Wonder tales of the ancient world

Preface

The tales contained in the following chapters are practically all that have survived of their kind in ancient Egyptian literature. One or two stories have been omitted, either because they are too fragmentary to be capable of satisfactory retelling, or because, as in the case of the story of Wen- Amen, the narrative, though very valuable as history, has not much interest merely as a story ; but those who read this volume will have a fair idea of the whole extant output of Egyptian literature in the department of fiction. The version given is free in the sense that some of the crudities of life which the ancient Egyptian expressed in remarkably plain language have been either omitted or expressed in accordance with more modern ideas, and that in some cases, which are all indicated, connecting links or conclusions have been suggested where the existing manuscripts are defective. In other respects the stories are told with as close

VI

PREFACE adherence as possible to the ancient sources. The story of Osiris, of course, is a retelling from Plutarch ; all the others are directly of native Egyptian origin. To writers such as Erman, Wiedemann, Breasted, Maspero, Petrie, and others who have treated of Egyptian life, religion, and literature, this volume owes a great deal ; but my debt is specially heavy to the Records of the Past,

to Sir Gaston Maspero’s “ Contes Populaires de l’Egypte Ancienne,” and to Professor Flinders Petrie’s “ Egyptian Tales.” The details of the illustrations have been carefully kept, so far as possible, in accordance with actual details extant from the various periods of Egyptian history to which the incidents portrayed belong.

Book I Tales Of The Wizards

CHAPTER FAG ft

I. About the People who told these Wonder

Tales - - - - 1

II. Tales of the Old Magicians - 17

the story of the waxen crocodile - 23

the story of zazamankh and the lost

CORONET - - - - 27

III. Tales of the Old Magicians — Continued

DEDI THE WIZARD, AND THE SUN-GOD’s BABIES 32

IV. The Wizards of the Empire - - 43

SETNA AND THE MAGIC ROLL - - - 47

V. The Wizards of the Empire — Continued

THE TRUE STORY OF SETNA-KHAEMUAS AND IIIS

SON SENOSIRIS - - - - 67

Book II Tales Of Travel And Adventure

VI. The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor and

the Talking Serpent - - - 93

VII. The Adventures of Sinuhe - - .106

VIII. How Tahuti took the Town of Joppa - 128

IX. The Doomed Prince - - - - 139

X. The Tale of the Two Brothers - - 169

vii

CONTENTS viii

Book III Legends Of The Gods

CHAPTER PAOK

XI. The Egyptian Gods : How Men rebelled

AGAINST THE SuN-GoD ... 183

XII. How Isis stole the Great Name of Ra - 198

XIII. The Princess and the Demon - - 206

XIV. The Story of Osiris and his Wicked Brother 217

XV. The Wanderings of Isis - 239

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR

FROM DRAWINGS BY

CONSTANCE N. BAIKIE

1. Osiris on iiis Throne ... Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

2. Setna restores the Roll to the Tomb - 64

3. “Our Ship went down” - - - - 97

4. “ Behold, a Great Serpent was drawing near !” 104

5. Then said the Crocodile to him : “ I am thy

Doom, following after thee” - - 153

6. Hathor (Sekiimet) an© the Blood-Red Beer - 192

7. Isis brings Home the Dead Body of Osiris - 232

8. Isis and her Seven Guardian Scorpions - - 24]

Chapter I About The People Who Told These Wonder Tales

Most people, I suppose, who ever trouble to think about the Egyptians, think of them as a very wonderful, but at the same time a very gloomy and terribly serious people. Their great country seems to be mainly interesting for old stones and old bones. While we think their great buildings, such as the Pyramids and some of the temples, very extraordinary, we wonder why in all the world people ever were so silly as to build such things ; and when we see their mummies, and learn what an amount of thought they used to give to death, and to the life that was to come after death, we are rather glad, on the whole, that such terribly serious people are all safely dead.

Most of this strange idea about these old Egyptians has arisen from the fact that nearly all we know about them has come from their tombs. What sort of folk would people think us if they had nothing but our churchyards to go by ? We should like rather to be judged by our houses and our home life. But you can’t do that with the Egyptians, for this reason : When an Egyptian made a tomb for himself, he knew that it was to be his resting-place for quite a long while, and so he made it very carefully ; but when he built a house, he said, “ Well, this may please me, but I shan’t live in it for more than a few years, and my son, when he comes after me, may like something quite different.” And so he built his house very prettily and comfortably, but very lightly, so that it would last his time and not much more. Perhaps he was wiser, after all, than we who have to go on some¬ times living in places we don’t like at all, just because our fathers built them. Anyhow, that is why you learn most about the Egyptians from their tombs, because the tombs have lasted far longer than the houses.

Another reason for our curious idea about the Egyptians is because some of the old Greek travellers who went through the country when Greece was very young and Egypt was getting very old, brought home some wonderful travellers’ yarns about the tremendous wisdom and seriousness of the Egyptians. Some things they told were true; and some were partly true, only they had taken them up wrong ; and some of them — well, I think the Egyptians had been playing a quiet joke off on the Greek globe-trotters, and were laughing in their sleeves at them all the time.

It was one of these Greeks who first told the story which, more than anything else, has made people believe that the Egyptians were a gloomy, sour, long-faced folk — the story, I mean, of how whenever a company wras gathered at a feast, the model of a mummy in its coffin was brought in, dragged round, and shown to everybody with the words, “ Look on this, and then eat and drink ; for as this is, so shalt thou be.” It sounds very unpleasant and uncomfortable, certainly. Well, perhaps they did do that now and again, though certainly they did not do it always, or perhaps even often ; but I am very sure that they enjoyed their feast none the less.

For, indeed, instead of being the dark, gloomy, mysterious people that we are apt to imagine them, the Egyptians were really one of the gayest, most light-hearted, and most easily amused of peoples. They were very fond of music and singing, and some of the oldest songs in all the world are the simple old verses that the workmen used to sing at their work — the fisherman as he hauled his nets, the farm-servant as he drove the oxen round and round to tread out the corn. They were very fond of sports of all kinds — fishing and fowling and hunt¬ ing ; and when their work or their sport was done, there was nothing they liked better than a big feast, with plenty to eat and drink, with garlands of roses to fasten on their heads, and sweet scents to fill the rooms with pleasant odour, and musicians, dancers, and acrobats to keep things going cheerily.

I said that most of our knowledge of them came from their tombs. Well, it is from the paintings on the walls of the tombs that all these pictures of feasting and merriment come ; and surely they cannot have been so gloomy and sour if they adorned their very tombs with pictures of gladness and fun.

Most of the other nations of old days had most un¬ pleasant ideas about the other world to which people go after their life here is done. The Greeks thought of it as a dim, shadowy, gloomy abode, where the ghosts of even the greatest heroes wandered miserably and aimlessly about. The Babylonians and Assyrians called it The Land of No Return, where people live on dust and mud and dwell in darkness, and the Hebrews called it The Pit, and dreaded nothing so much as going down into it. But the Egyptians’ Heaven was one of the cheeriest places you can imagine, where the good folks who had got there ploughed and sowed and reaped the most wonderful corn, whose stalks were three yards long with ears a yard more, and sailed, fishing and fowling, in little papyrus canoes, over beautiful lakes and canals, and then played draughts and enjoyed a glass of beer under the shade of the sycamore-trees in the evening.

Now, if you want to know what people really are like, I fancy as good a way as any of finding out is to learn what they like to read or to be told. There are some nations in whose literature you can scarcely imagine it possible to find a joke or even a story that is not as solemn as a sermon. But the Egyptians were not like that ; they liked a story with all their hearts ; they liked it with a little taste of the wonderful and mysterious about it ; they liked a joke in it, though some of their jokes seem rather clumsy to us, as I dare say ours would to them ; and they liked the story, if possible, to end happily. So you will find nothing very solemn and nothing very terrible in these wonder tales. They are the simple, unaffected attempts of just about the first people who ever tried to make stories. No doubt the thing can be very much better done now — it ought to, after 5,000 years’ practice — but, all the same, these stories should be interesting to us, for they are the forerunners of all the great race of “ once upon a time,” and, indeed, of all our modern novels.

How is it that these quaint old tales have come down to our times ? You can scarcely form any idea of how old they are. Some of them tell us of things that happened, if they ever happened at all, about 5,000 years ago. Some of them belong to much about the time when Abraham was journey¬ ing about in the world ; and some of them Moses may have heard when he was a schoolboy learning

“ all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” Now, I am very sure that no book of our times is likely ever to last so long as any of these old stories have done, and so the question is, How did they come to last like that ?

You know that a great deal of the information that has come down to us from the days of ancient Egypt has lasted so long because it was carved in stone upon the walls of some great building. The Egyptians had a very beautiful form of writing, which is called “ hieroglyphic,” or “sacred writing.” It is really made up of hundreds of little pictures — an eagle for an a, a lion for an m, and so on. And when they had anything very important to write, they carved it in this beautiful picture¬ writing, sometimes filling in the picture-letters with brightly coloured pastes, so that the whole story blazes with all sorts of colours. But that kind of writing was generally kept for very important things. There is one long poem telling of a great battle between the Egyptians and the Hittites which is carved on the walls of a great temple in Egypt ; but it wasn’t everybody who could afford to build a temple when he wanted to publish a poem. So most Egyptian books, and all Egyptian

story-books, were written not in the beautiful and difficult hieroglyphic, but in one or other of two simpler forms which we call “hieratic ” or “demotic”; and they were written not on stone, but on papyrus. The papyrus, from which our word “ paper ” comes, was a reed with a long, fleshy, thick stem, which grew plentifully in Egypt. They used to split up the inside of the stem into broad, thin layers, which, when pasted crosswise over one another, were strong enough to bear writing upon.

Then the scribe, or writer, took his palette, which had holes for black ink and for coloured inks, and his pens, which were really little brushes made of reeds with their ends bruised, and painted in the letters on the papyrus, something in the same way as a Chinaman paints his letters now. Then the papyrus, when it was finished, was rolled together. (It might sometimes be a very long roll, for sheet was joined to sheet as the story went on. There is one papyrus in the British Museum more than one hundred and thirty feet long.) It was then put into a case, and when the owner of it wanted to read he took it out of the case and unrolled a little of the beginning. As he went on he rolled up on the one side and unrolled on the other until he got to the end.

Now, these rolls of papyrus were very costly to make, so that only rich people could afford to have them ; and they were very easily destroyed, so that great care had to be taken of them. And some¬ times they were prized so much that when the owner of the roll died he left orders for his favourite roll or rolls to be buried in his coffin with him. And there the papyrus has lain, beside the mummy of its old owner, for hundreds upon hundreds of years, the desert sands drifting over them both, until some European explorer, or perhaps some Arab thief, has found out the old grave, dug up the coffin, and taken the precious papyrus out of its old master’s keeping. Some years ago a lady’s grave was discovered, and when her coffin was opened, they found, beneath her long, beautiful hair, a papyrus roll with part of Homer’s great poem, the “ Iliad,” written upon it.

Nearly all the stories that follow in this book were written on papyrus. Where some of them were found is not known ; they were sold to tourists, who sold them or gave them to some of our museums. But one way or another they all have been dug up from under the sands of Egypt, which have preserved them safe and sound for all

I these centuries. Of course, they are very brittle and fragile, and have to be very carefully handled ; but using them with the greatest care (for they are worth infinitely more than their weight in gold), scholars have been able to read them and to translate what is written on them into English and French and German, so that we all can listen to the tales that people listened to in palaces and cottages when the world was young. One of the finest of these old rolls, with a long story on it, once belonged to a Pharaoh of Egypt, Sety II., when he was Crown Prince. He lived about twelve hundred years before Christ, and his is by no means one of the oldest of the rolls, so that you see how old they are.

When we come to read the stories we may look at them in two ways. The first is the way that only cares for the story itself — that is only anxious to find out what happened to the Doomed Prince, or how the Shipwrecked Sailor was saved, or how the Ghost made the Wizard Prince give back the magic roll. After all, stories are meant to be read that way too, and nobody can blame those who like to see their hero or heroine safely settled, and don’t care much for anything else. And some of the

PEOPLE WHO TOLD THESE WONDER TALES la

Egyptian stories are worth reading even from that point of view, especially those in which we can see the seeds from which some of our own favourite stories have sprung. We shall hear later on about the old Egyptian General whose adventures gave the first idea of the story of Ali Baba, and the sailor who was the original of Sindbad, and the Prince who has figured in the stories of nearly every country under the sun, sometimes as a Prince, sometimes as a Princess, but always under the shadow of the doom pronounced at birth by the Fates or Fairy Godmothers.

But quite apart from the interest of the stories, we may look at them from the point of view of what they tell us about the Land of Egypt itself, the people who lived in it, their manners and customs, what they thought and what they believed and about the other lands and peoples which lay around Egypt. And in this respect these stories are of extraordinary value and interest. They give you pictures of all kinds of Egyptian life. You see Pharaoh in his palace, wearying of everything, and asking for stories to be told him, just as the Sultan in the “ Arabian Nights ” wearied till Scheherazade took him in hand. You see the extraordinary belief that the Egyptians of all periods had in the power of magic. It appears in the very first story, the Story of the Waxen Crocodile, where you have the absolute beginning of the strange belief, which lasted in our own country down to compara¬ tively recent times, and still lasts in Italy and other European countries, that you can make waxen images which will become alive and do harm to your enemies, or which can represent your enemies themselves, so that by injuring them you can injure the person you hate.

Rossetti’s Sister Helen, who melts her waxen man that she may have vengeance on her false lover, is first cousin to the learned scribe Uba-aner, who lived more than 5,000 years ago, and made his waxen crocodile to avenge himself on the man who had wronged him. The belief in the efficacy of magic colours almost every one of the tales to the very last, in point of date, the stories of Setna, which are the most magical of all ; and one remembers that these last stories belong almost to the very time at which we believe that Moses appeared at the Egyptian Court to plead for the oppressed Israelites. The scene in which the little boy Senosiris, the reincarnation of an old Egyptian sage, confounds the Ethiopian wizard before Pharaoh and his Court, is strikingly suggestive of the scenes in the succeeding reign, when a greater power than that of the Ethiopian baffled the wisdom of the Egyptians, and the wizards of the Nile were forced to confess, “ This is the finger of God.”

Once again you go forth with the Egyptian explorer, first on the long roll of those who have sought to penetrate the mysteries of the Dark Continent ; and you see the strange dangers and marvels that he believed to lie about his path — talking serpents, and vanishing islands, and young ladies who are brought to earth on the wings of a thunderbolt. Or you get a glimpse into the sinister realm of Court intrigue, with its atmosphere of sus¬ picion, jealousy, and sudden death, then — as now — the natural medium in which an Oriental monarchy moves ; and you see how the exiled Egyptian, suppliant for shelter among the tribes of Palestine, nevertheless comes surely to the top wherever his lot is cast, by virtue of his higher civilization, just as the Briton or the American takes the first place among the less civilized races of the earth to-day.

Stories like that of Tahuti, and the Doomed Prince, show you Egyptian sentiment in those days, which, for Egypt, correspond most nearly with our own Elizabethan period ; the days when the land was beginning to waken to the idea of worldempire, and to reach forth her hands to those Syrian and Mesopotamian lands which were to be the scene of her greatest glories and greatest over¬ throws. And, perhaps not least important, the placid, peaceful, laborious life of the ordinary Egyptian fellah, who goes his quiet way, knowing little and caring less of the great deeds of the mighty ones of earth, is mirrored for us in the opening scenes of the Tale of the Two Brothers, with its extraordinary resemblance to the story of Joseph, and its strange later maze of reincarnations and wizardries.

The stories which are here narrated cover, from first to last, a period of about 2,000 years ; and they are a faithful — because an entirely unstudied — reflection of the changing manners, customs, and beliefs of one of the most interesting peoples of the world during two millenniums.

Scanty as the fragments may seem, there is no body of literature extant in any other land on earth which, from this point of view, has a value even remotely approaching that of these Wonder Tales of the Ancient World.

Chapter II

The three stories which follow in Chapters II. and III. are written in an old papyrus, which was brought back from Egypt sixty years ago by an English lady, Miss Westcar. She gave it to the famous scholar, Lepsius, and it is now in the Berlin Museum, and is known as the Westcar Papyrus. It is the oldest of all the books of stories which have come down to us, for though the legends of the gods in their original form must, of course, have been the oldest of all, the form in which they are now best known is later than the Westcar i Papyrus. Some scholars hold this book to have been written about the time of the Twelfth Dynasty, not less than 2,000 years before Christ, perhaps round about the time when Abraham was living ; and though others do not think it quite so old, all agree that it must date from before 1500 b.c. But this, of course, only means that our copy of the stories is 4,000, or at least 3,500, years old. The stories themselves are far older, just as a copy of Shakespeare’s plays may be published this year, but contains stories which Shakespeare wrote 300 years ago, and some of which were many hundred years old already when he wrote them down in the form in which we now have them. Thus, these three stories are supposed to be told to King Khufu by his three sons, Khafra, Baufra, and Hordadef. Now, King Khufu reigned not later than 2900 b.c., and some think very much earlier. Khafra’s Story of the Wax Crocodile mentions a King who reigned more than a hundred years before Khufu ; so that these tales take us very far back indeed. If Professor Petrie’s views as to the dates of the earliest Egyptian Kings are correct, they take us back 6,000 years, and even if we take the shorter dates, they refer to events and people of about 5,000 years ago. Perhaps 1,000 years more or less scarcely matters much at that distance.

At the very beginning of Egyptian story-telling we notice that extraordinary belief in and love for magic of all kinds which has already been referred to. Zadkiel and the rest of his tribe would have made their fortunes in Egypt, for the Egyptians believed with all their heart in the influence of the stars, in lucky and unlucky days, in omens of all kinds, and in the influence and significance of dreams. On certain days it was unlucky to bathe — a great deprivation, for the Egyptians of those days were a cleanly race, though the virtue does not seem to have been transmitted to their descendants. On others it was certain that if you went in a boat you would be devoured by a crocodile ; while the 13th day of the month Mekhir was specially un¬ lucky, because on that day the Goddess Hathor, or Sekhmet, went forth to slay the men who had rebelled against God — a story that you will find later on. Some people still believe that Egyptian magic was something very real and terrible. Here is a famous spell from which anyone may judge its quality. It is a spell for producing dreams which were supposed to convey knowledge and warning from the gods :

“ Take a cat, black all over, and which has been killed ; prepare a writing-tablet, and write the following with a solution of myrrh, and the dream which thou desirest to be sent, and put it in the mouth of the cat. ‘ Keimi ! Keimi ! I am the

Great One in whose mouth rests Mommon, Thoth, Nanumbre, Karikha, Kenyro, Paarmiathon, the sacred Iau iee ieu aeoi who is above the heaven, Amekheumu, Neumana, Sennana, Ablanathanalba, Akramm, Khamaria, brasuia, lampsor, eieeieiei aoeeo theuris O.’ ” Then follows a lot more of similar drivel, and the spell ends : “ 4 Thy name answers to the seven vowels, a, e, e, i, o, y, 6, iauoeeao ouee oia. I named thy glorious name, the name for all needs. Put thyself in connection with N. N., Hidden One, God, with respect to this name, which Apollobex also used.’ ” Let us hope that N. N. got his dream, though it ought to have been a nightmare. The fact of the matter is that Egyptian magic is just as sensible as printers’ pie, and just as terrible as a turnip lantern.

Khafra’s story, according to Professor Petrie, was written by an anti-suffragist. Women always held a very influential position in Egypt, and this story was written to counteract their undue influence. It is the woman who is at the bottom of the mischief all through the story, and she comes to a very bad end, an end so unusual — for burning alive is scarcely ever heard of elsewhere in Egyptian story— that it is evident that her fate was meant as an awful warning to any of her sex who might be tempted to presume on their favoured position in the land. By which it appears that the vexed question of women’s rights is scarcely a thing of yesterday.

The fact that when Uba-aner takes the terrible crocodile into his hand it becomes nothing but wax again reminds one forcibly of the story of how Moses’ rod, which had been changed into a serpent, became a rod again when laid hold of by its owner (Exod. iv. 4).

The amusement which Zazamankh the wizard devised for King Seneferu in Prince Baufra’s story was exactly paralleled by that employed by the great Khedive of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, to divert him in his hours of ennui. It is not on record, however, that any miracle happened during the progress of his voyage.

Prince Hordadef s story really contains two tales. The first, which is really only the introduction, is a simple piece of wizardry ; but the story of Rud-didet and her babies is something more. It was no doubt invented for a political and religious purpose. The Fifth Dynasty, which succeeded that to which King Ivhufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, belonged, was a priestly dynasty, devoted to the worship of Ra the Sun-god. It is from its rise that the Kings of Egypt begin to take, as part of their regular style, the title Son of the Sun. The story, which tells how the three babies (whose names in the original are those of the first three Kings of the Fifth Dynasty) are really the children of the Sun-god, was no doubt invented to explain and justify the revolution by which the priests of Ra seized the throne, and to glorify their dynasty.

The regard which was paid to Kings and to common folks respectively may be seen in the offerings which King Khufu makes to the Kings, his ancestors, and to the wizards. Nebka and Seneferu get a thousand loaves and one hundred jugs of beer. Uba-aner and Zazamankh have to content themselves with one loaf and one jug.

TALES OF THE OLD MAGICIANS.

Once upon a time it fell out that the great King Khufu, Lord of the Two Lands, bearer of the White Crown and the Red, was in his palace, and time hung heavy on his hands. He turned to this and that, and he knew not what to do, for the day seemed long and weary. At last he said to his sons, the royal Princes, who were gathered about his throne : “ Is there one among you who can tell me a tale of the wizards of the olden times ?”

Then the royal son Khafra arose to speak, and he said : “ I shall tell your Majesty the story of a wonder which befell in the times of your ancestor the King Nebka, of happy memory, on an occasion when he was going to the Temple of Ptah, Lord of Ankhtaui.

“The Story of the Waxen Crocodile.

“ Now, it fell out on a day when His Majesty went to the Temple of Ptah, Lord of Ankhtaui, that he paid a visit to the house of the learned scribe, the first reciter, Uba-aner. Now, in the train of His Majesty there was a young page, of comely face and form, and when the wife of Uba-aner saw him, her heart was turned away from her husband, and she loved the young man. Without regard for her husband’s welfare, she wasted his substance in gifts to the page, and she invited him to spend the day with her in a pavilion by the side of the lake in the garden of Uba-aner. There they passed the day in eating and drinking, and when the evening came the page bathed in the lake. Now, when the steward of the house of Uba-aner saw the falseness of his master’s wife, he said to himself : ‘ It is not good that such things should be done, and my master know nothing about them.’