Dawn Of Civilization
B.C. 5867
Author: Maspero, G. C. C.
It is a far cry to hark back to 11,000 years before Christ, yet borings
in the valley of the Nile, whence comes the first recorded history of the
human race, have unveiled to the light pottery and other relics of
civilization that, at the rate of deposits of the Nile, must have taken at
least that number of years to cover.
Nature takes countless thousands of years to form and build up her
limestone hills, but buried deep in these we find evidences of a stone age
wherein man devised and made himself edged tools and weapons of rudely
chipped stone. These shaped, edged implements, we have learned, were made by
white-heating a suitable flint or stone and tracing thereon with cold water
the pattern desired, just as practised by the Indians of the American
continent, and in our day by the manufacturers of ancient (sic) arrow-,
spear-, and axe-heads. This shows a civilization that has learned the method
of artificially producing fire, and its uses.
Egypt is the monumental land of the earth, as the Egyptians are the
monumental people of history. The first human monarch to reign over all
Egypt was Menes, the founder of Memphis. As the gate of Africa, Egypt has
always held an important position in world-politics. Its ancient wealth and
power were enormous. Inclusive of the Soudan, its population is now more
than eight millions. Its present importance is indicated by its relations to
England. Historians vary in their compilations of Egyptian chronology. The
epoch of Menes is fixed by Bunsen at B.C. 3643, by Lepsius at B.C. 3892, and
by Poole at B.C. 2717. Before Menes Egypt was divided into independent
kingdoms. It has always been a country of mysteries, with the mighty Nile,
and its inundations, so little understood by the ancients; its trackless
desert; its camels and caravans; its tombs and temples; its obelisks and
pyramids, its groups of gods: Ra, Osiris, Isis, Apis, Horus, Hathor - the
very names breathe suggestions of mystery, cruelty, pomp, and power. In the
sciences and in the industrial arts the ancient Egyptians were highly
cultivated. Much Egyptian literature has come down to us, but it is
unsystematic and entirely devoid of style, being without lofty ideas or
charms. In art, however, Egypt may be placed next to Greece, particularly in
architecture.
The age of the Pyramid-builders was a brilliant one. They prove the
magnificence of the kings and the vast amount of human labor at their
disposal. The regal power at that time was very strong. The reign of Khufu
or Cheops is marked by the building of the great pyramid. The pyramids were
the tombs of kings, built in the necropolis of Memphis, ten miles above the
modern Cairo. Security was the object as well as splendor.
As remarked by a great Egyptologist, the whole life of the Egyptian was
spent in the contemplation of death; thus the tomb became the concrete
thought. The belief of the ancient Egyptian was that so long as his body
remained intact so was his immortality; whence arose the embalming of the
great, and hence the immense structures of stone to secure the inviolability
of the entombed monarch.
The monuments have as yet yielded no account of the events which tended
to unite Egypt under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal
principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of
which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focus in the
north, from which civilization radiated over the wet plain and the marshes of
the Delta.
Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the
principal myths of the local regions; the Ennead to which it gave conception
would never have obtained the popularity which we must acknowledge it had, if
its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty
over the neighboring plains. It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of
Lower Egypt was organized; everything there bore traces of Heliopolitan
theories - the protocol of the kings, their supposed descent from Ra, and
the enthusiastic worship which they offered to the sun.
The Delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited
for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and
stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself
to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the
reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely
united, its religion was less systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city
to serve as a political and sacerdotal centre. Hermopolis contained schools
of theologians who certainly played an important part in the development of
myths and dogmas; but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt.
In the south, Siut disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped
their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one
another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting authority
over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural advantages
and its system of government, which gave to it a peculiar character, and
stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down to its latest days.
The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and
was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers. It is to one
of the latter, Mini or Menes of Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honor of
having fused the two Egypts into a single empire, and of having inaugurated
the reign of the human dynasties.
Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian
cities. It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile, if
not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short distance
from it. The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it was the
metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain to the other, and gradually
extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban Oasis. Its inhabitants
worshipped a sky-god, Anhuri, or rather two twin gods, Anhuri-shu, who were
speedily amalgamated with the solar deities and became a warlike
personification of Ra.
Anhuri-shu, like all other solar manifestations, came to be associated
with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness - a Sokhit, who took for
the occasion the epithet of Mihit, the northern one. Some of the dead from
this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the modern village
of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose deep cliffs here
approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis was at some
distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos. It would appear that,
at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country, for the entire nome
bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for its symbol the
representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed.
In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political
rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The city
occupied a long and narrow strip between the canal and the first slopes of
the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the incursions of
the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the dead reared its naked
walls. Here Anhuri, having passed from life to death, was worshipped under
the name of Khontamentit, the chief of that western region whither souls
repair on quitting this earth.
It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what
political combinations this Sun of the Night came to be identified with
Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote antiquity; it
had become an established fact long before the most ancient sacred books were
compiled. Osiris Khontamentit grew rapidly in popular favor, and his temple
attracted annually an increasing number of pilgrims. The Great Oasis had
been considered at first as a sort of mysterious paradise, whither the dead
went in search of peace and happiness. It was called Uit, the Sepulchre;
this name clung to it after it had become an actual Egyptian province, and
the remembrance of its ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people,
so that the "cleft," the gorge in the mountain through which the doubles
journeyed toward it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the
other world.
At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all
parts of the valley; they there awaited the coming of the dying sun, in order
to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Khontamentit. Abydos,
even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god the only god,
whose worship, practised by all Egyptians, inspired them all with an equal
devotion.
material conquest by the princes of Thinis and Abydos, or is there an
historical foundation for the tradition which ascribes to them the
establishment of a single monarchy? It is the Thinite Menes, whom the Theban
annalists point out as the ancestor of the glorious Pharaohs of the XVIII
dynasty: it is he also who is inscribed in the Memphite chronicles, followed
by Manetho, at the head of their lists of human kings, and all Egypt for
centuries acknowledged him as its first mortal ruler.
It is true that a chief of Thinis may well have borne such a name, and
may have accomplished feats which rendered him famous; but on closer
examination his pretensions to reality disappear, and his personality is
reduced to a cipher.
"This Menes, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with dikes.
For the river formerly followed the sand-hills for some distance on the
Libyan side. Menes, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to the
south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the river
through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain ranges.
"Then Menes, the first who was king, having enclosed a space of ground
with dikes, founded that town which is still called Memphis: he then made a
lake around it to the north and west, fed by the river; the city he bounded
on the east by the Nile." The history of Memphis, such as it can be gathered
from the monuments, differs considerably from the tradition current in Egypt
at the time of Herodotus.
It appears, indeed, that at the outset the site on which it subsequently
arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbu-hazu - the white wall - which
was dependent on Heliopolis and in which Phtah possessed a sanctuary. After
the "white wall" was separated from the Heliopolitan principality to form a
nome by itself it assumed a certain importance, and furnished, so it was
said, the dynasties which succeeded the Thinite. Its prosperity dates only,
however, from the time when the sovereigns of the V and VI dynasties fixed on
it for their residence; one of them, Papi I, there founded for himself and
for his "double" after him, a new town, which he called Minnofiru, from his
tomb. Minnofiru, which is the correct pronunciation and the origin of
Memphis, probably signified "the good refuge," the haven of the good, the
burying-place where the blessed dead came to rest beside Osiris.
The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably it did not
fall in with their taste for romantic tales. They rather despised, as a
rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the
countries or cities with which they were familiar took their names: if no
tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any scruples in
inventing one. The Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies, who were guided
in their philological speculations by the pronunciation in vogue around them,
attributed the patronship of their city to a Princess Memphis, a daughter of
its founder, the fabulous Uchoreus; those of preceding ages before the name
had become altered thought to find in Minnofiru or "Mini Nofir," or "Menes
the Good," the reputed founder of the capital of the Delta. Menes the Good,
divested of his epithet, is none other than Menes, the first king of all
Egypt, and he owes his existence to a popular attempt at etymology.
The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the
construction of the city, must have originated at a time when Memphis was
still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at latest about
the end of the Memphite period. It must have been an old tradition at the
time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted unhesitatingly the
authenticity of the statements which ascribed to the northern city so marked
a superiority over their own country. When the hero was once created and
firmly established in his position, there was little difficulty in inventing
a story about him which would portray him as a paragon and an ideal
sovereign.
He was represented in turn as architect, warrior, and statesman; he had
founded Memphis, he had begun the temple of Phtah, written laws and regulated
the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hapis, and he had conducted
expeditions against the Libyans. When he lost his only son in the flower of
his age, the people improvised a hymn of mourning to console him - the
"Maneros" - both the words and the tune of which were handed down from
generation to generation.
He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented
the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining
posture. One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or other,
fell upon him to devour him. He escaped with difficulty and, pursued by
them, fled to the shore of Lake Moeris, and was there brought to bay; he was
on the point of succumbing to them, when a crocodile took him on his back and
carried him across to the other side. In gratitude he built a new town,
which he called Crocodilopolis, and assigned to it for its god the crocodile
which had saved him; he then erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a
pyramid for his tomb.
Other traditions show him in a less favorable light. They accuse him of
having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and
allege that after a reign of sixty-two years he was killed by a hippopotamus
which came forth from the Nile. They also relate that the Saite Tafnakhti,
returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been
obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of life, had solemnly cursed him,
and had caused his imprecations to be inscribed upon a "stele" ^1 set up in
the temple of Amon at Thebes. Nevertheless, in the memory that Egypt
preserved of its first Pharaoh, the good outweighed the evil. He was
worshipped in Memphis, side by side with Phtah and Ramses II.; his name
figured at the head of the royal lists, and his cult continued till the time
of the Ptolemies.
[Footnote 1: The burned tile showing the impression of the stylus, made on
the clay while plastic. - Ed.]
His immediate successors have only a semblance of reality, such as he
had. The lists give the order of succession, it is true, with the years of
their reigns almost to a day, sometimes the length of their lives, but we may
well ask whence the chroniclers procured so much precise information. They
were in the same position as ourselves with regard to these ancient kings:
they knew them by a tradition of a later age, by a fragment papyrus
fortuitously preserved in a temple, by accidentally coming across some
monument bearing their name, and were reduced, as it were, to put together
the few facts which they possessed, or to supply such as were wanting by
conjectures, often in a very improbable manner. It is quite possible that
they were unable to gather from the memory of the past the names of those
individuals of which they made up the first two dynasties. The forms of
these names are curt and rugged, and indicative of a rude and savage state,
harmonizing with the semi-barbaric period to which they are relegated: Ati
the Wrestler, Teti the Runner, Qeunqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for
a people the first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle,
and to strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.
The inscriptions supply us with proofs that some of these princes lived
and reigned: - Sondi, who is classed in the II dynasty, received a continuous
worship toward the end of the III dynasty. But did all those who preceded
him, and those who followed him, exist as he did? And if they existed, do
the order and relation agree with actual truth? The different lists do not
contain the same names in the same position; certain Pharaohs are added or
suppressed without appreciable reason. Where Manetho inscribes Kenkenes and
Ouenephes, the tables of the time of Seti I give us Ati and Ata; Manetho
reckons nine kings to the II dynasty, while they register only five. The
monuments, indeed, show us that Egypt in the past obeyed princes whom her
annalists were unable to classify: for instance, they associated with Sondi a
Pirsenu, who is not mentioned in the annals. We must, therefore, take the
record of all this opening period of history for what it is - namely, a
system invented at a much later date, by means of various artifices and
combinations - to be partially accepted in default of a better, but without,
according to it, that excessive confidence which it has hitherto received.
The two Thinite dynasties, in direct descent from the fabulous Menes,
furnish, like this hero himself, only a tissue of romantic tales and
miraculous legends in the place of history. A double-headed stork, which had
appeared in the first year of Teti, son of Menes, had foreshadowed to Egypt a
long prosperity, but a famine under Ouenephes, and a terrible plague under
Semempses, had depopulated the country; the laws had been relaxed, great
crimes had been committed, and revolts had broken out.
During the reign of the Boethos a gulf had opened near Bubastis, and
swallowed up many people, then the Nile had flowed with honey for fifteen
days in the time of Nephercheres, and Sesochris was supposed to have been a
giant in stature. A few details about royal edifices were mixed up with
these prodigies. Teti had laid the foundation of the great palace of
Memphis, Ouenephes had built the pyramids of Ko-kome near Saqqara. Several
of the ancient Pharaohs had published books on theology, or had written
treatises on anatomy and medicine; several had made laws called Kakou, the
male of males, or the bull of bulls. They explained his name by the
statement that he had concerned himself about the sacred animals; he had
proclaimed as gods, Hapis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the goat of
Mendes.
After him, Binothris had conferred the right of succession upon all
women of the blood-royal. The accession of the III dynasty, a Memphite one
according to Manetho, did not at first change the miraculous character of
this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necherophes, and the two
armies were encamped before each other, when one night the disk of the moon
became immeasurably enlarged, to the great alarm of the rebels, who
recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven, and yielded
without fighting. Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes, brought the
hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection. He composed, as Teti
did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be identified with the
healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these things seriously, and the
Greek writers took them down from their lips with the respect which they
offered to everything emanating from the wise men of Egypt.
What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see,
than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities or
kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination, but in
sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they dealt with, in
the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a method of which we are
enabled to detect flagrant instances on the monuments.
Toward the middle of the third century before our era the Greek troops
stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract,
developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae. Their devotion spread
to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the whole
population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the court of the Macedonian
kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave every
encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a common
sanctuary, and united in one cult two races over which they ruled. They
pulled down the meagre building of the Saite period, which had hitherto
sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost the temple which
still remains almost intact, and assigned to it considerable possessions in
Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess
the richest land-owner in Southern Egypt. Knumu and his two wives, Anukit
and Satit, who, before Isis, had been the undisputed suzerains of the
cataract, perceived with jealousy their neighbor's prosperity: the civil wars
and invasions of the centuries immediately preceding had ruined their
temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the
new-comer.
The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King
Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and still
continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the generosity
of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty of the times,
the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow. Doubtless authentic documents
were wanting in their archives to support their pretensions: they therefore
inscribed upon a rock, in the island of Sehel, a long inscription which they
attributed to Zosiri of the III dynasty. This sovereign had left behind him
a vague reputation for greatness. As early as the XII dynasty Usirtasen III
had claimed him as "his father" - his ancestor - and had erected a statue to
him; the priests knew that, by invoking him, they had a chance of obtaining a
hearing.
The inscription which they fabricated set forth that in the eighteenth
year of Zosiri's reign he had sent to Madir, lord of Elephantine, a message
couched in these terms: "I am overcome with sorrow for the throne, and for
those who reside in the palace, and my heart is afflicted and suffers greatly
because the Nile has not risen in my time, for the space of eight years.
Corn is scarce, there is a lack of herbage, and nothing is left to eat: when
any one calls upon his neighbors for help, they take pains not to go. The
child weeps, the young man is uneasy, the hearts of the old men are in
despair, their limbs are bent, they crouch on the earth, they fold their
hands; the courtiers have no further resources; the shops formerly furnished
with rich wares are now filled only with air, all that was within them has
disappeared. My spirit also, mindful of the beginning of things, seeks to
call upon the savior who was here where I am, during the centuries of the
gods, upon Thot-Ibis, that great wise one, upon Imhotpu, son of Phtah of
Memphis. Where is the place in which the Nile is born? Who is the god or
goddess concealed there? What is his likeness?"
The lord of Elephantine brought his reply in person. He described to
the king, who was evidently ignorant of it, the situation of the island and
the rocks of the cataract, the phenomena of the inundation, the gods who
presided over it, and who alone could relieve Egypt from her disastrous
plight.
Zosiri repaired to the temple of the principality and offered the
prescribed sacrifices; the god arose, opened his eyes, panted, and cried
aloud, "I am Khnumu who created thee!" and promised him a speedy return of a
high Nile and the cessation of the famine.
Pharaoh was touched by the benevolence which his divine father had shown
him; he forthwith made a decree by which he ceded to the temple all his
rights of suzerainty over the neighboring nomes within a radius of twenty
miles.
Henceforward the entire population, tillers and vinedressers, fishermen
and hunters, had to yield the tithe of their income to the priests; the
quarries could not be worked without the consent of Khnumu, and the payment
of a suitable indemnity into his coffers; finally, metals and precious woods,
shipped thence for Egypt, had to submit to a toll on behalf of the temple.
Did the Ptolemies admit the claims which the local priests attempted to
deduce from this romantic tale? and did the god regain possession of the
domains and dues which they declared had been his right? The stele shows us
with what ease the scribes could forge official documents when the exigencies
of daily life forced the necessity upon them; it teaches us at the same time
how that fabulous chronicle was elaborated, whose remains have been preserved
for us by classical writers. Every prodigy, every fact related by Manetho,
was taken from some document analogous to the supposed inscription of Zosiri.
The real history of the early centuries, therefore, eludes our
researches, and no contemporary record traces for us those vicissitudes which
Egypt passed through before being consolidated into a single kingdom, under
the rule of one man. Many names, apparently of powerful and illustrious
princes, had survived in the memory of the people; these were collected,
classified, and grouped in a regular manner into dynasties, but the people
were ignorant of any exact facts connected with the names, and the
historians, on their own account, were reduced to collect apocryphal
traditions for their sacred archives.
The monuments of these remote ages, however, cannot have entirely
disappeared: they existed in places where we have not as yet thought of
applying the pick, and chance excavations will some day most certainly bring
them to light. The few which we do possess barely go back beyond the III
dynasty: namely, the hypogeum of Shiri, priest of Sondi and Pirsenu; possibly
the tomb of Khuithotpu at Saqqara; the Great Sphinx of Gizeh; a short
inscription on the rocks of Wady Maghara, which represents Zosiri (the same
king of whom the priests of Khnumu in the Greek period made a precedent)
working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai; and finally the step pyramid
where this Pharaoh rests. It forms a rectangular mass, incorrectly oriented,
with a variation from the true north of 4 degrees 35', 393 ft., 8 in. long
from east to west, and 352 ft. deep, with a height of 159 ft. 9 in. It is
composed of six cubes, with sloping sides, each being about 13 ft. less in
width than the one below it; that nearest to the ground measures 37 ft. 8 in.
in height, and the uppermost one 29 ft. 2 in.
It was entirely constructed of limestone from neighboring mountains.
The blocks are small and badly cut, the stone courses being concave, to offer
a better resistance to downward thrust and to shocks of earthquake. When
breaches in the masonry are examined, it can be seen that the external
surface of the steps has, as it were, a double stone facing, each facing
being carefully dressed. The body of the pyramid is solid, the chambers
being cut in the rock beneath. These chambers have often been enlarged,
restored, and reworked in the course of centuries, and the passages which
connect them form a perfect labyrinth into which it is dangerous to venture
without a guide. The columned porch, the galleries and halls, all lead to a
sort of enormous shaft, at the bottom of which the architect had contrived a
hiding-place, destined, no doubt, to contain the more precious objects of the
funerary furniture. Until the beginning of this century the vault had
preserved its original lining of glazed pottery. Three quarters of the wall
surface was covered with green tiles, oblong and lightly convex on the outer
side, but flat on the inner: a square projection pierced with a hole served
to fix them at the back in a horizontal line by means of flexible wooden
rods. Three bands which frame one of the doors are inscribed with the titles
of the Pharaoh. The hieroglyphs are raised in either blue, red, green, or
yellow, on a fawn-colored ground.
The towns, palaces, temples, all the buildings which princes and kings
had constructed to be witnesses of their power or piety to future
generations, have disappeared in the course of ages, under the feet and
before the triumphal blasts of many invading hosts: the pyramid alone has
survived, and the most ancient of the historic monuments of Egypt is a tomb.
