CHAPTER VI .

EGYPT TO THE COMING OF ALEXANDER

I.

THE ACHAEMENID RULE

 

THE re-establishment of Persian authority in Egypt, probably meant a more intensive control of the country; and for the first time we hear of Persian officials even in subordinate positions, such as the desert-guard Atyuhi son of Artames, who inscribed his name on the rocks of the Wadi Hamamat, the much used caravan route from Koptos to Kuseir on the Red Sea. Military commanders were always Persians, and so apparently were the chief judges. There is little doubt that a host of Persian tax-gatherers, many of them probably Egyptians, but many also Syrians, Babylonians, and Persians, now descended upon the country, and extorted as much from it as they could to fill the coffers of the Great King at Susa. The obstinacy with which the Persians continued to exert their authority over Egypt whenever they could down to the fall of the Achaemenian empire was no doubt due to its value as a milch-cow. The country had become enormously rich, as wealth went then, under the Saites, and continued to be so under the Persians, in spite of repeated invasions, massacres and oppression. The large number of demotic contracts and other (including Aramaic) documents of the reign of Darius show what a volume of internal trade and other business then existed, but they cease for the time after the revolt of Khababesha and the imposition of the hard yoke of Xerxes. In the second half of the fifth century Aramaic contracts rather than demotic are found, often bearing Jewish, Syrian or even Babylonian names, which show that a crowd of small oriental traders had followed the Persians and their tax-gatherers into Egypt. The Persians were always friendly to the Jews, as they had been since the days of Cyrus. No doubt the Jewish trade when not mere bazaar­chaffering was chiefly connected with the East. As a consequence of the long war with Athens and her allies, trade with Greece must almost have ceased, and Naucratis been hard hit. But we cannot doubt the great extent of the foreign trade by land and sea with Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Ionia, and Greece, chiefly conducted by foreign caravaneers and shipmen, of which we have indications, as in the time of Amasis. The bilingual Stele of Hor, inscribed in Egyptian and Aramaic, in the Berlin Museum, dated in Xerxes’ fourth year, is a relic of some Syro-Egyptian merchant, probably: and the Minaean stele already mentioned testifies to trade with southern Arabia. By this time the Arab tribe of the Nabataeans, who had occupied Edom after the Babylonish captivity of the Jews a century before had enabled the Edomites to move westward into the Negeb of Judaea, were established at Petra, where they controlled the two crossing trade-routes from the Gulf of Akaba to Syria and from Egypt to Babylonia.

Xerxes made no attempt to popularize himself with his Egyptian subjects as his father did; no monuments bear his name, and his Egyptian inscription as ‘Khshayarsha, Pharaoh the Great’ (sic) on the well-known trilingually inscribed alabaster vases found at Halicarnassus and elsewhere, hardly looks as if it had been devised by an Egyptian at all. Later on the priests of Buto refer to him plainly as ‘that scoundrel Xerxes’.

No Egyptian fought at the Eurymedon (467 or 466 BC), when Cimon attacked the Persians nearer home, and freed temporarily the last Greek cities that had been tributary to the Great King, who now died (465) at the hands of Artabanus, and was eventually succeeded by his son Artakhshastra or Artaxerxes. The death of Xerxes was the signal for another revolt in the Delta, under a certain Ienharou, the Inaros of the Greeks, son of Psammetichus, ‘king of the Libyans’, no doubt a scion of the Saite royal house. The Persian tax-gatherers and receivers were expelled, and Achaemenes the viceroy with them; while the remnant of his troops was driven into Memphis. As always, the commanding strategic position of Memphis, with its vice-like grip on the throat of Egypt, cutting off the Delta, then as now the most populous part of Egypt, from the Upper Country, prevented the South from giving any aid to Inaros. He seemed unable to make any further headway, and the Persians were probably gathering strength, Achaemenes having returned with an army, when a deus ex machina appeared in the shape of the Athenian generals who were now with two hundred galleys carrying on Cimon’s war off the coast of Cyprus. This fleet was able and ready to aid any enemy of the Persians and at the same time restore the trade of Athens and her confederates with Egypt, which had probably suffered much from Persian hostility. The appearance on the Nile of the triremes and the hoplites of their inveterate little enemy Athens can hardly have been of good cheer to the Persian leaders. Achaemenes probably fought badly, and he was killed and his army defeated by the Egyptians at Papremis, where Herodotus, years later, saw the skulls and bones of the combatants still covering the ground. The remnant fled to Memphis, where they surrendered to the Athenian fleet, which had now appeared on the scene. The body of Achaemenes was sent to Artaxerxes as an intimation of his defeat, but troubles at home prevented the King from moving at once.

‘The Athenians remained in Egypt,’ says Thucydides, ‘and they experienced varied fortunes of war’. At first they were masters of the country. So the King (Artaxerxes) sent a Persian named Megabazus to Sparta with money, in order that he might persuade the Peloponnesians to invade Attica and so draw the Athenians away from Egypt. But when he had no success in his mission, and the money was being spent in vain, Megabazus was recalled to Asia with what was left of it, and the King sent Megabyxus son of Zopyrus with a great army to Egypt. When he arrived he defeated the Egyptians and their allies, and expelled the Greeks from Memphis, finally shutting them up in the island of Prosopis. There he besieged them for a year and six months, until in the end, having drained the canal and diverted its waters elsewhere, their ships were left high and dry, most of the island was joined to the surrounding land, and crossing with his foot-soldiers he captured it. Thus then the cause of the Greeks in Egypt was lost, after six years of war. A few of them, out of so many, managed to escape through Libya to Cyrene, but the majority perished. Egypt again passed into the possession of the King, with the exception of Amyrtaeus, the king in the fens, whom the Persians could not catch on account of the great extent of the fens: also the fenmen are the most warlike of the Egyptians. Inaros the king of the Libyans, who had caused all this trouble in Egypt, was betrayed and captured, and impaled. Fifty triremes, which had been sent by the Athenians and their allies to relieve the forces already in Egypt, sailed into the Mendesian mouth of the Nile in ignorance of what had happened. But they were attacked both by land and sea, and the greater part destroyed by the Phoenician fleet, a few ships only escaping. Thus ended the great Egyptian expedition of the Athenians and their allies (455—4 BC).

Inaros is called a Libyan by Thucydides on account of the Libyan origin of his family and the position of his fief; he was no doubt a Saite. According to Herodotus Thannyras his son was permitted by Artaxerxes to succeed to his father’s princedom, as also was Pausiris, son of Amyrtaeus, to that of his father. Inaros and Amyrtaeus were apparently forgotten by Manetho, in spite of the vogue of Inaros in legend as a popular hero, and not included in his dynastic list; possibly Amyrtaeus was confused by him or his copyists with the other king of the same name a little later. In 449 Amyrtaeus was still king ‘in the fens’ and sent to Cimon, now besieging Citium in Cyprus, for help. The sixty ships he sent returned after Cimon’s death, and Amyrtaeus was probably killed by the Persians or died soon after. There are no monuments of either king; they had no time for any.

Artaxerxes I never visited Egypt himself and erected no monuments there. For us his reign there is (or rather those of his satraps are) interesting only as the period of the visit of Herodotus, which is to be dated most probably at some time between the years 448, when peace was made with Persia, and 445, when he was at Athens before his visit to Thurii, where he took part in the colonization in 443. Before 448 a man of such strong Athenian sympathies as Herodotus would hardly be able to visit a part of the Persian Empire. Egypt was then at profound peace, but it was a peace of exhaustion and sullen resignation. The death of Cimon, followed by the fruitless victory off the Cyprian Salamis, the reconciliation of the revolted satrap of Syria, Megabyxus, with his master, and the so-called Peace of Callias (448) signified the end of Athenian efforts against Persia and in aid of Egypt: the Persian power now had a respite, which was confirmed by the Peloponnesian War.

The Egyptians simply waited. The Persian kings had not fulfilled the promise of Darius or even of Cambyses: they came not to Egypt, which knew nothing of her self-styled pharaohs, and would not be reconciled to rulers far away in Asia. It was not till the Ptolemies ruled in and from Egypt as Egyptian kings that the nation was more or less reconciled to a foreign dynasty. But Herodotus did not know what was at the back of the Egyptian mind; he saw only the surface prosperity of the country, which however was certainly less than it had been in the days of Amasis, to which he refers. It is in some ways a pity that he was not there at a more interesting period, but he gives an extraordinarily vivid description of the land and people as it was in the middle of the fifth century. Everything was going on as it always had; the festivals and services of the gods were celebrated openly and without fear of interruption (the Persians never interfered with the religion of their subjects), commerce and manufactures flourished in spite of heavy imposts often unjustly enforced or increased. The land stood open to foreign travellers, who could inspect the temples and all the ‘sights’ of the country without difficulty or apparently the risk of fanatical objections. ‘But for the bleaching bones of the fallen in the fight that had taken place, nothing in Egypt seems to have recalled the struggles of a few years before.’ The recuperative power of the Egyptians after disaster has always been extraordinary. It has been pointed out that the struggles of Persian and Egyptian were practically confined to the Delta and the neighbourhood of Memphis, so that naturally no sign of devastation would be visible to the traveller in Upper Egypt. But then as now the Delta was the really important portion of Egypt, and was visited in detail by Herodotus; had many signs of ruin and depopulation been visible there he would assuredly have mentioned them.

His description of the religious observances and the life of the people generally has always been of fascinating interest from his own day (when the Greeks, as at a much later period Heliodorus in his Aethiopica says, were always eager to hear queer tales about Egypt) to ours. It is the more interesting because but for the alteration of religion it might almost have been written today. Egypt was much the same then as she had been two thousand years before and as she is now. His vivid picture of the festival at Bubastis is repeated now in little by the describer of any great molid or festival of a Moslem saint. The tourist and his dragoman existed then as they do now: Herodotus himself was a tourist and was often the victim of his ignorant and pretentious dragoman, the type that still flourishes today. But at the same time Herodotus picked up a good deal of perfectly good information, and there is no reason to doubt that he actually conversed with and derived historical knowledge from priests. They may not have been and probably were not of the highest rank in the hierarchy, but Herodotus after all was an educated Greek gentleman of means and leisure, and would not forgather with priests of any but the educated type, of historical and antiquarian tastes, though he may not have met many. Hence his history does not depend exclusively on Greek information and imagination, and the stories of ignorant dragomans. He derived it largely from the Egyptians themselves and the testimony of his own eyes. It certainly is by no means so useless as it has been made out to be. It is true that he makes the Saites immediately succeed the pyramid­builders, but we can see that for this (which was possibly his own idea) he had a reason, as to an outside observer the Saite type of art would seem remarkably like that of the pyramid­time. We have no notion who his blind king ‘Anysis’ was, except that his name undoubtedly represents the Libyan princes of Ma at Heracleopolis (Hanes), but we see that his history of the Saites is quite good history, and his tales of Rhampsinitus (Ramses III) are interesting examples of folk-tales about kings who lived in the popular memory. His inaccuracies, major or minor, do not matter now that we have the actual records to study, and are more than atoned for by the interest of the general narrative; so that in spite of detraction, which we now see to be unnecessary, Herodotus’s description of Egypt will always remain one of the greatest of our classics.

The Thirty Years Peace, which was concluded between Athens and Sparta in 445, lasted less than half its intended duration, being followed by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431. But both states were at peace with Persia, and it mattered little to the Egyptians whether Athens or Sparta were at peace or war with each other if they were both at peace with the Great King. In 445—4 a great gift of corn from Egypt reached the Piraeus, sent, it was said, by a ‘king’ named Psammetichus, in response to a request from Athens. Peace with both Persia and Sparta enabled the Athenians to import corn from Egypt without difficulty. The ‘king’ was some Saite dynast (possibly Thannyras or his successor, who may well have been called Psammetichus).

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War Artaxerxes of the Long Hand died (424), and its continuance kept Egypt impotently still till the end of the century, throughout the undistinguished reigns of his successors, who left no record in Egypt with the exception of Darius Nothus (and he but a slight one). From his reign (407 BC) dates the important Aramaic papyrus found at Aswan (Syene) which contains the complaint of the priests of the local Jewish colony at Yeb (Elephantine) to Begvahi or Bagohi (Bagoas) the Persian governor of Judah, and the sons of Sanballat, against Waidrang (or perhaps better Vidarnag ? Hydarnes) the Persian general at Syene, for having allowed the Egyptian priests of Khnum to destroy and pillage the temple of Yahu and his contemplar goddesses, Ashima and Anath, at Yeb. This Jewish colony is first mentioned under Darius I in 494 BC. It was founded as a military colony under the XXVIth Dynasty, when as we have seen Jewish mercenaries were often hired and stationed in Egypt. Later it became a regular settlement, the men of which were organized in degels or detachments, each under a Persian commander. Its members owned lands and held slaves. It was remarkable for its possession of a fully-equipped temple for sacrifice instead of the orthodox synagogue, and for its polytheism.

The fall of Athens after Aegospotami and the destruction of her Long Walls by the Peloponnesians ‘to the sound of flutes’ (for Sparta’s allies indeed thought ‘that that day was to be the beginning of freedom for Hellas’) in 404 gave to Sparta the hegemony of Greece. And it was not long before the new leader of the Hellenes found herself at loggerheads with the old enemy Persia, and the chance of Egypt, which had revolted in 404 after the death of Darius Nothus and had preserved a precarious independence during those years owing to the quarrel of Artaxerxes and Cyrus, came again. For after the defeat of Cyrus at Cunaxa Persia and Sparta made war upon each other. But when it appeared that the thalassocracy of Sparta had only been destroyed to rehabilitate that of Athens, the old enemy of Persia, there was reaction. Conon the Athenian admiral of the Great King was disgraced, and Persia moved steadily towards the inevitable reconciliation with Sparta which would set free the King’s fleets and armies to re-assert his authority in Egypt.

 

II.

THE LAST NATIVE MONARCHY

 

The leader of the revolt in 404, Amyrtaeus II (Amonirdisu), probably a grandson of the older Amyrtaeus, had made himself king. He is recorded by Manetho as having reigned six years (XXVIIIth Dynasty). The Demotic Chronicle commemorates him as ‘the first after the Medes.’ His royalty was but precarious till Sparta went to war, and only survived on account of the preoccupation of Artaxerxes with the treason of his brother Cyrus. After Cunaxa and shortly before his assassination the Greek general of the Ten Thousand, Clearchus, offered the satrap Tissaphernes the services of his men to put down the Egyptian revolt.

Next year, in 400, the Egyptian Tamos, whom Cyrus had made ruler of Ionia, fled to Egypt before the coming of Tissaphernes, and was there murdered with his family by another ‘king Psammetichus,’ who may be another local Saite, but was more probably Amyrtaeus, who no doubt hoped in this way to ingratiate himself with the victorious Artaxerxes. But his action was not in accordance with the feeling of the time, which, evidently, was strongly anti-Persian. In 398 probably, when Sparta was at full war with Persia, and the coast was clear, an Egyptian leader of soldiery, Naifaurud, gave the signal for a revolt that immediately was successful. He was apparently the prince of Bindid (or Mendes, as the Greeks called it), in the Delta. The Greeks called him Nepherites (Manetho) or Nephereus (Diodorus). Amyrtaeus was no doubt killed. No monuments of him exist and we have only one contemporary reference to his reign, in one of the papyri from Elephantine. Nepherites was crowned king, and was the first of Manetho’s XXIXth Dynasty.

In 396 a great armament of 300 ships was assembled in the ports of Phoenicia, in all probability in preparation for an attempt to recover Egypt for the Great King, though it was to be expected that Conon the Athenian admiral and his friend Evagoras the Cypriote king would endeavour to divert the armada to the Aegean in order to challenge the new thalassocracy of Sparta. The Spartans at any rate thought this probable themselves. In this year they opened negotiations with Nepherites for an alliance with Egypt, whose complete independence of Persia was now generally realized. Nepherites eagerly seized the chance of securing Greek succours in case of Persian attack, and on his part is said to have offered Sparta wood for building 100 triremes and 500,000 bushels of corn. The latter is a possible offer, but where in Egypt he was to find wood good enough to build a single trireme with, much less a hundred, is not apparent. It is to be noted however that he could offer no actual ships and would not offer any men. When the corn-ships reached Rhodes they were captured by Conon, and Sparta never got them.

About four years later Nepherites was succeeded by Muthes, who is unknown to the monuments, and he by Psammouthis or Pse(re)mut, who is said to have been an impious person, but nevertheless has left inscriptions in a temple or two, in spite of his reign having lasted, like that of his predecessor, hardly more than a year. Psammouthis was followed on the throne by his enemy the foreign (?) prince Hakori, whom the Greeks called Achoris (390). According to a tradition in the strange Ptolemaic jumble of prophecies, which are found in the so-called ‘Demotic Chronicle’ at Paris, Hakori was not really the rightful heir, any more than Psammouthis whom he probably killed or Muthes whom we know nothing about, since Naifaurud had left a young son who afterwards reigned as Nakhtenebef. But Hakori justified his reign by his acts; ‘he was allowed to fulfil the time of his rule as prince, because he had been generous to the temples’.

Evagoras, who since the battle of Cnidus (where he fought in person) and the partial rehabilitation of his Athenian friends, had become suspect at Susa as too philhellenic in sympathy and harbouring designs against Persia, had apparently given no active help to his suzerain. Instead, he had made himself master of the other Greek and Phoenician towns in Cyprus. Now (in 389), emboldened by the Persian inaction, he determined to revolt against Artaxerxes, and so forestall the enmity of the King, who was bent on the ruin of so powerful a vassal. Hakori naturally hastened to support him. This alliance of Evagoras with Egypt determined the Persians to listen to the peace overtures of Sparta, who was weary of the unsuccessful campaign in Asia, and had opened negotiations through her admiral Antalcidas and the satrap Tiribazus. These two were so certain that the Great King also was disposed towards peace that in 388 they joined their fleets against the fleets of Athens, which was now as suspect to Persia as Conon and Evagoras and had concluded an alliance with Persia’s Egyptian enemy, Hakori. Athens sent Chabrias with reinforcements to Cyprus, but for a moment Sparta was again supreme at sea, owing only to Persian help to which she did not desire to be indebted. The Peace of Antalcidas followed (386), in which all the warring states of Greece made peace with one another and with Persia, and Sparta cynically abandoned to the barbarian the mainland cities of Ionia which Athens had rescued for Hellenism. Evagoras, who had no formal alliance with but only the sympathy of Athens, was tacitly abandoned to the wrath of Artaxerxes. Egypt, which nine years before had been sought as an ally by Sparta and two years before had alliance with Athens, was not mentioned.

Artaxerxes was now free to strike at either Evagoras or Hakori or both, if he could. He chose first the land-attack on Egypt, which was delivered by the satraps Pharnabazus, Tithraustes, and Abrocomas between 385 and 383, but apparently without energy and decision, and certainly without success. The Athenian publicist Isocrates contemptuously refers to this war in his Panegyricus (140) as showing how little the barbarians could now do without Greek aid. Hakori had probably very few Greeks with him, and none of importance, or we should have heard more of this war: the Persians none. Other than that of Greek soldiers of fortune, the only help that the Cypriote and the Egyptian could invoke was one another’s: Athens could only timidly and occasionally do something to help her old friend and admirer, Evagoras, who now fought in a way to compel admiration not only from Athens but from all Greece. With unspecified help from Hakori he carried war into the enemy’s camp, took Tyre and held Phoenician towns and raised revolt in Cilicia. The Athenians twice sent a fleet under the admiral Chabrias to the assistance of the allies. Hecatomnus the prince of Caria sent his subsidies. Hakori concluded a treaty with the Pisidian cities, probably arranging the hire of mercenaries. For ten years Evagoras defied the Persians, thus defending Egypt as well as himself, but was at last brought to bay, defeated at sea, and blockaded in his own island. The Persian generals were constrained to conclude peace (380) on condition that no further harm should be done to Evagoras, who was to pay tribute henceforth to Artaxerxes not as a slave to his master, but as one king might to another. Not long afterwards he fell a victim, with his son, Pnytagoras, to a con­spiracy; and was succeeded by another son, Nicocles, who was as philhellenic as his father.

The whole episode of Evagoras I is a most interesting one, though it can only interest us here incidentally. The Greek element in Cyprus was always the predominant element in the island, as it is now. The Phoenician settlements were few in number, but made up for their numerical weakness by their importance: Citium was always an important place. But Assyrian and Babylonian control had never resulted in an increase of the Semitic element. The Cypriote Greeks, though cut off from their fellow-countrymen by a long sea-road, and exposed to strong Semitic and Anatolian influences from the mainland as well as the leaven of the indigenous peasant population (of Anatolian affinities), continued Greeks, albeit old-fashioned Greeks: in classical days their kings still went to war in chariots, which in Greece had been relegated to the games centuries before. The thirty-five years of Egyptian domination (c. 560—25 BC) under Amasis had introduced a strong Egyptian element in art, and possibly had some effect on the Cyprian culture. Then came the Persian domination and the rescue of the Cyprian Andromeda from the barbarian dragon by that gallant Perseus, Cimon, only to be followed by her abandonment to her fate by the Peace of Callias. Then followed after half-a-century the stirring episode of Evagoras. The prince of Salamis regarded himself as a Teucrid, and so of Attic blood; he was as civilized a Hellene as any other, certainly more civilized than a Macedonian prince, for instance; he aspired to make Cyprus a free Hellenic state. Unsupported by Hellas, and with none but Athenian sympathy and none but Egyptian help, he went down in the struggle against Persian numbers, but with honour. He had helped Hakori by staving off renewed Persian attack for at least another ten years.

At this juncture Hakori died (378) and was succeeded by Nepherites II, who reigned only four months and left no monuments. The throne was now seized by the prince of Thebnute (Sebennytos), Nakhtenbof or Nakhtenebef (Nektanebos or Nectanebo I), who was said to have been a son of Nepherites I, the Mendesian, passed over in favour of Hakori fifteen years before, but as a matter of fact was the son of a certain general named Zedhor (Tachos). His predecessor Nepherites II was slain, and his son after him, according to tradition, no doubt by Nakhtenebef. The new king and his two successors, Zedhor (Tachos) and Nakhthorehbe (Nectanebo II), formed the XXXth Dynasty, the last dynasty of native Egyptian kings to rule the whole land.

Artaxerxes was not able to attack Egypt at once on account of dis­affection in the fleet. First revolted the admiral at Citium, Glos, son of that Egyptian Tamos who had escaped from Ionia to Egypt twenty years before, and therefore an Egyptian or half-Egyptian himself. Then, after he was suppressed and fled to Egypt, his successor, also, oddly enough, an Egyptian, named Tachos (Zedhor) himself revolted. Probably this was the result of Egyptian machinations. When the king’s armament was at last got together and had been placed under the command of the now elderly satrap Pharnabazus, a new complication arose. Nakhtenebef invited to his aid the Athenian admiral Chabrias with his fleet (377), and Chabrias, nothing loth, went to his assistance, without leave from the Athenian people. Pharnabazus immediately protested loudly at Athens in the name of the Great King, asking whether the Athenians deemed it prudent to provoke the resentment of Persia. The alarmed demos at once recalled Chabrias and furthermore, at the request of Pharnabazus, lent him the services of the famous officer Iphicrates, who in 390 had created such a sensation in Greece by his destruction by means of peltasts (light-armed troops whose use he developed and advocated) of a whole Spartan mora or battalion of hoplites outside the walls of Corinth.

The Athenian general accordingly repaired to Asia, and joined the army of Pharnabazus, which now advanced through Palestine and in 374 delivered its attack. It is said to have comprised 200,000 Persians and other barbarians, 12,000 (or 20,000) Greeks under Iphicrates, 300 warships: all figures which cannot be checked and may be quite erroneous. The Mendesian mouth of the Nile was forced by the fleet on board which were Iphicrates and many of his men, and the way lay open southward to Memphis. Iphicrates wished naturally to press on and finish the campaign at a blow, but Pharnabazus, deeply distrustful of the Greeks, and suspecting them of a design to seize Egypt themselves in the manner of the Athenians eighty years before, refused to allow him to do anything until the arrival of the gros of the Persian army over­land from Asia, when both forces would advance simultaneously on Memphis. Accordingly they waited, but the opportunity was lost, Memphis was fortified and garrisoned, and then towards summer the inundation covered the Delta with a sheet of water, and the invaders had hurriedly to decamp. Iphicrates, throwing up his command, departed secretly to Athens, and Pharnabazus had to make the best of his way to Asia and explain matters to his master as best he might.

Egypt was undisturbed during the rest of the reign of Nakhtenebef, which lasted eighteen years, till 361. A record of his relations with Greece exists in the Stele of Naucratis, erected in his first year, which records the gift to Neith of Sais of a tithe of all imports from Greece and of all products of Naucratis. The king took the opportunity, rare since the days of the Saites, of leaving some mark of his reign on the temples. In his sixteenth year, in consequence of a dream, he commanded the priest Petisi to restore the temple of Sebennytos. The deity Sopd, guardian of the eastern marches, was specially propitiated in order to secure his aid against the Persian danger, and his shrine at Saft el-hennah in the Wadi Tumilat, excavated by Naville in 1884, is a remarkable example of the use of great masses of stone that is characteristic of the temple-architecture of this period, and also well exhibits their meticulous decoration, equally characteristic of the age. The cutting of the hieroglyphs and other figures is carried out in a precise and delicate style like the Saite yet differing from it sensibly in details. He built not only in the Delta, but also at Abydos, Thebes and at Philae, where a graceful little temple commemorates his reign. The work of his architects is not untasteful. The green breccia sarcophagus of the king is at Cairo. His successor was his son Ze(d)ho(r), or Tachos as the Greeks called him, the Teos of Manetho: the name, meaning ‘Saith Horus,’ the symbol representing the human face being now used for the name of Horus (usually represented by the symbol of the falcon), was pronounced something like ‘Zaho’ or rather ‘Tjaho,’ and was a very common name at this time.

The accession of the new king was marked by a rude termination to the peace of the past twelve years. As before, the course of events was dependent on the kaleidoscopic changes of politics in Greece. The previous peaceful years had been contemporaneous with the dramatic contest between Sparta and Boeotian Thebes, immortalized by the names of Pelopidas and Epaminondas, which had ended the previous year in the battle of Mantinea and the death of Epaminondas. ‘After the battle,’ says Xenophon, ‘there was even more uncertainty and confusion in Greece than there had been before.’ The attempt of Pelopidas to bring the Greeks to a general peace and agreement under the aegis of the Great King as universal mediator failed, and the Greek delegates came back from Susa profoundly disillusioned as to the wealth of Susa and the King: ‘the famous golden plane-tree would not give enough shade for a lizard.’ And now all Asia broke into revolt under various dynasts and satraps; Mausolus of Caria, whose person we know from his tomb-statue in the British Museum, Datames, Orontes of Mysia, Autophradates of Lydia, Ariobarzanes of the Hellespontine region, and others. The king’s only weapon against them seems to be assassination. And then Tachos must needs join in the dance. He prepared an army to invade Syria, and as the modern Greeks get a French officer to reorganize their army and a British seaman to put their navy in order, so the Egyptian hired a Spartan to look after his army and an Athenian to take charge of his navy. They were respectively the old king Agesilaus and the admiral Chabrias, who, we are told, was always a lover of Egypt. Agesilaus came with the full consent of the Spartans, who were angered with Persia because Artaxerxes had approved at the conference at Susa of the freeing of Messenia by Epaminondas, and brought with him 1000 Spartans, a formidable reinforcement for Egypt in spite of its small numbers. Chabrias came at his own charges, and used his knowledge of Egypt to advise Tachos to confiscate much of the temple-revenues to pay his troops, an act which, if it was carried out, was not calculated to enhance the popularity of the Egyptian king with his subjects. Agesilaus’s appearance and his familiar camp-manners with his Spartans earned him only contempt from Tachos, but the Spartan king, though he was over eighty, had lost none of his vigour, and when after the arrival of the army in Phoenicia he found that he was utterly unable to agree with Tachos (who also was not loved by the Egyptians, who had revolted against him at home), he deposed him in favour of his relation the young prince Nakhthorehbe (359). Tachos fled to Susa. ‘One changes left for right’; said the oracle of Heracleopolis in the ‘Demotic Chroniclep. ‘ To the right is Egypt, to the left is Phoenicia. That is to say they exchanged him who went to Phoenicia, which is left, for him who stayed in Egypt, which is right’; says the commentary.

The new king immediately abandoned the Asiatic expedition (a consequence that can hardly have been expected by Agesilaus) in order to secure his power at home, which he only did after severe fighting, in which Agesilaus acted, as before, as chief-of-staff, and guaranteed him victory. The native troops on either side, Egyptian or Persian, hardly count for anything now: all the real fighting is done by the Greek mercenaries on both sides, and no sensible king would go to war without employing the best Greek military specialist he could. Agesilaus, when peace was restored in Egypt, received great gifts and a fee of 230 talents to Sparta (which he distributed among his soldiers), and went home, only to die on the way. Chabrias followed him. These Greek military specialists remind us, not so much of medieval condottieri, with whom they have been compared, as of the German and other professional generals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men like Montecuculi, the von der Schulemberg who commanded the Venetians at Corfu, Marshal Schomberg, and the famous Maréchal de Saxe.

Two other experts had soon to be engaged by Nakhthorehbe to command his forces. In 359 the Persian prince Ochus, now associated with his father as king, had attempted to follow Nakhthorehbe and Agesilaus into Egypt, but had retired, probably owing to the death of his father (358), whom he now succeeded as king Artaxerxes III, Ochus. The confederacy of Anatolian satraps broke up partly owing to the defection of Egypt, and partly owing to treachery among their number. His position being assured, Ochus, hearkening to the prayers of the exiled Tachos, determined to reinstate the Egyptian as his tributary. In the resulting attack, which was defeated probably about 357 or 356, the Egyptian defending forces (mostly no doubt Greeks) were ably commanded by the Athenian Diophantus and the Spartans Lamius and Gastron. We hear no more of Tachos. Like Nakhtenebef, Nakhthorehbe (Nectanebo II) reigned for some years now in peace, and also erected monuments like him at Thebes and elsewhere, notably at Edfu and at Hibis in the oasis of al-Khargah. Of Tachos there is little trace in Egypt. He does not appear to have been a person of much distinction. Both Nectanebos, however, come before us as kings of a certain nobility and dignity, and we hear no ill of them. They were both distinguished patrons of the arts, and the later Saite renascence that marks the second half of the short sixty years of independence, and is so important as the prelude and incentive to the fine efforts of early Ptolemaic art and architecture, must have been due to their direct patronage as well as to the inspiration which renewed independence and even power had given to the development of the arts.

Artaxerxes Ochus was a man of proud and energetic nature, who could not brook the continual independence of a people which he regarded as subject to his ancestors and so rightfully subject to him. Persian policy too was obstinate in endeavouring to regain its hold over a country so wealthy as Egypt. The Greeks after all could contribute nothing to Susa’s treasury: they had nothing to export but their philosophy and art and no ware that Persia wished to buy but their military science. They were really not worth troubling about except on the point of honour. But the Egyptians meant flesh-pots, corn, and gold to their ruler. Accordingly prematurely aged Persia must put forward her half-palsied arm again to try to coerce decrepit Egypt into submission to her. And this time Ochus, or his advisers, acted with some skill while Nakhthorehbe did not. For the Persian at last realized that without expert Greek aid his expedition must fail, while the Egyptian, whether because he would not or could not pay properly for the best advice, or because he thought himself a general, did not trouble to secure his professionals as he should have done, and was betrayed by them.

The immediate cause of the war was a revolt in Phoenicia and Cyprus led by the king Tennes of Sidon, to whom Nakhthorehbe in an evil hour promised help (344). He sent him 4000 Greek mercenaries under Mentor the Rhodian, who, when he heard of the approach of Ochus in person with his army, opened communication with the Persians in collusion with Tennes. Ochus nevertheless besieged Sidon, whose citizens knew nothing of the treachery of their king. When the Persians were admitted into the city by Mentor and Tennes, the Sidonians burnt themselves, their fleet and their houses in one great pyre. Forty thousand are said to have perished. Tennes was cynically executed by Ochus, and Mentor with equal cynicism taken into his service. Cyprus was reduced for him by Idrieus, prince of Caria, the successor of Mausolus, helped by the Athenian admiral Phocion and the Salaminian king Evagoras II, who had been expelled from Cyprus and now returned.

In 343, strengthened by Mentor and his men, well acquainted with the eastern border of Egypt, and by Lacrates the Theban and Nicostratus the Argive, whom Ochus had specially engaged with their men from Thebes and Argos on payment of a subsidy to the two states, and 6000 Ionians besides, the Persian king moved southwards on Egypt. Nakhthorehbe defended the line of the isthmus of Suez with a considerable army, which is said to have included 20,000 Greeks, though this seems improbable. He had at least two Greek generals, Philophron and Cleinias of Cos, but they were not of the first rank; Lacrates and Nicostratus easily outclassed them, and Mentor’s local knowledge stood the two chief commanders in good stead. Nicostratus forced the passage of the canals at Pelusium and beat Cleinias in the field and killed him; whereupon Nakhthorehbe, who had apparently no other Greek commander on whom he could rely, retreated to Memphis, leaving his Greeks to continue the fighting. After his disappearance from the scene they soon surrendered, and now the cities of the Delta had to open their gates to their conquerors. Bagoas the eunuch, the chief Persian commander, received their submission, and advanced with Mentor on Memphis, from which Nakhthorehbe fled with his treasure, as Taharka had done before him, to Ethiopia. The finely wrought sarcophagus which had been prepared for his tomb, probably at Sais, in his life­time, and was never occupied by him, is in the British Museum, after having acted for long as a bath in some Alexandrian palace.

Ochus now arrived in Egypt, and, if we are to believe the chroniclers, celebrated his arrival in a way that outdid the outrages of Cambyses, stabling an ass in the temple of Ptah and having Apis slain to be roast for a banquet. This Persian king was no doubt very much of a savage, but we may doubt whether these are not a mere réchauffé of the tales against Cambyses, unless, of course, he purposely imitated the sacrileges of his predecessor, which is not impossible. The archives of the temples, which had been carried off, had to be redeemed by the priests from Bagoas for large sums.

Pherendates (Franadata) was appointed satrap, and Egypt sank into an uneasy torpor of dazed submission to the ‘Great Kings’ who now ruled by the favour of Bagoas, and to their new satraps, until, only ten years later, she was awakened by the trumpet-call of Alexander. One can almost smile at the succession of unexpected shocks which the Greeks gave to the Egyptians during this catastrophic fourth century, but the last was certainly the most startling of all, though it turned out well for Egypt.

 

III.

THE COMING OF ALEXANDER

 

The rumour of the coming of the Macedonian conqueror had preceded him, and the sieges of Tyre and Gaza had given the Persians in Egypt and the Egyptians plenty of time in which to make up their minds how to receive him. The Persians, cut off from all help, could do nothing; and the feeling of the Egyptians would certainly be in his favour; they would prefer a Greek, or soi-disant Greek, conqueror to a Persian. To them Alexander was a Greek as others before him. And though he might punish individuals, he would not oppress the whole nation or contemn its gods. Mazaces the satrap submitted, and, amid the acclamations of the Egyptians, Alexander sacrificed to the Egyptian gods and was hailed by the priests as the Son of Amon-Re, the Sun-god, and king of Egypt (332). He had no time to visit Thebes, so went to the more romantic oasis-oracle of Ammon at Siwah instead, where his divinity as king of Egypt was fully recognized and proclaimed. If he was king of Egypt he could not avoid being the son of the sun-god, and indeed ‘the good god’ himself, even if he wished. His Macedonians could not understand the fiction and resented the assumption, while the Greeks mocked when they dared. The divinity of Alexander was due to no mad arrogance nor can it be proved that he believed it in the least himself, but it was a ‘legal’ necessity, so far as Egypt was concerned; it could be justified to the Greeks as the divinity of a ‘founder-god’, or at any rate the semi­divinity of a ‘founder-hero’, as the founder of Alexandria. And Iskander dhu’l-qarnein, ‘two-horned Alexander’, with the ram’s horns of Ammon springing from his head as on the coinage of Lysimachus, he has remained in oriental tradition till this day. Popular legend in Egypt soon busied itself with him after his death, and we have that marvellous tale, the ‘Alexander Romance’ of the Pseudo-Callisthenes: how Nectanebo, who was a great sorcerer, fled, not to Ethiopia, but to Macedonia, where he visited the queen Olympias in the guise of the ram-headed Ammon, and so he, not Philip, was the real father of Alexander, who was thus doubly the rightful pharaoh of Egypt. The Heracleopolite oracular description of the Greeks as ‘the dogs’ and of Alexander himself as ‘the Big Dog’ who finds something still to devour, is not necessarily derogatory, although the nationalist priests of Heracleopolis cannot really have loved the ‘dogs’, though they drove out the Persian oppressors: the idea is rather a neutral one, describing Alexander and his soldiers rather appropriately under the guise of their own Molossian hounds, chasing away the Medes and seeking everywhere for more to devour.

Alexander attempted to enlist the Egyptians themselves in the government of their country by appointing a noble, Petisis, as satrap, though solely with the power of a Minister of the Interior carefully checked both from the financial as well as the military side, the taxation of the country being entrusted to a Naucratite Greek, Cleomenes, with his colleague Apollonius, its military security to the Macedonian officers Peucestas and Balacrus and the Greek admiral Polemon. The Egyptian, however, declined his post and a certain Doloaspis, who had been associated with him, was appointed as sole satrap. This Doloaspis, judging by his name, was not an Egyptian, but a Persian, or possibly an Ana­tolian. Cleomenes got the last ounce of tribute out of Egypt for his master, and the reason for Alexander’s diversion to Egypt after the fall of Tyre is evident. He had to secure the wealth of Egypt before pursuing his attack on Persia. He could trust the treachery, ineptitude, and incapacity of the Persians to leave his Anatolian conquest unattacked, his land line of communications uncut. Not, too, that he needed that much now. The possession of Phoenicia and her fleets gave him an invulnerable line of communication by sea, if he were cut off by land, and that of Egypt rendered the sea line absolutely safe from land attack, since it could be transferred at a moment’s notice from Tyre and Sidon to Naucratis and to the new port and city of Alexandria-Rhacotis, which the conqueror established in the neighbourhood of Naucratis at the west end of the Delta coast. Here alone there was no fear of a silted-up harbour, since the Nile-flood drives its silt eastward up the coast from the mouths in the direction of the Serbonian bog, not westward towards Libya.

With the foundation of Alexandria the ancient history of Egypt ends, and that of the new Hellenistic Egypt, ruled by Greek pharaohs from the Greek sea-city and in continuous connection with the Mediterranean world, begins. Had Alexander lived on as Great King at Babylon or Susa, and founded a dynasty there, it is doubtful whether his experiment in Egypt would have survived. It was owing to the fate that confined Ptolemy Soter to Egypt as his share of the empire of Alexander that his Macedonian dynasty, circumscribed to Egypt and wholly identified with it, survived, and Alexandria with it. The Ptolemies were in all respects for their subjects Egyptian kings, residing in Egypt and representing Egypt only, as the Persians had never been, and as Alexander’s dynasty, had it existed, would not have been. Therefore, on the whole, they kept the loyalty of their subjects.

The last native régime, which had made such valiant struggles against the Medes, was, it is true, looked back to in Ptolemaic days with regret. We read in the prophetic oracles of Heracleopolis (preserved in the ‘Demotic Chronicle’), of the Mendesian and Sebennytic kings: of Amyrtaeus ‘the first after the Medes,’ of Naifaurud ‘the second after the Medes,’ and so on to the seventh, Nakhtenebef, son of Naifaurud, the eighth Zedhor (Tachos) and then the tragic figure of Nakhtljorehbe. ‘(The chief who came after Zedhor, eighteen years shall he reign. . . .) They have opened the gates of the veil (?), they will open the doors of the curtained place (?); (they who came after him, the Madai [Medes].. . .) Our lakes and our isles are full of tears; (the dwellings of the men of Egypt have none in them at this time: that is to say, at the time named it is meant that the Medes had taken their dwellings in order to live in them)..  I love the first day of the month more than the last: (by which he would say: better is the first year than the last in the times which they bring, namely the Medes)...  I have arrayed myself from head to foot (by this thou wouldst say: I appear with the basilisk of gold which none shall take from my head! He said this of king Nakhtenebef.) My royal vestment is upon my back: (that is to say, my royal vestments shine upon my back: none shall take them from me.) The scimitar is in my hand: (that is to say: the kingly office is in my  hands, none shall take it from me. . .the scimitar of victory!) ’. But Nakhtenebef’s pride and splendour, the glory of the renewed kingdom, were cast down into dust: ‘the herds of the people of the deserts have entered Egypt (that is to say: the nations of the west and east have entered Egypt. And they are the Medes!).... O Gardener, do thy work! (that is: Pharaoh, do thy work: by whom he meant king Nakhtenebef) O Gardener, may thy planting remain!' Such, according to the latest version, is the style of this curious book of prophecies with their commentary or interpretation (in brackets), which often seems to be a double interpretation: a commentary on a commentary on the original text.

We seem also to read vague and veiled aspirations after the coming of a saviour-king, who should come to Hermopolis from Ethiopia, like Piankhi long before, under the auspices of the god Harshafi of Heracleopolis and his priests, and end the Ptolemaic domination: ‘(for the Ionians who come to Egypt, they rule Egypt for long) The dogs, may they long live: the Big Dog, he finds somewhat to eat'. But no Ethiopian deliverer ever came; intelligent Ethiopian princes like Ergamenes realized too well the power of the Ptolemies and the civilization they represented to think of trying to conquer Egypt. And though patriotic antiquaries and litterati might sometimes sigh, in the characteristic old Egyptian fashion in times of internal war or foreign domination, for a Messianic deliverer, and though prophecy-mongering priests might do their best to keep up the hope of a native monarchy in the minds of the people, it never revived. Local dynasts in Upper Egypt, like Harmachis and Anchmachis in the reign of Epiphanes at the beginning of the second century, might arrogate royal regnal years to themselves as long as they dared. But the nation as a whole desired no change. The regime of the Ptolemies was a very different thing from that of the Persians, and though Greeks might settle everywhere in the country and penetrate into the life and being of the native race to a remarkable extent, they did so as fellow-subjects of kings who wore the Double Crown of Egypt and no other.

 

IV.

 RETROSPECT

 

When we look back over the eight hundred years of Egyptian history since the days of the priest-kings, we shall perhaps be struck by the great sameness that runs through the whole story. The history of Egypt in many respects resembles that of China. Both countries were and are inhabited by a sturdy peasant-folk of intensely conservative instincts, which for thousands of years has altered but little. Barbarians from outside, Scyths, Turks and Huns (Yueh-chi, Til-chi, and Hiungnu), Khingans, Mongols, and Manchus in the case of China, Libyans, Ethiopians, Assyrians in the case of Egypt during this period, Hyksos and Philistines before it, have always flowed in, or tried to flow in from the surrounding bad lands into the desirable cultivation and amenity of the river-countries: they have in both China and Egypt conquered the native folk and given them an aristocracy and a royal house. We may very well compare the Libyans of the Twenty-second Dynasty not only with the Kassites in Babylonia but also with the Manchus in China. The conquerors have however always become absorbed in all essentials into the native race, while often retaining the mere insignia (in the way of names and so forth) of their alien origin. This phenomenon repeats itself in Egypt: we may compare the ‘Great Chiefs of Ma’ with the Manchu ‘banner-men’ in China. The pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty may more than be suspected of being of Semitic origin, descended from some Hyksos princely family that remained behind in the Delta after the exodus of the Shepherds. Here we have the Arab-Canaanite filtering in from the east. In the case of the Ptolemies we have strangers from the sea (albeit Alexander came by land like the others) coming in to rule the patient race that made the wealth for them. But of all the foreign dominations that of the Libyan families was the most persistent. Under the Twenty-first Dynasty they began to dominate Egypt, under the Twenty-second they gave a royal house not only to Egypt but also to Ethiopia, and seven hundred years after the time of the Meneptah the princes of Sais still bear the apparently Libyan name Psamatik. The Egyptian military class was then largely of Libyan origin, the descendants of the followers of the Great Chiefs of Ma. It was the appearance of the Greek mercenaries and the Persian conquest that together wrecked the ‘Hermotybies and Kalasiries,’ and caused the final disappearance of the Libyan element, which under the Mendesians and Sebennytites no longer exists and has left hardly any trace except the popular proper name Sheshenk, which occurs in Ptolemaic and even in Roman days (as Sesonchosis).

We must now cease to think of the Ethiopian kings as very radically opposed to the Libyans of the north. It has been shown that the Ethiopian royal house was of Bubastite origin and bore Libyan names. Yet there is no doubt that Nubian names occur among their queens, and there can be little doubt that the Ethiopian kings themselves soon became half Nubian. Taharka is represented by the Assyrians as having the visage of a negro: and, after all, Egyptian representations of him are negroid in appearance. He may in fact have had not a Nubian, but a negress, for his mother. The Saites of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty show no Ethiopian, much less negroid, traces in their portraits, so that there was probably no intermarriage with the Ethiopian royal house. We have an excellent portrait of Psamatik I on an intercolumnar slab probably from Sais, in the British Museum, which is obviously faithful; it represents him as remarkably like the famous Lord Chancellor Brougham, with an almost equally characteristic nose. One would say that the features were those of a west-European. The nearest Egyptian approach to his type is that of a Fourth Dynasty grandee from Gizeh, whose ‘reserve head’ for the tomb was found by Reisner. The ancient head is the nobler of the two. But the persistence of this ‘European’ type is interesting. There is certainly nothing of the Ethiopian about it, or Semite. Something of the same type, but more conventionally Egyptian in character, is the portrait of Nakhtenebef, also on an intercolumnar slab in the British Museum. Character in a Sebennytite portrait is not unexpected: it was not till the Ptolemaic period that the faces of royal statues again became characterless and conventional. Apries, on a slab also in the British Museum, has marked features though without the character of Psamatik I.

The Libyan admixture, apart from the royalties, was chiefly apparent in the upper class. We find it already under the priest-kings in the burly Masaherti, who bore a Libyan name. It was probably on the whole a healthy admixture. The Semitic and Anatolian admixture, however, which (apart from Semitic peasants in the eastern Delta) was probably now apparent chiefly in the cities, was by no means of the best, consisting probably (as it does now) of the riff-raff of Phoenicia and the Levantine coasts generally. This cannot have been any but a degenerate component in the new Egyptian race, to which Ethiopian and negro elements contributed nothing good except (like the Libyans) a certain amount of energy, without which the Egyptians would have been an even feebler folk at this period than they actually were. The effect of these doubtful foreign strains on the national type is perhaps seen in a particularly villainous cast of countenance that appears in certain portrait-heads of the Saite period, which are almost too faithful representations of their subjects. The negro and Nubian (‘Berberine’) elements in the population were probably more apparent than they are now; many of both races belonging to the armies of the Ethiopian kings would settle in Egypt in the eighth century, and Ethiopian types, often mixed with negro, would be seen then also among the upper classes, and most apparently at Thebes, owing to the long domination there of the southern kings. Yet Mentumehet appears before us as in his portrait as a typical Egyptian of the old- fashioned broad-faced type which we know under the Fourth Dynasty. Fellah blood after all was but little contaminated, and the country gentleman would be fellah then as he is now. The degeneration was in the towns and among the ruling classes at the capital cities.

We have spoken of the Egyptians of this time as being a feeble folk. The fellah stock of the nation was not in itself feeble, but it was, as it always has been, pacific, except in regard to local quarrels between villages or parties, when the use of the nabut or heavy staff was as common as now and as is the lathi among those other very simple peasants, the Jats of the Punjab. The stronger stick prevailed then as now, and when it was in the hand of a resolute pharaoh or a foreign conqueror, the fellah submitted to his master in either case. It was only a strong pharaoh and a strong incentive that could get the fellahin forth of Egypt and away from their beloved fields to fight abroad; weak government and poverty meant that Egypt became indeed a broken reed, able to stave off conquest by a resolute aggressor only by means of the weapons of intrigue and chicane. The centuries of manoeuvres of this kind must have had as bad an effect on the minds of the Egyptian ruling classes as it had on those of the similarly situated Byzantines. Then, in Saite times, the eclipse of the military class by the foreign mercenaries, with the result that in the fourth century the Egyptian armies were largely composed of foreigners, reduced the manliness of the nation to a very low ebb. It cannot be said that in classical times the Egyptian had a very savoury reputation. At Rome he was usually the professor of religious humbug and ‘occult’ quackery. But for a temporary revival, the result of Islam, during the Middle Ages, the Egyptians have continued to be an unwarlike, albeit quarrelsome, race from Saite days to our own. And yet the nation had and has, like the Chinese again, the solid virtues of its main stock, the sons of the soil. This race is as fecund as ever it was. Its misfortune always has been that it has so rarely been ruled by men of real light and leading, of true credit and renown.

Of the condition of the farmer and the peasant class we hear little that is new during the period. The common warriors that were settled among them soon mixed with the native population. The conditions of life were not altered for anybody: in Egypt they are unchanging. Only a very high or low Nile makes any difference. We have documents from which something of the petty details of the land and tax organization can be learned, but they are marvellously dull reading, and of no interest to anybody but specialists in law or language. All that need be said in a general history is that traditional system was preserved with necessary modifications, and that the complicated system of Ptolemaic and Roman days was, so far as we can tell, already in existence in a somewhat less elaborate form. The many trading documents of the time of Darius I have already been mentioned. Trade with Asia always flourished except in time of actual war; and nothing shows the resilience of the Egyptians so well as the astounding speed with which the traces of constantly recurring wars and invasions disappeared from the daily life of the people.

Of other documents we possess letters of the Twenty-first Dynasty in the shape of the correspondence of certain Theban officials, the scribes Zaroiye and Thutmosis, the commander of the guard Piankhi, the scribe Buteha-Amon, the priestess or singer of Amon Shedumedua, and others, that give a tantalizing impression of the life of educated but not noble persons of that time, an impression tantalizing because so much space in each letter is taken up by compliments that there is little room left for information which might be to us of priceless value. Here again we see a parallel with old China. Both countries were in much the same state of civilization, with a despotic ruler, a cultivated, literary, and over-elaborate upper class, stupid and bad soldiers, and a long-suffering and silent peasantry.

It is difficult to judge from these letters whether the peasants are regarded as serfs or slaves or not. The letters are full of in­junctions to be kind to the workmen, but, at the same time, ‘Look after the people sharply every day,’ writes Thutmosis to Buteha-Amon and Shedumedua, whose relations were probably conjugal; they appear to have stood in some subordinate relation to Thutmosis. ‘Direct your attention to the people who are in the fields; make them do their irrigation work, make them do their irrigation work! and don’t let the boys at school throw their books on one side! Look after the people in my house: make them dig ditches, but not too much!’. It is much the same relation as that in India today between a zamindar and his rayats. The fellahin were not slaves any more than they are now: far less slaves indeed than most of other oriental peoples: the true slave was the negro and the war-captive, male or female. We possess interesting documents of a later period, the Saite, relating to slavery, in the demotic papyri from el-Hibeh preserved in the Rylands Library at Manchester. From them we see that in the reign of Amasis Egyptians also could be held and sold as slaves, a practice that had probably grown up during the wars of the Dodekarchy. Under the Persians foreign mercenaries, like the Jews at Syene, could own Egyptian slaves. After legal formalities a man could mortgage his own body for debt, and could also, if he willed, sell himself into slavery. Legal contracts, properly witnessed, were necessary for these proceedings.

The correspondence of Thutmosis and Buteha-Amon gives rise to the surmise whether these letters are not really model pieces of writing, intended for scholastic use? The reference to the bad boys casting aside their books looks very like it: one can hardly imagine Thutmosis troubling about the matter in real life, though perhaps the litteratus, Egyptian or Chinese, would be capable of mixing this matter up with irrigation. Such scholastic models were however common, and most of our copies of Egyptian literature are of this character: they are school exercises. But the letters, whether they are genuine or not, and whether Thutmosis and his friends were real persons or not, give some idea of the life of the time. The language is the altered common speech of the day, with many neologisms and foreign importations, which in the course of our period became the tongue of Ptolemaic days, practically identical with the later Coptic.

Under the Twenty-first Dynasty letters and all other documents were of course still written in hieratic and the same may be said of the Twenty-second. But in the time of the Ethiopians they begin to be, and from that of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty onwards they are always written in demotic, the new short-hand script that was evolved from hieratic and became popular somewhere about the beginning of the seventh century; after which time hieratic, written in a peculiar small, neat style, was used only for religious papyri. In fact our period might almost be called the ‘Demotic Age’ of Egyptian history, so characteristic of the period is the use of the older type of demotic writing, when hieratic had disappeared from ordinary use and Greek was not yet employed. Like the business documents and letters of all kinds now, the romances and prophecies which have been mentioned as written down in Ptolemaic and Roman times were written in demotic.

We have little literature in demotic script before Ptolemaic days. The stories were there, of course, in the mouths of the people, but had not yet been written. Notable among such tales that have not a direct historical bearing, and so have not yet been mentioned, are the stories of Setme Khamuas, the great sorcerer, who is none other than an actual historical personage of old time, the prince Khamuas, son of Rameses II, of whom there is a statue in the British Museum. He seems in his lifetime to have been a student of occult arts, and was high-priest of Ptah at Memphis; whence his later title of Setme, the name of the Setme-priest. In the story, which was written down at the end of the Ptolemaic period, Setme Kha'muas has marvellous adventures with ghosts in a tomb into which he penetrates in order to obtain a book of magic deposited in it. Kha'muas plays draughts with the ghosts, the stake being the precious book. He goes down too into Hades and sees wonders there, and his son Si-Osirei, being still a child, but a reincarnation of a former sorcerer, defeats the sorceries of some Ethiopian magicians, who have the audacity to transport pharaoh himself by magic from Memphis to Ethiopia, there beat him in the presence of the ‘Viceroy,’ and bring him back to Memphis, all in the space of six hours. We hear of contests between Egyptian and Ethiopian magicians exactly parallel to those between Moses and the Egyptian sorcerers in the Book of Exodus, and finally Si-Osirei disappears, having done the work for which he was reincarnated, the rescue of Egypt from Ethiopian magic. The whole story is curiously weird, and though occasionally it may read like a tale from the Arabian Nights, there is in it a macabre element that is very Egyptian and could only belong to the land of tombs and mummies in its old age.

It may be that the nation was becoming depressed by continued foreign rule and gloomier than it was in olden days. Certainly in late Roman times all joyousness seems to have departed from Egypt, when we seem to have reached an age of humourless, semi-idiotic religious delirium and fanaticism, and the dirtier, the stupider and the more delirious a man was the holier he was deemed to be by the murderers of Hypatia. That desperate time was however not yet, though perhaps we see premonitions of it already. In religion during our period we are greatly struck by the increase of the element of magic and obscure occultism. This element had of course always existed from the days of the predynastic medicine-men and of Dedi the magician of king Khufu. But now we find it very much to the fore, and manifesting itself in odd pantheistic figures and objects like the famous ‘Metternich-stele,’ which is of the time of Nakhthorehbe. In the Egyptian religion the idea of sin and responsibility had but a small place: in fact consciousness of sin hardly appears till the Ramessid period, and is then no doubt a Semitic importation. Later we find religion sinking beneath the weight of formalism and mere superstitious observance of magical rites. Under the Saites a religious revival (if it may be so termed) among the priests, connected with the archaistic movement, led to a new recension and edition of the ‘Book of Coming Forth by Day,’ the ‘Book of the Dead,’ as we call it, which resulted in the fixing of the order of its ‘mouths’ or chapters. The primitive, barbarous and unintelligible Pyramid-texts of the beginnings of Egyptian civilization were revived in an even more unintelligible form, and their childish gabble, that of the ‘Book of the Dead’, was much prefferred to the splendid Eighteenth Dynasty hymns written when Egypt was really civilized in honour of Amon-Re, the great god of the imperial period. The whole religion was becoming funerary in character, in accordance with the exaltation of Osiris at the expense of Amon.

We see the gradual retirement of Amon from his ancient pride of place as the chief deity of the realm, though in the Saite days he is still Amonrasonther, ‘the king of the gods.’ Under the Twenty-first Dynasty he is of course still all powerful, with his wife Mut and his son the moon-god Khons, whose worship had developed so greatly under the Twentieth Dynasty. Under the Twenty-second Amon is still the chief god and war-lord. But alongside him in royal and popular estimation is now a form of Hathor, the cat-goddess Ubastet or Baste, the deity of Bubastis, the city of the court. The magnificent temple which the Bubastite kings built at Bubastis on the ruins of one that went back to the days of Khufu is well known in its formless ruin. But Baste was eclipsed with the Bubastite dynasty. Of course she still continued to be venerated, especially at Bubastis, but she is no longer to the fore. As the special patroness of dynasty and people she was succeeded by the war-goddess Neith, who was Libyan, but Libyan of a very early day, and had been naturalized as an Egyptian goddess long ago, in the days of the First Dynasty at least. Her position as the local deity of Sai’s made her the special protectress of the Saite kings, and names compounded with hers were common under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Probably the later Libyans of the days of the Ma identified their gods with those of Egypt wholly: Harshafi of Heracleopolis may have owed his popularity among them to identification with some Libyan Heracles, some Antaeus of the desert-caves.

Amon was soon to follow Baste, but to a more definite limbo of discarded gods, at any rate for a few centuries. The destruction of Thebes in 663 was probably the turning-point in his divine career. Osiris, the god of the dead, took his place in the popular mind as the universal lord whom all revered, and in Ptolemaic days Amon and Osiris were more or less confused with one another and with the deified sage Amenothes or Amenophis, son of Paapis, the historical Amenhotep, son of Hapu, vizier of Amenhotep III, who was now regarded as a god, like Imhotep, the vizier of king Zoser, also now deified as the son of Ptah and patron of learning, the Imouthes of the Greeks. Officially Amon reappears under the Ptolemies as a royal god, owing to Alexander’s special devotion to him, the ram-headed god whom he claimed as father. Alexander had to be son of Re‘, but in the assumption of his pharaonic filial dignity it would appear that he was advised to become, or by chance became, son of Amon-Re of Siwah rather than of Re of Heliopolis only. The imposing panache of the pre-Saite Amon-Re suited the ideas of the Ptolemaic period, when men were inclined to revive the imperialistic spirit under the influence of the grandeur and foreign empire of such kings as Philadelphus. But to the common people Amon was no more than Amenophis or Osiris. The welding together, so far as it could be accomplished, of the Greek and Egyptian religions produced the curious phenomenon that we know well in classical days of Alexandrian religion with its worship of Sarapis (Osor-hapi, Osiris-Apis the funerary deity of Sinopion [Sinhapi], the necropolis of Sakkara near Memphis), who was naturally identified with Hades, and with its Graeco-Egyptian ‘fake’ mysteries, which brought hierophants of Isis to Delos and to Rome, and made the great mother-goddess of a great and ancient people become one of the attractions of a second-rate Roman seaside resort like Pompeii. So Egypt perished, but qualis artifex! On her death-bed she was a sham and a poseuse: but what had she not been in her young days: the mother of the arts?

 

CHAPTER VII

THE INAUGURATION OF JUDAISM