains of On — Tradition of visit of the Holy Family 131

Chapter X. Pi-beseth

1 of city — Its great antiquity — Name and worship — Shishak

and his family : record of his campaign in Palestine — - Remains of temples — Festival of Bubastis — Historical character of Egyptian remains . . . . . .150

Chapter XI. Sin

The approaches to Egypt- -Strong position of Sin or Pelusium — Names — History — The Persian conquests of Egypt here

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xii

PAGE

decided — The murder of Pompey at Pelusium — The site — Historical lesson — Neighbouring stronghold Tahpanhes, probably Daphn* . . . . . . . .166

Chapter XII. Alexandria

Foundation by Alexander — Plan — Advantages of situation — Civil history : greatness under earlier Ptolemies : decline : the Alexandrian mob — Alexandria as an intellectual centre : worship of Sarapis : Museum and Library : faculties of university : extent of collections of books — Alexandrian philosophy: influence of Platonism seen in Egyptian temple : meeting of Greek and Hebrew thought: Platonism and Judaism : Philo — Christianity at Alexandria — Influence of Platonism, and action and reaction of Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian thought — Clement of Alexandria: Origen — Separation of philosophers and churchmen: continued action of philosophy on dogma : asceticism a gift of Egypt— Athanasius and Arius : Julian : fall of paganism : fanaticism — Arab conquest— Scanty remains — Temple of Arsinoe and story of Berenice’s hair dedicated there — Farewell to Egypt . .178

NOTES 215

MAP.

Sketch Map to illustrate the Route of the J To be placed between Exodus / pages 120 and 121

CITIES OF EGYPT.

Chapter I. Introductory

Egypt is a land of light. The landscape lacks the charm of form, the majesty of the Alps, the solemn line of Atlas, the asperity of the Lycian crags which tower above the turbulent gulf of Adalia, the solid mass of snow-clad Lebanon, the pastoral softness of the Galilean hills. Plain and highland, meadow and forest, do not succeed one another as in those varied lands which are each a little world complete in itself. The colouring is monotonous. The fields change with the yearly course of nature or the threefold harvest which rewards the labour of man. The mountains of Egypt are white or yellow or tawny ; on their rocky sides grows neither moss nor heather ; no pines clothe their steep heights ; no firs

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crown their level tops. The fields are varied alone by long avenues of stately palms in measured colonnades, or by the welcome shade of a rare sycamore. Nature does not transform the scene with a rain-storm or make it mysterious with vapours. There is neither rain nor cloud nor any mist. But those unvarying features are lighted up with ever-changing expression like a sympathetic face which takes its beauty from the influence of things around, reflecting pain or pleasure, joy or grief. Each day brings a rhythmic sequence of colour, from the moment when the long streaks of ruddy light in which Homer saw the rosy fingers of the Dawn begin to stretch across the eastern sky, until the olive after-glow reflects in its mirror the last rays of the sun fallen below the Libyan waste. But neither for the cloudless sunrise and sunset, nor for the herald of the one and the rear-guard of the other, does nature take most care. It is when the sun is in his strength and all he shines on is only relieved by the quivering of intense heat, a white heat as of a furnace, that the shadows are painted with sunset hues, and the sides of the barren mountains become luminous with liquid rose and purple and violet, like marvels of cloudland dropped on the earth. There are moments

INTRODUCTORY.

when we witness the same glow in the Greek islands, where the banished Apostle saw the Holy City descend from the skies in its splendour of sard and beryl, of sapphire and amethyst. At night the yellow glory of the moon walking in brightness makes but a softer day, or the deep blue sky of Egypt is lit up by manycoloured stars. The plague that foreshadowed the last and heaviest of all was the darkness that could be felt.

We must think of this strange beauty of Egypt if we would know why she has drawn to herself the Arab and the Hebrew from their life of freedom, and has yet a witchery for modern hearts, to prove the truth of the native saying that he who has drunk of the water of the Nile must return to drink of it again. We can see why the Egyptian has clung to his land with a love that is not patriotism, but a blind instinct of enjoyment, the sense of life that in the North wakens the world in spring alone. For all moves in harmony with nature, and existence is not without joy be the taskmaster’s rod ever so heavy.

Egypt on the maps is not this wonderful land. We look and see a vast oblong space squared out in the north-eastern corner of Africa. This is a fiction of the

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geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of Greek legend, or the Lyonesse of mediaeval romance, both sunk beneath the ocean to explain their disappearance. The true Egypt of the old monuments, of the Hebrews, of the Greeks and Romans, of the Arabs, and of its own people in this day, is a mere fraction of this vast area of the maps, nothing more than the valley and plain watered by the Nile, for nearly seven hundred miles by the river’s course from the Mediterranean southward. On either side are the great wastes, the highlands of the eastern desert, the undulating lowlands of the western, both parts of that great belt which runs across Africa and is nowhere broken but by the course of the Nile. The very populations are different. The scanty tribes which roam in the deserts are in manners, and some even in race, alien to the settled dwellers on the banks of the Nile. The strongest ruler of Egypt cannot call the wanderers his subjects. One tribe on the west moves from the Nile to the Atlantic. It would need a mighty Pharaoh to control the Benee ’Alee.

The story of Egypt is graven in its rocks, and written in its soil. Countless ages ago the mighty river gathered his forces in Central Africa, where the equatorial rains

INTRODUCTORY.

still yearly replenish a series of vast lakes. Forcing a way northward to lower levels, the mass of water cut a great trench in the rocky surface of the desert. In Upper Egypt this stupendous work is about three hundred feet deep from the top of the mountains to the river’s bed, and from eight miles to less than a mile in breadth. As the Nile found a way to the sea, the waters sank to the base of the trench, leaving usually a level space on either side. With the rainy season of the equatorial region, the Nile still rises every year and carries northward the rich soil washed down from the highlands of Abyssinia, which with the beautiful regularity of nature is spread equally on the whole surface covered by the inundation, renewing the land, which never need lie fallow, nor have any artificial aid to make it fertile. This deposit has been carefully measured where in the course of centuries it has risen up the sides of monuments of known date. The rate of increase is only about four inches and a half in a century, yet this is amply enough to fertilize the land. Near Cairo the trench of the Nilevalley opens out into a great triangular plain, the Delta, or Lower Egypt, won, like all deltas, from the ocean. Two great branches of the river water it, following its

CITIES OF EGYPT.

outline. This vast surface, formed of successive deposits, shows how much of the gift of the Nile man suffers to be yearly poured away into the sea and lost for ever. Were a cutting made anywhere from the river into the desert, the stream would carry Egypt with it in its course. No sooner was the Freshwater Canal cut and the waters of the Nile admitted, than the wilderness bloomed with mysterious herbage.

The natural division into valley and plain, and the character of Egypt, give us a clue to the names of the country. In the older books of the Bible we find Mizraim a dual word, the two Mazors, like the two Sicilies. In the Prophets Mazor sometimes occurs, and even Mizraim for the Delta, while Pathros is their name for Upper Egypt, the native Pa-ta-res, the Southland. The derivation of Mazor is obscure, and conjecture is mere learned idling ; but it is interesting to know that the old name survives in Misr, in the vulgar speech Masr, the Arabic name of Egypt, and strangely also of its capital. The old Egyptians do not leave us in doubt as to their definition of their country ; with them it was ‘ Kem,’ the ‘ Black,’ from the colour of its soil : there is no place for the yellow desert in this descriptive name.

INTRODUCTORY.

The last use of Kem died out in the form Chemi in Coptic, the descendant of the classical language, which ceased to be spoken a century ago. It survives among us in the terms ‘ chemistry ’ and ‘ alchemy,’ sciences thought to be of Egyptian origin.

The Greek name which is the parent of our Egypt is as obscure in its meaning as Mazor. We first find it in the Homeric poems. In the Odyssey, it seems strangely used for both country and river, only changing the gender from feminine to masculine. There may be sound reason in this. Once a year, when the fertilising flood covers the whole valley and plain, river and country are one, from desert to desert. This ancient use of the name of Egypt ceases with Homer : thenceforward, the stream is called the Nile.

Still more fit than the names of Egypt are those of the Nile. The modern people call it * the sea,’ an Arab way of speaking of the mightiest rivers ; and with them ‘the Nile’ means the inundation. Nahum, when he warns Nineveh, telling her how the Assyrian sacked her rival and ancient conqueror Thebes, calls the waterrampart of the Egyptian capital, not the river, but ‘ the sea’ (Nah. iii. 8). The usual Hebrew name is ‘the

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river,’ ‘ yeor,’ but this is not the common word for river. It is a special one almost reserved for the Nile and the canals it feeds. A rarer name in Hebrew is Shichor, ‘ the black,’ and we also find ‘ the river of Mizraim ’ where the common Hebrew word for ‘ river ’ is used. Nile, the Greek name, seems to mean ‘ dark blue ’ or ‘ black.’ We may compare it to Shichor and to the modem Bahr-el-Azrak, or ‘ Blue Sea,’ as the great stream which brings down the fertilising soil to Egypt is now called, while its rival is the Bahr-el-Abyad, or ‘ White Sea.’ The Nile in Egypt is never clear, and its volume and depth give it the deep hue which Shichor and Nile describe ; for the vagueness of antiquity has not our fine sense of the tones of colour.

The mystery of the source of the Nile struck the fancy of the old Egyptians. Hence the sacred name Hapi, ‘the Hidden,’ under which the river was worshipped as a god.

Not, however, in this form does the Nile take high rank in the Egyptian religion : Hapi is only the river personified, the fruitful genius who with his water-plants builds up the throne of Pharaoh. In a larger sense the Nile is identified with Osiris, ‘ the good being,’ the source

INTRODUCTORY.

of light and plenty, thus at once the sun and the Nile. As the sun, Osiris ruled not only the world of light, but also, and more specially, the world of darkness. He was the sun of the night, the ruler of the shades. Each Egyptian took his name after death, that as Osiris he might conquer darkness and return in light.

As the Nile, Osiris is the hidden source of fertility and nourishment, in perpetual warfare with barrenness and famine. His enemy was Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon, the desert, the sea, the storm, darkness, and destruction. The force of this opposition lies in the contrast of the desert to Egypt. Take one step from the valley or plain, rich with teeming vegetation, full of life, and you are at once in a waste utterly barren and dead, whether it be the mountainous region on the east or the rolling stretch of lowland on the west. There are the marks of a perpetual conflict ; here the Nile has won for Egypt a new strip of the desert, there the sand has poured in and obliterated the fertile land. N o wonder that the Egyptians saw in this the war of good and evil. No wonder that in another and gentler sense the western expanse, to them illimitable, impassable, mysterious, wherein the sun daily sank and disappeared,

IO

CITIES OF EGYPT.

became the region of death, the symbol of ‘ God’s underworld,’ ‘ the hidden land,’ ‘ the West, the ancient, the perfect, the vast.’

It is in such figures as these, in the use of an epithet, in the natural expression of surprise or pleasure or awe, that the ancients show us their sense of nature in terse utterances whose force puts to shame our modern attempts to picture in words. Thus the sudden view of the plain of the Delta as its green expanse refreshes the eye wearied with the monotony of the parched yellow desert is brought before us in a single sentence. The plain of Jordan ere it was blasted was ‘well watered everywhere,’ ‘ as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoan ’ (Gen. xiii. io).1

After the long and bitter bondage Egypt did not always wear this pleasant colour to the Hebrew eye. It had a Janus face. It was the land of plenty where they had eaten freely the abundant and varied produce of the earth, the land of kindly folk who did not share in the stern policy of their rulers, and had always a welcome

1 Zoan for Zoar here seems the better reading, unless we may suppose Zal or Zar, the Egyptian name of Zoan, to be meant : Zoar of Palestine can scarcely be intended, for the passage would then be unlike the simple style of Genesis.

INTRODUCTORY.

il for the fugitive from Palestine ; but it was also the house of bondage, where as in a furnace of iron they had toiled under the burning sun, while the taskmaster smote their bare shoulders with a continual stroke. The meaner souls, as they grew weary of the wilderness or waxed feeble in the struggle for existence against Canaanite and Assyrian, could not forget the flesh-pots of Egypt. The runaway Saneha, whose adventures are preserved in a papyrus roll, when he tells us in the story of his flight how he wandered on the border faint and hungry, measures his progress by the Egyptian supper-time.

To the land of plenty the Hebrew and the Arab have always fled when their pastures have been smitten by drought. Rarely have they come in vain. For there can be no dearth in Egypt unless the river fail, and this is most unusual. Thus the regular rise of the Nile came to be expected, and was no doubt ascribed by the people to the river-god, rather than to the Divine Ruler of all things. Perhaps this tendency struck the native poet who in his beautiful hymn to the Nile makes the genius of the river a manifestation of the hidden divinity who cannot be graven by the sculptor, unseen, whom no offering reaches, who cannot be drawn to the

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mysteries, his place unknown, whom no abode can hold, w’hose mind none can attain unto. Yet to this day the river is reverenced. Every year before the festal ceremony of cutting the canal of Cairo, the signal that the inundation has attained its needed height, a pillar of mud is raised to be washed away by the rising waters : it is called ‘ the bride,’ and legend says that it represents a virgin who in ancient times was decked in gay apparel and cast into the stream as a sacrifice, by a fiercer marriage than that in which the Doge of Venice was wont to wed the Adriatic. We see another indication that the common people did not look beyond the Nile to Providence, in the contrast drawn in Deuteronomy between the husbandry of Egypt and that of Palestine, the mechanical nature of the one, the faith that watched the varying seasons in the other (Deut. xi. 10-12).

The wonderful spectacle of Egypt flooded by the inundation, the Delta one vast lake, a torrent between desert and desert, in the valley of Upper Egypt, towns and villages islanded in the swirling waters, the people hurrying their cattle to places of safety — this sight, welcome as it is to the natives, is full of terror to the

INTRODUCTORY.

stranger. Thus the Hebrew prophets, writing in days when the memory of the sojourn had passed away, take the Nile in flood-time as a figure for the onrush of a mighty army of invasion (Jer. xlvi. 7, 8), and also for utter destruction when a land is swept clean of its inhabitants (Amos ix. 5).

The desert-like Egypt had a twofold aspect to the Hebrews as it has to all who have since known it. To the wayfarer it is terrible in its loneliness, its vastness, its silence, its lack of all that makes the earth pleasant to the eye with signs of life and verdure, with offer of food and water. It is a dry and thirsty land, and that means more than all the rest when the sun beats with unremit ting force till the earth is as heated iron beneath a sky of molten brass. Yet it had another face. There have always been those who chose the desert life because they desired to leave mankind for a time to be alone with God. Abraham preferred the border of the desert to the pleasant plain of Jordan. Moses fled to the desert for those many years in which he prepared to be the leader and lawgiver. Elijah went to Horeb when he would solve the question whether he was indeed the last of the faithful. In the desert the Baptist passed his early days,

CITIES OF EGYPT.

until the voice crying in the wilderness peopled the waste with those who came from busy city and field to repent in its solemn quiet. The old Egyptian hermits founded in the desert the hardest monastic state, which surrendered all the joys of life in exchange for the calm of the silent valleys. For in those tremendous solitudes there is neither sight nor sound to disturb the mind. In the mighty rocks and the rolling hills, stretching far away to immeasurable distance, not clothed by nature, untrod by man, save in the rare tracks where his timorous uncertain footprints are washed away by the first light air that stirs the sand, under the luminous heavens, most of all when the night has fallen, more than even in the midst of the ocean, man seems conscious of the Divine Presence. Nothing is between him and the heavens which open their portals wide. The world need not be shut out, with its changing shows, its restless movement, its many voices of to-day : it is so far away that it is as though it had never been. The scene which through countless ages has known no change is full of the silence and the rest of eternity.

MEMPHIS.

i

Chapter II. Memphis

No one of the great cities of the old world has so utterly disappeared as Memphis. Her rival Thebes has yet four splendid temples to attest the greatness which Homer sang. Babylon and Nineveh are still marked by vast mounds, the sepulchres of their treasures. Athens nestles, as of yore, beneath her ancient citadel of rock. Rome has endured for six-and-twenty centuries the storms of changing fortune, and is growing once more. Jerusalem, long shrunken within her first limits of near three thousand years ago, is again enlarging herself. But no temple or town attests the former wealth of Memphis, or preserves a fragment of her once abounding life. There is neither sacred building, nor palace, nor a trace of common houses, nothing to show where the long ramparts rose, or where the White Wall, the ancient citadel, defended the capital. The mighty city, which i6

CITIES OF EGYPT.

for three, four, or five thousand years was first or second in Egypt ; the famous shrine, enriched by successive kings, from the first who ruled the land to the Macedonian sovereigns who courted the powerful priesthood ; all that stood within the ample circuit of the walls, is levelled to the ground, and the traveller is shown a fallen Colossus 1 and a few fragments near by, and told that he stands in the precincts of the Temple of Ptah, the Egyptian Vulcan, and that of Memphis herself nothing else remains.

Yet no city in the world has so many or such costly monuments. As you stand on the platform of the Citadel of Cairo that commands the westward view, you look across the vast modern city, the plantations of mulberry trees and the rolling Nile, and the other side of the valley rich in corn-lands, with the long line of palms in which Memphis is just traced, and you see in the farthest distance the low edge of the Libyan desert, spreading like an even rampart, along whose summit rise in four groups the shining masses of the Pyramids of Memphis, like the boundary-marks of the mighty waste,

1 The Colossus is said to have been recently set up by an English traveller.

MEMPHIS.

1 7 the Egyptian land of the shades, the abode of the sun after his setting. The city of the living has perished, the city of the dead remains, remains with the royal sepulchres, and around them the humbler tombs of subjects, sculptured and inscribed with the lively records of what was done in the remote past by those whose mummies have crumbled to dust in the lapse of ages. Memphis the lost is here recovered. We may walk through the silent streets of the City of the Dead, as did the hero of an old Egyptian romance, and read the writings that are engraven on the outer walls of the tombs, and we shall not listen to the words of any one who, like the magician who accosted him, shall tell us our interest is profitless. For we have discovered the true magic in the recovery of the records of the past, in giving speech to the long-silent utterances of the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows of the fathers of mankind, who return from the underworld and admit us to their company, as, having interpreted the title without, we can enter each sepulchral chapel and understand when and why and for whom its pictured reliefs were made in olden time.

The foundation of Memphis is the first event in c i8

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Egyptian history, the one large historical incident in the reign of the first king, who emerges a real man from the shadowland which the Egyptians called the reign of the gods. Let us try and span in our minds the vast interval which has passed since the days of Menes. Look once more with me from the Citadel of Cairo west- Avard, and beneath our feet is spread out the greatest of Eastern cities, Masr the Victorious, splendid yet with the fast-decaying mosques of the Moslem rule, so numerous that they foil the attempt to count them. In a series of successive styles, the Eastern counterparts of the changes of Western art, you pass in time through the base art of the Turkish rule, to group after group, or memorial after memorial, up to the earliest and greatest of all, whose vast court, surrounded by colonnades with pointed arches, marks the first stage in Arab art. A thousand years have passed since it was built. Two centuries more take us to the Arab conquest. This art, nobly massive or delicately sumptuous, has passed through its phases since, while the like changes have worked in the hearts and minds of men, while race after race, dynasty after dynasty, has ruled over Egypt. Yet this is but a mere fragment of the time since Menes reigned. Memphis

MEMPHIS.

was in her decay when the Arabs poured into the country, and soon ceased to be a town. She had lived before as the second city of Egypt through the Roman and the Greek dominion; she had been taken by the Persian and the Assyrian and the Ethiopian. We go back to the dawn of Greek history, farther yet to the Exodus when Israel became a nation, and still we have not reached the age of the supremacy of Memphis. Still earlier, before Abraham, we attain at last the long unmeasured period of the six great lines of Egyptian kings who ruled at Memphis, and were buried in the Pyramids that overlook her obliterated site. The space of time from our days to the starting-point of Egyptian history we cannot measure. Authorities differ by some two thousand years. But numbers make no clear impression. It is far more striking to note the movements of history, not in Egypt alone, but outside its limits, and to remember that the existence of religions, the sway of empires, and the rule of races, have taken up but fragments of this vast interval.

Menes, or Mena, the first mortal king, who stands at the head of our uncounted reckoning of time, leader of the roll of thirty dynasties which filled the list of Manetho

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the native annalist, — Menes, the founder of Memphis and Egyptian history, came from the south. Civilisation descended the Nile. His native place was Thinis, or This, in Upper Egypt, a still older town, where his shadowy predecessors ruled. He united under his single sway ‘ the two regions ’ of Egypt, and at once erected a new capital, from which he could control the whole country. The site was happily chosen, and neither the glory of Thebes nor the traffic of Alexandria ever took away the seat of government for long — for a few centuries only in each case — from the neighbourhood of the oldest capital. It was •well called ‘the balance of the two regions.’ Where the valley of Upper Egypt is about to spread out into the plain of the Delta, a strong city could rule both, and hold the entrance of the narrow Upper Country, the first of many barriers which could stay the advance of tire invader, and so give courage to a retiring army.