irrigation. All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither
corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass. No water is to be found
there beyond a few wells, all more or less exposed to exhaustion in
an ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain is an extremely
rare phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the
actual valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides into
several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole
length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more
than four or five leagues. In a few districts it is even narrower than
this. For almost its whole length it is shut in between two mountain
chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan
chain. These mountains, especially towards the south, sometimes
close in and form defiles. On the other hand, in Middle Egypt the
Libyan chain falls back and becomes lower, allowing the passage of
the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the
province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the
Greek writers called Lake Mœris exist. Egypt, which was little more
than a glen higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A
little below Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from
the site of ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one
of which, the Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that
of Damietta, to the north and north-east.... The ancients knew five
others which, since their time, have either been obliterated or at least
have become non-navigable.... All these branches took their names
from towns situated near their mouths. A large number of less
important watercourses threaded their way through
8
Lower Egypt; but as the earth there is marshy, their channels have
shifted greatly from age to age and still go on changing. The Nile
forms several lagunes near the sea, shut in by long tongues of earth
and sand, and communicating with the Mediterranean by openings
here and there. The space comprised between the two most distant
branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its triangular
form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek delta (Δ)."[43]
At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the
sandy plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid; the Nile
flowed into the sea at that time slightly to the north of the site upon
which Memphis was afterwards built. With the slow passage of time
the particles of earth which it brought down from the mountains of
Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks upon the coast, and
gradually filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy plains
intersected by lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the
successive watercourses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods
had already, at the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the
Nile far beyond the normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The
Egyptian priests—whose words have been preserved for us by
Herodotus—had a true idea as to how this vast plain had been
created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand square
kilometres and is continually being added to; but they were strangely
deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Ména, the
first of all kings, found almost all Egypt under the waters. The sea,
they said, penetrated in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and
the remainder of the country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an
unhealthy morass.[44] The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it may have shown pretty much
its present form when the Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of
the Nile.[45]
As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a
question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that
they were connected with the white races of Europe
9
and Western Asia; the anatomical examination of the bodies
recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their
statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we
take away individual peculiarities these monuments furnish us with
the following common type of the race even in the most remote
epochs:—
"The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and
powerful shoulders,[46] a muscular chest, sinewy arms terminating in long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His
knees and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the
case with a pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by
his habit of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for
the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was
square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes
were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick
but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an
habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be
found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in
all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or fellahs,
have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their
ancestors, although the upper classes have lost it by repeated
intermarriage with strangers."[47]
When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous
wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of
authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature
and attitude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who
managed the corvées and apportioned the taxation. An astonished
fellah cried out: "The Sheikh-el-Beled!" His companions took up the
cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since.[48]
Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to
carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his
successors. By many of its roots, by its system of pronouns,
10
by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its
conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of
languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in
Egyptian in a rudimentary state. From this it has been concluded that
Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that
group, separated from it at a very early period, while their
grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, disunited
and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different
use of the elements which they possessed in common.
There would thus seem to have been a community of root between
the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and
Phœnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an
early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the
valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a
very particular and original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians
are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races.
Fig. 6.—Statue from the Ancient Empire in calcareous
stone. (Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Bénédite.
This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM.
Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by
13
M. Maspero.[50] But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they
neither deny nor explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the
Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic,
and to which he would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa.[51] A comparison of the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the
question of origin.
Fig. 7.—The Sheikh-el-Beled. (Boulak.) Drawn by J. Bourgoin.
The people whose physical characteristics we have described and
whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by
the Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of
the Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African
continent.[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and
set themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must
then have presented a very different sight from its richness and
fertility of to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually
changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach
certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; in other
districts it remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The
Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under
those of the Mediterranean, was simply a huge morass dotted here
and there with sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and
lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way;
upon both banks the desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched
by the yearly inundations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical
marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the
new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in
and to carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt
gradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one
of the best adapted countries in the world for the development of a
great civilization.[53]
How many generations did it require to create the country and the
nation? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a
14
commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at
several different points of small independent states, each of which
had its own laws and its own form of worship. These districts
remained almost unchanged in number and in their respective
boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world. Their union
under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the Pharaohs, the country
of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not therefore disappear; the
small independent states became provinces and were the foundation
of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called nomes.
Fig. 8.—Hunting in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in the tomb of
Ti.
Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and
only one—the division into Lower Egypt, or the
15
North Country ( Tomera, or To-meh), and into Upper Egypt, or the
South Country ( To-res). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper
Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first
cataract. This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to
the configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the memory of
a period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided
into two separate kingdoms—that of the North and that of the South,
a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the
course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long duration
to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt,
and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic imagery.
The sovereigns who united the whole territory under one sceptre are
always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Lower
Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one
of the two great divisions of their united kingdom. That of Upper
Egypt is known to egyptologists as the White crown, because of the
colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of the North is
called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with one another
they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called the
pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the
papyrus; Southern by the lotus.
Fig. 9.—Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above the level
of the canals.
During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper,
Middle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle
16
Egypt of the Greek geographers began at the southern point of the
Delta, and extended to a little south of Hermopolis. Although this
latter division was not established until after the centuries which saw
the birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we
shall make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more
definite our topographical explanations. For the contemporaries of the
Pharaohs both Memphis and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if
we adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual
necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions;
but with the tri-partite division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in
Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea
of their relative positions.
Fig. 10.—The White Crown. Fig. 11.—The Red Crown. Fig.
12.—The Pschent.
§ 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History.
In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall
classify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the
plastic arts will be arranged into groups determined by the periods of
their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We
must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the
lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign, but
it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the principal
epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds to an
artistic period with a
17
special character and individuality of its own. The following
paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero give all the
necessary information in a brief form.
"In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal class had
obtained a supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man
called Menes (Menha or Ména in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this
supremacy and founded the Egyptian monarchy.
"This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty
consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo
(340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of which
political history takes note, is usually divided into three parts: the
Ancient Empire, from the first to the eleventh dynasty; the Middle
Empire, from the eleventh dynasty to the invasion of the Hyksos or
Shepherds; the New Empire from the shepherd kings to the Persian
conquest. This division is inconvenient in one respect; it takes too
little account of the sequence of historical events.
"There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical
development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of
human dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number
of dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) the political
centre of the country was at Memphis; Memphis was the capital and
the burying-place of the kings; Memphis imposed sovereigns upon
the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian
commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth
dynasty, the centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the
ninth and tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt,
and in the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From
that period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and
furnished the sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the
Egyptian dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the
fourteenth Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the
Thebaïd became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes,
after centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in
freeing the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth
dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars.
"Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the
first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the
north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes
18
ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis,
Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior
importance. From that time the political life of the country
concentrated itself in the maritime districts. The nomes of the
Thebaïd, ruined by the Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their
influence; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more
than a rendezvous for curious travellers.
"I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods,
each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or
province over the whole of Egypt:—
"First Period, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of
Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her.
"Second Period, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties
inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is
divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties.
" a. The old Theban empire, from the eleventh to the sixteenth
dynasties.
" b. The new Theban empire, from the sixteenth to the twentieth
dynasties.
"Third Period, Sait (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties,
inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This
period is divided into two by the Persian invasion:—
" First Sait period, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth dynasties.
" Second Sait period, from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth
dynasties."[54]
Mariette places the accession of Ména or Menes at about the fiftieth
century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring
forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the
dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other.
Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its
long existence, was often partitioned between princes who reigned in
Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided
19
by circumstances which need not be described here, they incline to
believe that Manetho confined himself to enumerating those
dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work
of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern savants,
must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and
some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and passed
over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the
names of reigning families which are ignored by history.
Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has
been so well said by M. Renan, "a lighthouse in the profound
darkness of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long
anterior to the earliest traditions of the Greek race; the reign of
Thothmes III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew
his frontiers where he pleased," is placed by common consent in the
seventeenth century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised
Abyssinia, the Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia,
Khurdistan, and Armenia. Founded by the kings of the eighteenth
dynasty, this greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To
this dynasty belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who
flourished in the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its
civilization, even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers,
which made Egypt supreme over Western Asia.
This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty-second
dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more
certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew
history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given
with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the
contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards,
the constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially
with Assyria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In
the seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real
creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and
their love for exactitude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the
founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials
are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who
penetrated everywhere, taking notes which they afterwards amplified
into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the
Ptolemies, when the
20
power of the Macedonian monarchy was fully developed, the
Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we call an era, of
some definite point from which they could measure the course of time
and the progress of the centuries. "They were satisfied with
calculating