 1 A land of old renown. If we were asked to name the most interesting country in the world, I suppose that most people would say Palestine, not because there is anything so very wonderful in the land itself, but because of all the great things that have happened there, and above all because of its having been the home of our Lord. But after Palestine I think that Egypt would come next. For one thing it is linked very closely to Palestine by all those beautiful stories of the Old Testament, which tell us of Joseph the slave boy who became Viceroy of Egypt, of Moses the Hebrew child who became a Prince of Pharaoh's household, and of the wonderful exodus of the children of Israel. But besides that it is a land which has the most strange and wonderful story of its own. No other country has so long a history of great kings and wise men and brave soldiers, and in no other country can you see anything to compare with the great buildings, some of them most beautiful, all of them most wonderful, of which Egypt has so many. We have some old and interesting buildings in this country, and people go far to seek cathedrals and castles that are perhaps five or six hundred years old, or even more, but in Egypt buildings of that age are looked upon as almost new, and nobody pays very much attention to them. For the great temples and tombs of Egypt were, many of them, hundreds of years old before the story of our Bible, properly speaking, begins. The pyramids, for instance, those huge piles that are still the wonder of the world, were far older than any building now standing in Europe, before Joseph was sold to be a slave in Potiphar's house. Hundreds upon hundreds of years before anyone had ever heard of the Greeks and Romans, there were great kings reigning in Egypt, sending out their armies to conquer Syria and the Sudan, and their ships to explore the unknown southern seas, and wise men were writing books which we can still read. When Britain was a wild, unknown island, and habited only by savages as fierce and untaught as the South Sea Islanders, Egypt was a great and highly civilized country, full of great cities, with noble palaces and temples, and its people were wise and learned. So in this little book I want to tell you something about this wonderful and interesting old country, and about the kind of life that people lived in it in those days a long ago before most other lands had begun to waken up, or to have any history at all. First of all, let us try to get an idea of the land itself. It is a very remarkable thing that so many of the countries which have played a great part in the history of the world have been small countries. Our own Britain is not very big, though it has had a great story. Palestine, which has done more than any other country to make the world what it is today, was called the least of all lands. Greece, whose influence comes, perhaps next after that of Palestine, is only a little hilly corner of southern Europe, and Egypt too is comparatively a small land. It looks a fair size when you see it on the map, but you have to remember that nearly all the land which is called Egypt on the map is barren sandy desert, or wild rocky hill country where no one can live. The real Egypt is just a narrow strip of land on either side of the Great River Nile, sometimes only a mile or two broad altogether, never more than thirty miles broad except near the mouth of the river where it widens out into the fan-shaped plain called the Delta. Someone has compared Egypt to a lily with a crooked stem, and the comparison is very true. The long, winding valley of the Nile is the crooked stem of the lily, and the Delta at the Nile mouth, with its wide stretch of fertile soil, is the flower, while just below the flower there is a little bud, a fertile valley called the Fayum. Long before even Egyptian history begins, there was no bloom on the lily. The Nile, a far bigger river then than it is now, ran into the sea near Cairo, the modern capital of Egypt, and the land was nothing but the narrow valley of the river, bordered on either side by desert hills. But gradually, century by century, the Nile cut its way deeper down into the land, leaving banks of soil on either side between itself and the hills, and the mud, which it brought down on its waters, piled up at the mouth and pressed the sea back, till, at last, the Delta was formed, much as we see it now. This was long before Egypt had any story of its own, but even after history begins the Delta was still partly marshy land, not long reclaimed from the sea, and the real Egyptians of the valley despise the people who lived there as mere marsh dwellers. Even after the Delta was formed, the whole country was only twice as large as Wales, and though there was a great number of people in it for its size, the population was only, at the most, about twice as great as that of London. An old Greek historian once said, Egypt is the gift of the Nile, and it is perfectly true. We have seen how the Great River made the country to begin with, cutting out the narrow valley through the hills, and building up the flat plain of the Delta. But the Nile has not only made the country, it keeps it alive. You know that Egypt has always been one of the most fertile lands in the world. Almost anything will grow there, and it produces wonderful crops of corn and vegetables, and, nowadays, of cotton. It was the same in old days. When Rome was the capital of the world, she used to get most of the corn to feed her hungry thousands from Egypt by the famous Alexandrian corn ships. And you remember how, in the Bible story, Joseph's brethren came down from Palestine because, though there was famine there, there was corn in Egypt. And yet Egypt is a land where rain is almost unknown. Sometimes there will come a heavy thundershower, but for month after month, year in and year out, there may be no rain at all. How can a rainless country grow anything? The secret is the Nile. Every year, when the rains fall in the Great Lake Basin of Central Africa, from which one branch of the Great River comes, and on the Abyssinian hills where the other branch rises, the Nile comes down and flood. All the lower lands are covered, and a fresh deposit of Nile mud is left upon them. And though the river does not rise to the higher grounds, the water is led into big canals, and these, again, are divided up into little ones, till it circulates through the whole land, as the blood circulates through your arteries and veins. This keeps the land fertile, and makes up for the lack of rain. Apart from its wonderful river, the country itself has no very striking features. It is rather a monotonous land, a long ribbon of green running through a great waste of yellow desert and barren hills. But the great charm that draws people's minds to Egypt, and gives the old land a never-failing interest, is its great story of the past, and all the relics of that story which are still to be seen. In no other land can you see the real people and things of the days of long ago as you can see them in Egypt. Think how we should prize an actual building that had been connected with the story of King Arthur, if such a thing could be found in our country, and what wonderful romance would belong to the weapons, the actual shields and helmets, swords and lances of the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and Tristram and Galahad, if we could only find them. Out there in Egypt you can see buildings, compared with which King Arthur's Camelot would be only a thing of yesterday. And you can look, not only on the weapons, but on the actual faces and forms of great kings and soldiers who lived, and fought bravely for their country, hundreds of years before Saul and Jonathan and David began to fight the battles of Israel. You can see the pictures of how people lived in those faraway days, how their houses were built, how they traded and toiled, how they amused themselves, how they behaved in time of sorrow, how they worshipped God, all set down by themselves at the very time when they were doing these things. You can even see the games at which the children used to play and the queer, old-fashioned toys and dolls that they played with, and you can read the stories which their mothers and their nurses used to tell them. These are the things which make this old land of Egypt so interesting to us all today, and I want to try to tell you about some of them, so that you may be able to have in your mind's eye a real picture of the life of those long past days. CHAPTER II. OF PEAPS AT MANY LANDS. ANCIENT EGYPT. BY JAMES BAKY. A DAY IN THIEVES. If any foreigner were wanting to get an idea of our country and to see how our people live, I suppose the first place that he would go to would be London, because it is the capital of the whole country and its greatest city, and so if we want to learn something about Egypt and how people lived there in those far off days, we must try to get to the capital of the country and see what is to be seen there. Suppose then that we are no longer living in Britain in the 20th century, but that somehow or other we have got away back into the past, far beyond the days of Jesus Christ, beyond even the times of Moses, and are living about 1300 years before Christ. We have come from Tyre in a Phoenician galley laden with costly bales of cloth dyed with Tyrian purple and beautiful vessels wrought in bronze and copper to sell in the market of thieves, the greatest city in Egypt. We have coasted along past Carmel and Joppa, and after narrowly escaping being driven in a storm on the dangerous quicksand called the Cirtus, we have entered one of the mouths of the Nile. We have taken up an Egyptian pilot at the river mouth, and he stands on a little platform at the bow of the galley and shouts his directions to the steersmen, who work the two big rudders, one on either side of the ship's stern. The north wind is blowing strongly and driving us swiftly upstream, in spite of the current of the Great River, so our weary oarsmen have shipped their oars, and we drive steadily southwards under our one big swelling sail. At first we sail along through a broad flat plain, partly cultivated and partly covered with marsh and marsh plants. By and by the green plain begins to grow narrower. We are coming to the end of the delta and entering upon the real valley of Egypt. Soon we pass a great city, its temples standing out clear against the deep blue sky, with their towering gateways, gay flags floating from tall flag staves in front of them, and great obelisks pointing to the sky. And our pilot says that this is Memphis, one of the oldest towns in the country, and for long its capital. Not far from Memphis, three great, pyramid-shaped masses of stone rise up on the river bank, looking almost like mountains, and the pilot tells us that these are the tombs of some great kings of long past days, and that all around them lie smaller pyramids and other tombs of kings and great men. But we are bound for a city even greater than Memphis, and so we never stop, but hasten always southward. Several days of steady sailing carry us past many towns that cluster near the river, past one ruined city, falling into mere heaps of stone and brick, which our pilot tells us was once the capital of a wicked king who tried to cast down all the old gods of Egypt and to set up a new god of his own, and at last we see, far ahead of us, a huge cluster of buildings on both sides of the river, which marks a city greater than we have ever seen. As we sweep up the river we see that there are really two cities. On the east bank lies the city of the living, with its strong walls and towers, its enormous temples, and an endless crowd of houses of all sorts and sizes, from the gay palaces of the nobles to the mud huts of the poor people. On the west bank lies the city of the dead, it has neither streets nor palaces, and no hum of busy life goes up from it, but it is almost more striking than its neighbor across the river. The hills and cliffs are honeycombed with long rows of black openings, the doorways of the tombs where the dead of thieves for centuries back are sleeping. Out on the plain, between the cliffs and the river, temple rises after temple in seemingly endless succession. Some of these temples are small and partly ruined, but some are very great and splendid, and as the sunlight strikes upon them it sends back flashes of gold and crimson and blue that dazzle the eyes. But now our galley is drawn in towards the key on the east side of the river, and in a few minutes the great sail comes thundering down, and as the ship drifts slowly up the key the mooring ropes are thrown and made fast, and our long voyage is at an end. The Egyptian custom house officers come on board to examine the cargo and collect the dues that have to be paid on it, and we watch them with interest, for they are quite different in appearance from our own hooked nose bearded sailors with their thick, many-colored cloaks. These Egyptians are all clean shaven, some of them wear wigs, and some have their hair cut straight across their brows, while it falls thickly behind upon their necks in a multitude of little curls, which must have taken them no small trouble to get into order. Most wear nothing but a kilt of white linen, but the chief officer has a fine white cloak thrown over his shoulders. His linen kilt is stiffly starched, so that it stands out almost like a board where it folds over in front, and he wears a gilded girdle with fringed ends which hang down nearly to his knees. In his right hand he carries a long stick, which he is not slow to lay over the shoulders of his men when they do not obey his orders fast enough. After a good deal of hot argument, the amount of the taxes settled and paid, and we are free to go up into the great town. We have not gone far before we find that life in thieves can be quite exciting. A great noise is heard from one of the narrow riverside streets, and a crowd of men comes rushing up with shouts and odes. A hut of them runs a single figure whose writing case, stuck in his girdle, marks him out as a scribe. He is almost at his last gasp, for he is stout and not accustomed to running, and he is evidently fleeing for his life, for the men behind him, rough, half-naked, ill-fed creatures of the working class, are chasing him with cries of anger and a good deal of stone-throwing. Bruised in bleeding, he darts up to the gate of a handsome house whose garden wall faces the street. He gasps out a word to the porter and is quickly passed into the garden. The gate is slammed and bolted in the faces of the pursuers, who form a ring around it, shouting and shaking their fists. In a little while the gate is cautiously unbarred, and a fine-looking man, very richly dressed and followed by half a dozen well-armed negro guards, steps forward and asks the workmen why they are there, making such a noise and why they have chased and beaten his secretary. He is Prince Passer, who has charge of the Works Department of the Theban government, and the workmen are masons employed on a large job in the Cemetery of Thebes. They all shout at once in answer to the Prince's question, but by and by they push forward a spokesman, and he begins, rather sheepishly at first, but warming up as he goes along, to make their complaint to the great man. He and his mates, he says, have been working for weeks. They have had no wages. They have not even had the corn and oil which ought to be issued as rations to government workers. So they have struck work, and now they have come to their Lord the Prince to entreat him either to give command that the rations be issued, or if his stores are exhausted to appeal to Pharaoh. We have been driven here by hunger and thirst. We have no clothes. We have no oil. We have no food. Right to our Lord the Pharaoh that he may give us something for our subsidence. When the spokesman has finished his complaint, the whole crowd voluably assents to what he has said, and sways to and fro in a very threatening manner. Prince Pazer, however, is an old hand at dealing with such complaints. With a smiling face, he promises fifty sacks of corn shall be sent to the cemetery immediately, with oil to correspond. Only the workmen must go back to their work at once, and there must be no more chasing of poor secretary Amin Naktu. Otherwise he can do nothing. The workmen grumble a little. They have been put off with promises before, and have got little good of them. But they have no leader bold enough to start a riot, and they have no weapons, and the spears and the bows of the prince's nubians look dangerous. Finally, they turn and disappear, grumbling down the street from which they came, and Prince Pazer, with a shrug of his shoulders, goes indoors again. Whether the fifty sacks of corn are ever sent or not is another matter. Strikes, you see, were not unknown even so long ago as this. End of CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. OF PEAPS AT MANY LANDS, ANCIENT EGYPT, BY JAMES BAKY. RED INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR LEBERVOX.ORG. A DAY IN THEBES CONTINUED. Having seen the settlement of the mason's strike, we wander up into the heart of the town. The streets are generally narrow and winding, and here and there the houses actually meet overhead, so that we pass out of the blinding sunlight into a sort of dark tunnel. Some of the houses are large and high, but even the largest make no display towards the street. They will be fine enough inside, with bright quartz surrounded with trees, in the midst of which lies a cool pond of water, and with fine rooms decorated with gay hangings, but their outer walls are almost absolutely blank, with nothing but a heavy door breaking the dead line. We pass by some quarters where there is nothing but a crowd of mud huts, packed so closely together that there is only room for a single foot passenger to thread his way through the narrow alleys between them. These are the workman's quarters, and the heat and smell in them are so overpowering that one wonders how people can live in such places. By and by we come out into a more open space, one of the bazaars of the city, where business is in full swing. The shops are little shallow booths quite open to the front, and all the goods are spread out round the shopkeeper, whose squats cross-legged in the middle of his property, ready to serve his customers, and invites the attention of the passersby with loud explanations of the goodness and cheapness of his wares. All sorts of people are coming and going, for a Theban crowd holds representatives of nearly every nation known. Here are the townsfolk, men and women, out to buy supplies for their houses, or to exchange the news of the day. Friends from the villages round about, bringing in vegetables and cattle to barter for goods, which can only be God in the town. Fine ladies and gentlemen dressed elaborately in the latest court fashion, with carefully curled wigs, long pleated robes of fine transparent linen, and dainty, brightly colored sandals turned up at the toes. At one moment you rub shoulders with a hittite from Kadesh, a conspicuous figure with his high-peaked cap, pale complexion, and heavy pointed boots. He looks round him curiously, as if thinking that thieves would be a splendid town to plunder. Then a priest of high rank goes by, with the shaven head, a panther's skin slung across his shoulder over his white robe, and a roll of papyrus in his hand. A sardinian of the bodyguard swagger along behind him, the ball and horns on his helmet flashing in the sunlight, his big swords swinging in its sheath as he walks, and a Libyan bowman, with two bright feathers in his leather skull cap, looks disdainfully at him as he shouldered his way through the crowd. All around us people are buying and selling. Money, as we know it, has not yet been invented, and nearly all the trade is done by means of exchange. When it comes to be a question of how many fish have to be given for a bed, or whether a load of onions is good value for a chair, you can imagine that there has to be a good deal of argument. Besides, the Egyptian dearly loves bargaining for the mere excitement of the thing, and so the clatter of tongues is deafening. Here and there one or two traders have advanced a little beyond the old-fashioned way of barter, and offer, instead of goods, so many rings of copper, silver, or gold wire. A peasant who has brought in a bullock to sell is offered ninety copper utin, as the rings are called, for it, but he loudly protests that this is robbery, and after a long argument he screws the merchant up to one hundred and eleven utin, with eight more as a luck penny, and the bargain is clinched. Even then the rings have still to be weighed, that he may be sure he is not being cheated. So a big pair of balances is brought out, the utin are heaped into one scale, and in the other are piled weights in the shape of bull's heads. Finally he is satisfied, and picks up his bag of rings, but the wily merchant is not done with him yet. He spreads out various tempting bargains before the eyes of the countrymen, and before the latter leaves the shop, most of the copper rings have found their way back again to the merchant's sack. A little farther on, the Tyrion traders, to whom the cargo of our galley is consigned, have their shop. Screens made of woven grass shelter it from the sun, and under their shade all sorts of gorgeous stuffs are displayed, glowing with the deep rich colors of which the Tyrions alone have the secret since the sack of Knossos destroyed the trade of Crete. Beyond the Tyrion booth a goldsmith is busily employed in his shop. Necklets and bracelets of gold and silver, beautifully inlaid with all kinds of rich colors, hang round him, and he is hard at work, with his little furnace and blowpipe, putting the last touches to the welding of a bracelet, for which a lady is patiently waiting. In one corner of the bazaar stands a house which makes no display of wares, but nevertheless seems to secure a constant stream of customers. Workmen slink in at the door, as though half ashamed of themselves, and reappear after a little, wiping their mouths and not quite steady in their gait. A young man, with pale and haggard face, swagger's past and goes in, and as he enters the door one bystander nudges another and remarks, Pen Tyrion is going to have a good day again. He will come to a bad end, that young man. Try and buy the door opens again, and Pen Tyrion comes out staggering. He looks vacantly round, and tries to walk away, but his legs refuse to carry him, and after a stumble or two he falls in a heap and lies in the road, a pitiful sight. The passers-by jeer and laugh at him as he lies helpless, but one decent-looking man points him out to his young son and says, See this fellow, my son, and learn not to drink beer to excess. Thou dost fall and break thy limbs, and bespeter thyself with mud like a crocodile, and no one reaches out a hand to thee. But comrades go on drinking, and say, Away with this fellow who is drunk! If any one should seek thee on business, thou art found lying in the dust like a little child. But in spite of much wise advice, the Egyptian, though generally temperate, is only too fond of making a good day, as he calls it, at the beer-house. Even fine ladies sometimes drink too much at their great parties, and have to be carried away very sick and miserable. Worst of all, the very judges of the High Court have been known to take a day off during the hearing of a long case in order to have a revel with the criminals whom they were trying, and it is not so long since two of them had their noses cut off as a warning to the rest against such shameful conduct. Sauntering onwards we gradually get near the sacred quarter of the town, and can see the towering gateways and obelisks of the great temples over the roofs of the houses. Soon a great crowd comes toward us, and the sounds of trumpets and flutes are heard coming from the midst of it. Inquiring what is the meaning of the bustle, we are told that one of the images of Amen, the great God of Thebes, is being carried in procession as a preliminary to an important service, which is to take place in the afternoon, and at which the king is going to preside. Stepping back under the doorway of a house, we watch the procession go past. After a group of musicians and singers, and a number of women who are dancing as they go, and shaking curious metal rattles, there comes a group of six men, who form the center of the whole crowd, and on whom the eyes of all are fixed. They are tall, spare, keen-looking men, their heads clean-shaven, their bodies wrapped in pure white robes of the beautiful Egyptian linen. On their shoulders they carry, by means of two long poles, a model of a nile boat, in the midst of which rises a little shrine. The shrine is carefully draped around with a veil, so as to hide the God from curious eyes. But just in front of the doorway, where we are standing, a small stone pillar rises from the roadway, and when the bearers come to this point, the bark of the God is rested on the top of the pillar. Two censor-bearers come forward, and swing their censors, wafting clouds of incense round the shrine. A priest lifts up his voice, loudly intoning a hymn of praise to the great God, who creates and sustains all things, and a few of the bystanders lay before the bark, offering of flowers, fruits, and edibles of various kinds. Then comes the solemn moment. Amid breathless silence, the veil of the shrine is slowly drawn aside, and the faithful can see a little wooden image, about eighteen inches high, adorned with tall plumes, carefully dressed, and painted with green and black. The revelation of this little doll, to a Theban crowd, the most sacred object in all the world, is hailed with shouts of wonder and reverence. Then the veil is drawn again, the procession passes on, and the streets are left quiet for a while. We are reminded that, if we wish to get a meal before starting out to see Pharaoh passing in procession to the temple, we had better lose no time, and so we turn our faces riverwards again, and wander down through the endless maze of streets, where our galley is moored at the key. CHAPTER IV. OF PEAPS AT MANY LANDS, ANCIENT EGYPT, BY JAMES FAKIE. RED INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR LEBROVOX.ORG. PHARO AT HOME. THE TIME IS COMING ON NOW FOR THE KING TO GO IN STATE TO THE GREAT TEMPLE AT CARNAC TO OFFER SACRIFICE, AND AS WE GO UP TO THE PALACE TO SEE HIM COME FORTH IN ALL HIS GLORY, LET ME TELL YOU A LITTLE ABOUT HIM AND THE KIND OF LIFE HE LEADS. Pharaoh, of course, is not his real name, it is not even his official title, it is just a word which is used to describe a person who is so great that people scarcely venture to call him by his proper name. Just as the Turks nowadays speak of the Sublime Porta when they mean the Sultan and his government, so the Egyptians speak of Pharaoh, or Pharaoh, as we call it, which really signifies great house when they mean the king. For the king of Egypt is a very great man indeed, in fact his people look upon him and he looks upon himself as something more than a man. There are many gods in Egypt, but the God whom the people know best and to whom they pay the most reverence is their king. Ever since there have been kings in the country, and that is a very long time now, the reigning monarch has been looked upon as a kind of god manifest in the flesh. He calls himself Son of the Son. In the temples you will see pictures of his childhood where great goddesses dandle the young god upon their knees. Divine honors are paid and sacrifices offered to him, and when he dies and goes to join his brother gods in heaven a great temple rises to his memory, and hosts of priests are employed in his worship. There is just one distinction made between him and the other gods. Amen at Thebes, Patah at Memphis, and all the rest of the crowd of divinities are called the great gods. Pharaoh takes a different title. He is called the Good God. At present the Good God is Ramesses II. Of course that is only one part of his name, for like all the other pharaohs he has a list of titles that would fill a page. His subjects and Thebes have not seen very much of him for a long time, for there has been so much to do away in Syria that he has built another capital at Tannas, which the Hebrews call Zohan, down between the delta and the eastern frontier, and spends much of his time there. People who have been down the river tell us great wonders about the beauty of the new town, its great temple, and the large statue of the king, ninety feet high, which stands before the temple gate. But Thebes is still the center of the nation's life, and now, when it is growing almost certain that there will be another war with those vile Hittites in the north of Syria, he has come up to the great city to take counsel with his brother God, Amen, and to make arrangements for gathering his army. The royal palace is in a constant bustle, with envoys coming and going, and counselors and generals continually passing in and out, with reports and orders. Outside the palace is not so very imposing. The Egyptians built their temples to last forever, but the palaces of their kings were meant to serve only for a short time. The new king might not care for the old king's home, and so each pharaoh builds his house according to his own taste of light materials. It will serve his turn, and his successor may build another for himself. A high wall with battlements, towers, and heavy gates surrounds it, for though pharaoh is a god, his subjects are sometimes rather difficult to keep in order. Plots against the king have not been unknown in the past, and on at least one occasion a great pharaoh by gondes had to spring from his couch and fight single-handed for his life against a crowd of conspirators who had forced an entrance into the palace while he was enjoying his siesta. So since then pharaoh has found it better to trust in his strong walls, and in the big broadswords of his faithful sardinian guardsmen than in any divinity that may belong to himself. Within the great boundary wall lie pleasant gardens, gay with all sorts of flowers, and an artificial lake shows its gleaming water here and there through the trees and shrubs. The palace itself is all glittering white stucco on the outside. A high central door leads into a great audience hall, glowing with color, its roofs supported by painted pillars in the form of lotus stalks, and on either side of this lie two smaller halls. Behind the audience chamber are two immense dining rooms, and behind these come the sleeping apartments of the numerous household. Hamzees has a multitude of wives and a whole army of sons and daughters, and it takes no small space to house them all. The bedroom of the king himself stands apart from the other rooms and is surrounded by banks of flowers and full bloom. The son of the son has had a busy day already. He has had many letters and dispatches to read and consider. Some of the Syrian vassal princes have sent clay tablets covered with their curious, arrow-headed writing, giving news of the advance of the Hittites and imploring the help of the Egyptian army. And now the king is about to give audience and to consider these with his great nobles and generals. At one end of the reception hall stands a low balcony, supported on gaily painted wooden pillars which end in capitals of lotus flowers. The front of this balcony is overlaid with gold and richly decorated with turquoise and lapis lazuli. Here the king will show himself to his subjects, accompanied by his favorite wife, Queen Nefertari, and some of the young princes and princesses. The folding doors of the audience chamber are thrown open, and the barons, the provincial governors, and the high officers of the army and the state throng in to do homage to their master. In a few moments the glittering crowd is duly arranged, a door opens at the back of the balcony, and the king of the two lands, Lord of the Vulture and the Snake, steps forth with his queen and family. In earlier times, whenever the king appeared, the assembled nobles were expected to fall on their faces and kiss the ground before him. Fashion has changed, however, and now the great folks, at all events, are no longer required to smell the earth. As Pharaoh enters the balcony, the nobles bow profoundly and raise their arms as if in prayer to the good God. Then in silent reverence they wait until it shall please their lord to speak. Ramazid sweeps his glance over the crowd, singles out the general in command of the Theban troops, and puts a question to him as to the readiness of his division. The picked division of the army. The soldier steps forward with a deep bow, but it is not court manners for him to answer his lord's question directly. Instead, he begins by reciting a little psalm of praise, which tells of the king's greatness, his valor and skill in war, and asserts that wherever his horses tread his enemies flee before him and perish. This little piece of flattery over, the general begins, O king, my master, and in a few sensible words gives the information required. So the audience goes on, counselor after counselor coming forward at the royal command, reciting his little hymn, and then giving his opinion on such matters as his matters suggest to him. At last the council is over. The king gives orders to his equary to prepare his chariot for the procession to the temple, and as he turns to leave the audience chamber, the assembled nobles once more bow profoundly and raise their arms in adoration. After a short delay, the great gates of the boundary wall of the palace are opened. A company of spearmen in quilted leather kilts and leather skull caps marches out and takes position a short distance from the gateway. Behind them comes a company of the sardinians of the guard, heavily armed with bright helmets, broad round shields, quilted courselets, and long, heavy, two-edged swords. They range themselves on either side of the roadway and stand like statues, waiting for the appearance of Pharaoh. There is a whore of chariot wheels, and the royal chariot sweeps through the gateway and sets off at a good round pace towards the temple. The spearmen in front start at the double, and the guardsmen in spite of their heavy equipment keep pace with their royal master on either side. The waiting crowd bows to the dust as the sovereign passes, but Pharaoh looks neither to the right hand nor to the left. He stands erect and impassive in the swaying chariot, holding the crook and whip which are the Egyptian royal emblems. On his head he wears the royal war helmet, in the front of which a golden cobra rears its crest from its coils, as if to threaten the enemies of Egypt. His finely shaped, swarthy features are adorned or disfigured by an artificial beard, which is fastened on by a chin strap passing up in front of the ears. His tall, slender body is covered, above his corselet, with a robe of fine white linen, a perfect wonder of pleading, and round his waist passes a girdle of gold and green enamel, whose ends cross and hang down almost to his knees, terminating in two threatening cobra heads. On either side of him run the fan-bearers, who manage, by a miracle of skill and activity, to keep their great, gaily colored fans of perfumed ostrich feathers waving round the royal head, even as they run. Behind the king comes a long train of other chariots, only less splendid than that of Ramesses. In the first stands Queen Nefertari, languidly sniffing at a lotus flower as she passes on. The others are filled by some of the princes of the blood, who are going to take part in the ceremony at the temple, chief among them the wizard prince Kameas, the great magician in Egypt, who has spells that can bring the dead from their graves. Some in the crowd shrink from his keen eye, and mutter that the papyrus roll, which he holds so close to his breast, was taken from the grave of another magician prince of ancient days, and that Kameas will know no peace till it is restored. In a few minutes the whole brilliant train has passed, dazzling the eyes with a blaze of gold and white and scarlet, and crowds of courtiers stream after their master as fast as their feet can carry them towards Karnak. You have seen, if only for a moment, the greatest man on earth, the great oppressor of Hebrew story. Very mighty and very proud he is, and he does not dream that the little Hebrew boy whom his daughter has adopted, and who is being trained in the priestly college at Heliopolis, will one day humble all the pride of Egypt, and that the very name of Ramesses shall be best remembered because it is linked with that of Moses. CHAPTER FIVE OF PEAP'S AT MANY LANDS ANCIENT EGYPT by James Bakey Read into the public domain for LibriVox.org THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER When you read about the Egyptians in the Bible, it seems as though they were nearly always fighting, and indeed they did a good deal of fighting in their time, as nearly every nation did in those old days. But in reality they were not a great soldier people, like their rivals the Assyrians or the Babylonians. We who have had so much to do with their descendants, the modern Egyptians, and have fought both against them and with them, know that the Jippie is not fond of soldiering in his heart. He makes a very good, patient, hardworking soldier when he has good officers, but he is not like the Sudanese who love fighting for fighting's sake. He much prefers to live quietly in his own native village, and cultivate his own bit of ground. And his forefathers, in those long past days, were very much of the same mind. Often of course they had to fight, when Pharaoh ordered them out for a campaign in the Sudan or in Syria, and then they fought wonderfully well, but all the time their hearts were at home, and they were glad to get back to their farm work and their simple pleasures. They were a peaceful, kindly, pleasant race, with little of the cruelty and fierceness that you find continually among the Assyrians. In fact the old Egyptian rather despised soldiering as a profession. He thought it was rather a miserable, muddled kind of a job, in which, unless you were a great officer, you got all the hard docks and none of the honours, and I am not sure that he was far wrong. His great idea of a happy life was to get employment as a scribe, or, as we should say, a clerk, to some big man or to the government, to keep accounts and write reports. Of course the people could not all be scribes, but an Egyptian who had sons was never so proud as when he could get one of them into a scribe's position, even though the young man might look down upon his old father and his brothers, toiling on the land or serving in the army. A curious old book has come down to us from these ancient days, in which the writer, who had been both a soldier and a high officer under government, in what we should call the diplomatic service, has told a young friend of his opinion of soldiering as a profession. The young man had evidently been dazzled with the idea of being in the cavalry, or rather the chariotry, for the Egyptian soldiers did not ride on horses like our cavalry, but drove them in chariots, in each of which there were two men, the charioteer, to drive the two horses, and the soldier who stood beside the driver and fought with the bow, and sometimes with the landser sword. But this wise old friend tells him that even to be in the chariotry is not by any means a pleasant job. Of course it seems nice at first. The young man gets his new equipment, and thinks all the world of himself as he goes home to show off his fine feathers. He receives beautiful horses, and rejoices and exults, and returns with them to his town. But then comes the inspection, and if he is not everything in perfect order he has a bad time of it, for he is thrown down on the ground, and beaten with sticks till he is sore all over. But if the lot of the cavalry soldier is hard, that of the infantry man is harder. In the barracks he is flogged for every mistake or offense. Then war breaks out, and he has to march with his battalion to Syria. Day after day he has to tramp on foot through the wild hill country, so different from the flat, fertile homeland that he loves. He has to carry all his heavy equipment and his rations, so that he is laden like a donkey, and often he has to drink dirty water which makes him ill. Then when the battle comes he gets all the danger in the wounds, while the generals get all the credit. When the war is over he comes home riding on a donkey, a broken down man, sick and wounded, his very clothes stolen by the rascals who should have attended on him. Or better, the wise man says, to be ascribed, and to remain comfortably at home. I daresay it was all quite true, just as perhaps it would not be very far from the truth at the present time. But in spite of it all, Pharaoh had his battles to fight, and he got his soldiers all right when they were needed. The Egyptian army was not generally a very big one. It was nothing like the great hosts we hear of nowadays, or read of in some of the old histories. The armies that the pharaohs led into Syria were not often much bigger than what we should call an army corps nowadays, probably about twenty thousand men altogether, rarely more than twenty-five thousand. But in that number you could find almost as many different sorts of men as in our own Indian army. There would be first the native Egyptian spearmen and bowmen, the spearmen with leather caps and quilted tunics carrying a shield and spear, and sometimes an axe or a dagger or a short sword. The bowmen, more lightly equipped, but probably more dangerous enemies, for the Egyptian archers were almost as famous as the old English bowmen, and won many a battle for their king. Then came the chariot brigade, also of native Egyptians, men probably of higher rank than the foot soldiers. The chariots were very light, and it must have been exceedingly difficult for the bowmen to balance himself in the narrow car as it bumped and clattered over rough ground. The two horses were gaily decorated and often wore plumes on their heads. The charioteer sometimes twisted the reins round his waist, and could take a hand in the fighting if his companion was hard pressed, guiding his horses by swaying his body to one side or the other. Round the pharaoh himself, as he stood in his beautiful chariot, marched the royal bodyguard. It was made up of men whom the Egyptians called Sheridan, Sardinians probably, who had come over the sea to serve for hire in the army of the great king. They wore metal helmets, with a round ball on the top and horns at the sides, carried round bossed shields, and were armed with great heavy swords of much the same shape as those which the Norman knights used to carry. Behind the native troops and the bodyguard marched the other mercenaries, regiments of black Sudanese, with wild-beast skins thrown over their ebony shoulders, and light-colored Libyans from the west, each with a couple of feathers stuck in his leather skull cap. Scouts went on ahead to scour the country and bring to the king reports of the enemy's whereabouts. Beside the royal chariot there padded along a strange but very useful soldier, a great tame lion which had been trained to guard his master and fight with teeth and claws against his enemies. Last of all came the transport train, with the baggage carried on the backs of a long line of donkeys and protected by a baggage guard. The Egyptians were good marchers, and even in the hot Syrian sunshine, and across a rough country where roads were almost unknown, they could keep up a steady fifteen miles a day for a week on end without being fagged out. Let us follow the fortunes of an Egyptian soldier through one of the great battles of the nation's history. Mena was one of the most skillful charioteers of the whole Egyptian army, so skillful that, though he was still quite young, he was promoted to be driver of the royal war-chariot when King Ramesses II marched out from Zahru, the frontier garrison town of Egypt, to fight with the Hittites in northern Syria. During all the long march across the desert, through Palestine and over the northern mountain passes, no enemy was seen at all, and though Mena was kept busy enough attending to his horses and seeing that the chariot was in perfect order, he was in no danger. But as the army began to wind down the long valley of the Iranese towards the town of Qadesh, the scouts were kept out in every direction, and the whole host was anxiously on the look-out for the Hittite troops. Qadesh came inside at last. Far on the horizon its towers could be seen, and the sun's rays sparkled on the river and on the broad moat which surrounded the walls, but still no enemy was to be seen. The scouts came in with the report that the Hittites had retreated northwards in terror, and King Ramesses imagined that Qadesh was going to fall into his hands without a battle. His army was divided into four brigades, and he himself hurried on rather rashly with the first brigade, leaving the other three to straggle on behind him, widely separated from one another. The first brigade reached its camping-ground to the north-west of Qadesh. The tired troops pitched camp, the baggage was unloaded, and the donkeys, released from their burdens, rolled on the ground in delight. Just at that moment some of the Egyptian scouts came in, bringing with them two Arabs whom they had caught, and suspected to belong to the enemy. King Ramesses ordered the Arabs to be beaten soundly with sticks, and the poor creatures confessed that the Hittite king, with a great army, was concealed on the other side of Qadesh, watching for an opportunity to attack the Egyptian army. In great haste Ramesses, scolding his scouts the while for not keeping a battle look-out, began to get his soldiers under arms again, while men ran and yoked through the royal chariot the two noble horses which had been kept fresh for the day of battle. But before Pharaoh could leap into his chariot a wild uproar broke out at the gate of the camp, and the scattered fragments of the second brigade came pouring in headlong flight into the enclosure. Behind them the whole Hittite chariot force, twenty-five hundred chariots strong, each chariot with three men in it, came clattering and leaping upon the heels of the fugitives. The Hittite king had waited till he saw the first brigade busy pitching camp, and then as the second came straggling up he had launched his chariots upon the flank of the weary soldiers, who were swept away in a moment as if by a flood. The rush of terrified men carried off the first brigade along with it in a hopeless rout. Ramesses and menna were left with only a few picked chariots of the household troops, and the whole Hittite army was coming on. But though King Ramesses had made a terrible bungalow of his generalship, he was at least a brave man. Leaping into his chariot and calling to the handful of faithful soldiers to follow him, he bade menna lash his horses and charge the advancing Hittites. Menna was no-coward, but when he saw the thin line of Egyptian troops, and looked at the dense mass of Hittite chariots, his heart almost failed him. He never thought of disobedience, but as he stooped over his plunging horses, he panted to the king, O mighty strength of Egypt, in the day of battle, we are alone in the midst of the enemy. O, save us, Ramesses, my good Lord! Steady, steady, my charioteer, said Ramesses, I am going among them like a hawk. In a moment the fiery horses were whorling the king and his charioteer between the files of the Hittite chariots, which drew aside as if terrified at the glittering figures that dashed upon them so fearlessly. As they swept through, menna had enough to do to manage his steeds, which were wild with excitement. But Ramesses' bow was bent again and again, and at every twang of the bow-string a Hittite champion fell from his chariot. Behind the king came his household troops, and altogether they burst through the chariot brigade of the enemy, leaving a long trail marked by dead and wounded men, overturned chariots and maddened horses. Still king Ramesses had only gained a breathing space. The Hittites far outnumbered his little force, and though his orderlies were madly galloping to bring up the third and fourth brigades, it must be some time yet before even the nearest could come into action. Besides on the other bank of the river there hung a great cloud of eight thousand Hittite spearmen under the command of the Hittite king himself. If these got time to cross the river, the Egyptian position, bad enough as it was, would be hopeless. There was nothing for it but to charge again and again, and if possible drive back the Hittite chariots on the river, so as to hinder the spearmen from crossing. So Mena whipped up his horses again and again, and with arrow on string the pharaoh dashed upon his enemies once more. Again they burst through the opposing ranks, scattering death on either side as they passed. Now some of the fragments of the first and second brigades were beginning to rally and come back to the field, and the struggle was becoming less unequal. The Egyptian quivers were nearly all empty now, but lands and swords still remained, and inch by inch the Hittites were forced back upon the river. Their king stood ingloriously on the opposite bank, unable to do anything. It was too late for him to try to move his spearmen across. They would only have been trampled down by the retreating chariots. At last a great shout from the rear announced the arrival of the third Egyptian brigade, and the little nod of brave men who had saved the day still leading the army swept the broken Hittites down the bank of the Arantes into the river. Great was the confusion and the slaughter. As the chariots struggled through the ford, the Egyptian bowmen, spread out along the bank, picked off the chiefs. The two brothers of the Hittite king, the chief of his bodyguard, his shield-bearer, and his chief scribe were all killed. The king of Aleppo missed the ford and was swept down the river, but some of his soldiers dashed into the water, rescued him, and in rough first aid held the half-drowned leader up by the heels to let the water drain out of him. The Hittite king picked up his broken fugitives, covered them with his mass of spearmen, and moved reluctantly off the field where so splendid a chance of victory had been missed and turned into defeat. The Egyptians were too few and too weary to attempt to cross the river in pursuit, and they retired to the camp of the first brigade. Then Pharaoh called his captains before him. The troops stood around, leaning on their spears, ashamed of their conduct in the earlier part of the day, and wondering at the grim signs of conflict that lay on either side. King Ramses called menna to him, and handing the reins to a groom, the young charioteer came bowing before his master. Pharaoh stripped from his own royal neck a collar of gold, and fastened it round the neck of its faithful squire, and while the generals and captains hung their heads for shame, the king told them how shamefully they had left him to fight his battle alone, and how none had stood by him but the young charioteer. As for my two horses, he said, they shall be fed before me every day in the royal palace. Both armies had suffered too much loss for any further strive to be possible, and a truce was agreed upon. The Hittites drew off to the north, and the Egyptians marched back again to Egypt, well aware that they had gained little or nothing by all their efforts, but thankful that they had been saved from the total destruction which had seemed so near. A proud man was menna when he drove the royal chariote up to the bridge of Zaru. As the troops passed the frontier canal, the road was lined on either side with crowds of nobles, priests, and scribes, stirring flowers in the way, and bowing before the king. And after Pharaoh himself, whose bravery had saved the day, there was no one so honored as the young squire who had stood so manfully by his master in the hour of danger. CHAPTER VI. OF PEAPS AT MANY LANDS, ANCIENT EGYPT BY JAMES BAKEY. RED INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR LEBRAVOX.ORG. CHILD LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT. How did the boys and girls live in this quaint old land so many hundreds of years ago? How were they dressed? What sort of games did they play at? What sort of lessons did they learn? And what kind of school did they go to? If you could have lived in Egypt in those far-off days, you would have found many differences between your life of today and the life that the Egyptian children led, but you would also have found that there were very many things much the same then as they are now. Boys and girls were boys and girls three thousand years ago just as they are now, and you would find that they did very much the same things, and even played very much the same games as you do today. When you read in your fairy stories about a little boy or girl, you often hear that they had fairy godmothers who came to their cradles and gave them gifts, and foretold what was going to happen to the little babies in after years. Well, when little T'houti or little Sen Seb was born in Thebes, fifteen hundred years before Christ, there were fairy godmothers too, who had presided over the great event, and there were others called the Hathors, who foretold all that was going to happen to the little boy or girl as the years went on. The baby was kept a baby much longer in those days than our little ones are kept. The happy mother nursed the little thing carefully for three years at all events, carrying about with her wherever she went, either on her shoulder or a stride upon her hip. If the baby took ill and the doctor was called in, the medicines that were given were not in the least like the sugar-coated pills and capsules that make medicine taking easy nowadays. The Egyptian doctor did not know a very great deal about medicine and sickness, but he made up for his ignorance by the nastiness of the doses which he gave to his patients. I don't think you would like to take pills made up of the moisture scraped from pig's ears, lizard's blood, bad meat, and decaying fat, to say nothing of still nastier things. Often the doctor would look very grave and say, the child is not ill, he is bewitched, and then he would sit down and write out a prescription something like this. Remedy to drive away bewitchment. Take a great beetle, cut off his head and his wings, boil him, put him in oil, and lay him out. Then cook his head and his wings, put them in snake fat, boil and let the patient drink the mixture. I think you would almost rather take the risk of being bewitched than drink a dose like that. Sometimes the doctor gave no medicines at all, but wrote a few magic words on a scrap of old paper and tied it round the part where the pain was. I daresay it did as much good as his pills. Very often the mother believed that it was not really sickness that was troubling her child, but that a ghost was coming and hurting him. So when his cries showed that the ghost was in the room, the mother would rise up, shaking all over, I daresay, and would repeat the verse that she had been taught would drive ghosts away. Come as thou to kiss this child, I suffer thee not to kiss him. Come as thou to quiet him, I suffer thee not to quiet him. Come as thou to harm him, I suffer thee not to harm him. Come as thou to take him away, I suffer thee not to take him away. When little Tahouti has got over his baby-akes and escaped the ghosts, he begins to run about and play. He and his sister are not bothered to any great extent with dressing in the mornings. They are very particular about washing, but as Egypt is so hot, clothes are not needed very much. And so the little boy and girl play about with nothing at all on their little brown bodies except, perhaps, a narrow girdle, or even just a single thread tied round the waist. They have their toys just like you. Tahouti has got a wonderful man, who when you pull a string, makes a roller up and down upon a board, just like a baker rolling out dough, and besides he has a crocodile that moves its jaws. His sister has dolls, a fine Egyptian lady and a frizzy-haired black-faced Nubian girl. Sometimes they play together at nine pins, rolling the ball through a little gate. For about four years this would go on, as long as Tahouti was what the Egyptians called a wise little one. Then when he was four years old, the time would come when he had to become a writer in the house of books, which is what the Egyptians called a schoolboy, so little Tahouti set off for school, still wearing no more clothes than the thread tied around his waist, with his black hair plated up into a long thick lock, which hung down over his right ear. The first thing that he had to learn was how to read and write, and this was no easy task for Egyptian writing, though it is very beautiful and well done, is rather difficult to master. All the more as there were two different styles which had to be learned if a boy was going to become a man of learning. I don't suppose that you think your old copy books have much importance when you are done with them, but the curious thing is that among all the books that have come down to us from ancient Egypt, there are far more old copy books than any others, and these books, with the teacher's corrections written on the margins and rough sketches scratched in here and there among the writing, have proved most valuable in telling us what the Egyptians learned and what they like to read, for a great deal of the writing consisted in the copying out of wise words of the men of former days and sometimes stories of old times. These old copy books can speak to us in one way, but if they could speak in another, I dare say they would tell us of many weary hours in school, of many floggings and tears, for the Egyptian schoolmaster believed with all his heart in the cane and used it with great vigor and as often as he could. Miltahudi used to look forward to his daily flogging as much as he did to his lunch in the middle of the day, when his careful mother regularly brought him three rolls of bread and two jugs of beer. A boy's ears, his master used to say, are on his back, and he hears when he is beaten. One of the former pupils at his school writing to his teacher and recalling his school days says, I was with thee since I was brought up as a child, thou didst beat my back and thine instructions went into my ear. Sometimes the boys, if they were being stubborn, got punishments even worse than the cane. Another boy in a letter to his old master says, thou has made me buckled too since the time that I was one of thy pupils. I spent my time in the lock-up and was sentenced to three months and bound in the temple. I am afraid our schoolboys would think the old Egyptian teachers rather more severe than the masters with whom they have to do nowadays. Lesson time occupied about half the day, and when it came to an end the boys all ran out of the school shouting for joy. That custom has not changed much, anyway, in all these hundreds of years. I don't think they had any home lessons to do, and so perhaps their school time was not quite as bad as we might imagine from the rough punishments they used to get. When Dehudi grew a little older and had fairly mastered the rudiments of writing, his teacher set him to write out copies of different passages from the best known Egyptian books, partly to keep up his handwriting, and partly to teach him to know good Egyptian and to use correct language. Sometimes it was a piece of a religious book that he was set to copy, sometimes a poem, sometimes a fairy tale. For the Egyptians were very fond of fairy tales, and later on perhaps we may hear some of their stories, the oldest fairy tales in the world. But generally the piece that was chosen was one which would not only exercise the boy's hand and teach him a good style, but would also help to teach him good manners, and fill his mind with right ideas. Very often Dehudi's teacher would dictate to him a passage from the wise advice which a great king of long ago left to his son the crown prince, or from some other book of the same kind. And sometimes the exercises would be in the form of letters which the master and his pupils wrote as though they had been friends far away from one another. Dehudi's letters, you may be sure, were full of wisdom and good resolutions, and I daresay he was just about as fond of writing them as you are of writing the letters that your teacher sometimes sets as a task for you. When it came to arithmetic, Dehudi was so far lucky that the number of rules he had to learn was very few. His master taught him addition and subtraction and a very slow and clumsy form of multiplication, but he could not teach him division for the very simple reason that he did not properly understand it himself. Enough of measureation was taught to enable him to find out, though rather roughly, what was the size of a field and how much corn would go into a granary of any particular size. And when he had learned these things, his elementary education was pretty well over. Of course a great deal would depend upon the profession he was going to follow. If he was only going to be a common scribe, his education would go no farther, for the work he would have to do would need no greater learning than reading, writing, and arithmetic. If he was going to be an officer in the army, he entered as a cadet in a military school which was attached to the royal stables. But if he was going to be a priest, he had to join one of the colleges which belonged to the different temples of the gods, and there, like Moses, he was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was taught all the strange ideas which they had about the gods, and the life after death, and the wonderful worlds above and below where the souls of men lived after they had finished their lives on earth. But whether his schooling was carried on to what we should call a university training or not, there was one thing that Tehudi was taught with yet most care, and that was to be very respectful to those who were older than himself, never to sit down while an older person was standing in the room, and always to be very careful in his manners. Chief of the older people to whom he had to show respect for his parents, and above all his mother, for the Egyptians reverenced their mothers more than anyone else in the world. Here is a little scrap of advice that a wise old Egyptian once left to his son, Thou shalt never forget what thy mother has done for thee. She bear thee, and nourished thee in all manner of ways. She nursed thee for three years. She brought thee up, and when thou didst enter the school, and was instructed in the writings, she came daily to thy master with bread and beer from her house. If thou forgetest her, she might blame thee, she might lift up her hands to God, and he would hear her complaint. And nowadays might do a great deal worse than remember these words of the oldest book in the world. But you are not to think that the Egyptian children's life was all teaching in primb behavior. When Dehudi got his holidays he would sometimes go out with his father and mother and sister on a fishing or fouling expedition. If they were going fishing the little papyrus skiff was launched, and the party paddled away, armed with long spears, which had two prongs at the point. Looking over the quiet shallow waters of the marshy lakes, they could see the fish swimming beneath them, and launched their spears at them. Sometimes if he was lucky, Dehudi's father would pierce a fish with either prong of the spear, and then there was great excitement. But still more interesting was the fouling among the marshes. The spears were laid aside on this kind of expedition, and instead Dehudi and his father were armed with curved throw-sticks, shaped something like an Australian boomerang. But besides the throw-sticks they had with them a rather unusual helper. When people go shooting nowadays they take dogs with them to retrieve the game. Well, the Egyptians had different kind of dogs, too, which they used for hunting, but when they went fouling they took with them a cat, which was trained to catch the wounded birds and bring them to her master. The little skiff was paddled cautiously across the marsh, and in among the reeds where the wild ducks and other waterfowl live, Anseb and her mother holding on to the tall papyrus plants and pulling them aside to make room for the boat, or plucking the beautiful lotus lilies of which the Egyptians were so fond. When the birds rose, Dehudi and his father let fly their throw-sticks, and when a bird was knocked down, the cat, which had been sitting quietly in the bow of the boat, dashed forward among the reeds and secured the fluttering creature before it could escape. Altogether it was great fun for the brother and sister, as well as for the grown folks, and Dehudi and Anseb liked nothing so well as when the gaily-painted little skiff was launched for a day on the marshes. I think that on the whole they had a very bright and happy life in those old days, and that, though they had not many of the advantages that you have today, the boys and girls of three thousand years ago managed to enjoy themselves in their own simple way quite as well as you do now. End of CHAPTER VI. Some fairy tales of long ago. The little brown boys and girls who lived in Egypt three thousand years ago were just as fond as you are of hearing wonderful stories that begin with once upon a time, and I want in this chapter to tell you some of the tales that Dehudi and Anseb used to listen to in the evening when school was over and play was done. The oldest of all wonder tales, stories that were old and had long been forgotten, ages before the sleeping beauty and Jack and the beanstalk were first thought of. One day when King Khufu, the great king who built the biggest of the pyramids, had nothing else to do, he called his sons and his wise men together and said, Is there anyone among you who can tell me the tales of the old magicians? Then the king's son, Prince Bufra, stood up and said, Your Majesty, I can tell you of a wonder that happened in the days of your father, King Snifaru. It fell on a day that the king grew weary of everything and saw it through all his palace for something to please him, but found nothing. Then he said to his officers, Bring to me the magicians, Azamank. And when the magician came the king said to him, O Azamank, I have sought through all my palace for some delight and I have found none. Then said Azamank, Let thy majesty go in a boat upon the lake of the palace, and let twenty beautiful girls be brought to Rothi, and let their oars be of ebony, inlaid with gold and silver. And I myself will go with thee, and the sight of the waterbirds and the fair shores and the green grass will cheer thy heart. So the king and the wizard went down to the lake, and the twenty maidens rode them about in the king's pleasure-galley. Nine rode on this side and nine on that, and the two fairests stood by the two rudders at the stern, and set the rowing song, each for her own side. And the king's heart grew glad and light, as the boat sped hither and thither, and the oars flashed in the sunshine to the song of the rowers. But as the boat turned, the top of the steering oar struck the hair of one of the maidens, who steered, and knocked her cornet of turquoise into the water, and she stopped her song, and all the rowers on her side stopped rowing. Then his majesty said, Why have you stopped rowing, little one? And the maiden answered, It is because my jewel of turquoise has fallen into the water. Row on, said the king, and I will give you another. But the girl answered, I want my own one back as I had it before. So King Snefru called Zazamonk to come to him, and said, Now, Zazamonk, I have done as you advised, and my heart is light. But behold, the cornet of this little one has fallen into the water, and she has stopped singing, and spoiled the rowing of her side, and she will not have a new jewel but wants the old one back. Then Zazamonk the wizard stood up in the king's boat, and spoke wonderful words. And lo! the water of one half of the lake rose up, and heaped itself upon the top of the water of the other half, so that it was twice as deep as it was before. And the king's bark rowed upon the top of the piled-up waters, but beyond it the bottom of the lake lay bare, with the shells and pebbles shining in the sunlight. And there upon a broken shell lay the little rower's cornet. Then Zazamonk leaped down and picked it up, and brought it to the king. And he spake wonderful words again, and the water sank down and covered the whole bed of the lake, as it had done at first. So his majesty spent a joyful day, and gave great rewards to the wizard Zazamonk. When King Khufu heard that story, he praised the men of olden times. But another of his sons, Prince Hordedef, stood up, and said, O king, that is only a story of bygone days, and no one knows whether it is true or a lie, but I will show thee a magician of today. Who is he, Hordedef? said King Khufu. And Hordedef answered, His name is Deddy. He is a hundred and ten years old, and every day he eats five hundred loaves of bread, and a side of beef, and drinks a hundred jugs of beer. He knows how to fasten on a head that has been cut off. He knows how to make a line of the desert follow him, and he knows the plan of the house of God that you have wanted to know for so long. Then King Khufu sent Prince Hordedef to bring Deddy to him, and he brought Deddy back in the royal boat. The king came out, and sat in the colony of the palace, and Deddy was led before him. Then said his majesty, Why have I never seen you before, Deddy? And Deddy answered, Life, health, and strength to your majesty, a man can only come when he is called. Is it true, Deddy, that you can fasten on a head which has been cut off? Certainly I can, your majesty. Then said the king, Let a prisoner be brought from the prison, and let his head be struck off. But Deddy said, Long life to your majesty, do not try it on a man, let us try a bird or an animal. So a goose was brought, its head was cut off, and the head was laid at the east side of the hall, and the body at the west. Then Deddy rose and spoke wonderful words. And behold! The body of the goose waddled to meet the head, and the head came to meet the body. They joined together before his majesty's throne, and the goose stood up and cackled. Then when Deddy had joined to its body again the head that had been struck off from the ox, and the ox followed him lowing, King Khufu said to him, Is it true, Deddy, that you know the plans of the house of God? It is true, your majesty, but it is not I who shall give them to you. Who, then? said the king. It is the eldest of three sons who shall be born to the lady, Rode Dudy, wife of the priest of Ra, the sun god. And Ra has promised that these three sons shall reign over this kingdom of thine. When King Khufu heard that word his heart was troubled, but Deddy said, Let not your majesty's heart be troubled, thy son shall reign first, then thy son's son, and then one of these. So the king commanded that Deddy should live in the house of Prince Hortedeff, and that every day there should be given to him a thousand loaves, a hundred jugs of beer, an ox, and a hundred bunches of onions. When the three sons of Rode Dede were born, Ra sent four goddesses to be their godmothers. They came attired like traveling dancing girls, and one of the gods came with them, dressed like a porter. And when they had nursed the three children awhile, Rode Dede's husband said to them, My ladies, what wages shall I give you? So he gave them a bushel of barley, and they went away with their wages. But when they had gone a little way, Isis, the chief of them, said, Why have we not done a wonder for these children? So they stopped and made crowns, the red crown and the white crown of Egypt, and hid them in the bushel of barley, and sealed the sack, and put it in Rode Dede's store chamber and went away again. A fortnight later, when Rode Dede was going to brew the household beer, there was no barley. And her maid-servant said, There is a bushel, but it was given to the dancing girls, and lies in the storeroom, sealed with their seal. So the lady said to her maid, Go down and fetch it, and we shall give them more when they need it. The maid went down, but when she came to the storeroom, low, from within there came a sound of singing and dancing, and all such music as should be heard in a king's court. So in fear she crept back to her mistress and told her, and Rode Dede went down and heard the royal music, and she told her husband when he came home at night, and their hearts were glad, because their sons were to be kings. But after a time the lady Rode Dede quarreled with her maid, and gave her a beating, as ladies sometimes did in those days, and the weeping maid said to her fellow-servants, Shall she do this to me? She has borne three kings, and I will go and tell it to his majesty King Khufu. So she stole away first to her uncle, and told him of her plot, but he was angry, because she wished to betray the children to King Khufu, and he beat her with a scourge of flax. And as she went away by the side of the river, a great crocodile came out of the water and carried her off. But here, alas, our story breaks off, the rest of the book is lost, and we cannot tell whether King Khufu tried to kill the three royal babies or not. Only we do know that the first three kings of the race which succeeded the race of Khufu bore the same names as Rode Dede's three babies, and were called, like all the kings of Egypt after them, Sons of the Sun. These then are absolutely the oldest fairy stories in the world, and if they do not seem very wonderful to you, you must remember that everything has to have a beginning, and that the people who made these tales hadn't had very much practice in the art of storytelling. CHAPTER VIII. Some fairy tales of long ago continued. Our next story belongs to a time several hundred years later, and I dare say it seemed as wonderful to the little Egyptians as the story of Sinbad the sailor does to you. It is called the story of the shipwrecked sailor, and the sailor himself tells it to a noble Egyptian. I was going, he says, to the mines of Pharaoh, and we set sail in a ship of one hundred and fifty cubits long and forty cubits wide, two hundred and twenty-five feet by sixty feet, quite a big ship for the time. We had a crew of one hundred and fifty of the best sailors of Egypt, men whose hearts were bold as lions. They all foretold a happy voyage, but as we came to the shore a great storm blew, the sea rose in terrible waves, and our ship was fairly overwhelmed. Clinging to a piece of wood I was washed about for three days, and at last tossed up on an island, but not one was left of all my shipmates, all perished in the waves. I lay down in the shade of some bushes, and when I had recovered a little I looked about me for food. There was plenty on every hand, figs and grapes, berries and corn, with all manner of birds. When my hunger was satisfied I lit a fire, and made an offering to the gods who had saved me. Suddenly I heard a noise like thunder, the trees shook, and the earth quaked. Looking around I saw a great serpent approaching me. He was nearly fifty feet long, and had a beard three feet in length. His body shone in the sun like gold, and when he reared himself up from his coils before me I fell upon my face. Then the serpent began to speak. What has brought thee, little one? What has brought thee? If thou dost not tell me quickly what has brought thee to this isle, I shall make thee vanish like a flame. So saying he took me up in his mouth, carried me gently to his lair, and laid me down unhurt. And again he said, What has brought thee, little one? What has brought thee to this isle of the sea? So I told him the story of our shipwreck, and how I alone had escaped the fury of the waves. Then he said to me, Fear not, little one, and let not thy face be sad. If thou hast come to me, it is God who has brought thee to this isle, which is filled with all good things. And now, see, thou shalt dwelt for four months in this isle, and then a ship of thine own land shall come, and thou shalt go home to thy country and die in thine O-town. As for me I am here with my brethren and my children. There are seventy-five of us in all, besides a young girl, who came here by chance, and was burned by fire from heaven. But if thou art strong and patient, thou shalt yet embrace thy children and thy wife, and return to thy home. Then I bowed low before him, and promised to tell of him to Pharaoh, and to bring him ships full of all the treasures of Egypt. But he smiled at my speech, and said, Thou hast nothing that I need, for I am prince of the land of Punt, and all its perfumes are mine. Moreover, when thou departest, thou shalt never again see this isle, for it shall be changed into waves. Now behold, when the time was come, and as he had foretold, the ship drew near, and the good serpent said to me, Farewell, farewell, go to thy home, little one, see again thy children, and let thy name be good in thy town. These are my wishes for thee. So I bowed low before him, and he loaded me with precious gifts of perfume, cassia, sweet woods, ivory, baboons, and all kinds of precious things, and I embarked in the ship. And now, after a voyage of two months, we are coming to the house of Pharaoh, and I shall go in before Pharaoh, and offer the gifts which I have brought from this isle into Egypt, and Pharaoh shall thank me before the great ones of the land. Our last story belongs to a later age than that of the shipwreck sailor. About fifteen hundred years before Christ there arose in Egypt a race of mighty soldier-kings, who founded a great empire, which stretched from the Sudan right through Syria and Mesopotamia as far as the great river Euphrates. Mesopotamia, or Naharena, as the Egyptian called it, had been an unknown land to them before this time, but now it became to them what America was to the men of Queen Elizabeth's time, or the heart of Africa to your grandfathers, the wonderful land of romance, where all kinds of strange things might happen. And this story of the doomed prince, which I have to tell you, belongs partly to Naharena, and as you will see some of our own fairy stories have been made out of very much the same materials as are used in it. Once upon a time there was a king in Egypt who had no child. His heart was grieved because he had no child, and he prayed to the gods for a son. So in course of time a son was born to him, and the fates, like fairy godmothers, came to his cradle to foretell what should happen to him. And when they saw him they said, his doom is to die either by the crocodile or by the serpent or by the dog. When the king heard this his heart felt sore for his little son, and he resolved that he would put the boy where no harm could come to him. So he built for him a beautiful house away in the desert, and furnished it with all kinds of fine things, and sent the boy there, with faithful servants to guard him, to see that he came to no hurt. So the boy grew up quietly and safely in his house in the desert. But it fell on the day that the young prince looked out from the roof of his house, and he saw a man walking across the desert, with a dog following him. So he said to the servant who was with him, what is this that walks behind the man who is coming along the road? It is a dog, said the page. Then the boy said, you must bring me one like him, and the page went and told his majesty. Then the king said, get a little puppy and take it to him, lest his heart be sad. So they brought him a little dog, and it grew up along with him. Now it happened that, when the boy had grown to be a strong young man, he grew weary of being always shut up in his fine house. Therefore he sent a message to his father, saying, why am I always to be shut up here? Since I am doomed to three evil fates, let me have my desire, and let God do what is in his heart. So the king agreed, and they gave the young prince arms and sent him away to the eastern frontier, and his dog went with him, and they said to him, go wherever you will. So he went northward through the desert, he and his dog, until he came to the land of Naharena. Now the chief of the land of Naharena had no children, save one beautiful daughter, and for her he had built a wonderful house. It had seventy windows, and it stood on a great rock more than one hundred feet high. And the chief summoned the sons of all the chiefs of the country round about, and said to them, The prince who can climb to my daughter's window shall have her for his wife. So all the young princes of the land camped around the house, and tried every day to climb to the window of the beautiful princess, but none of them succeeded, for the rock was very steep and high. Then one day, when they were climbing as they were want, the young prince of Egypt rode by with his dog, and the princes welcomed him, bathed him, and fed his horse, and said to him, Once comeest thou, thy goodly youth? He did not wish to tell them that he was the son of Pharaoh, so he answered, I am the son of an Egyptian officer. My father married a second wife, and when she had children she hated me, and drove me away from my home. So they took him into their company, and he stayed with them many days. Now it fell on a day that he asked them, Why do you stay here, trying always to climb this rock? And they told him of the beautiful princess who lived in the house on the top of the rock, and how the man who could climb to her window should marry her. Therefore the young prince of Egypt climbed along with them, and it came to pass that at last he climbed to the window of the princess, and when she saw him she fell in love with him and kissed him. Then was word sent to the chief of Nahirena that one of the young men had climbed to his daughter's window, and when he asked which of the princes it was, and the messenger said, It is not a prince, but the son of an Egyptian officer who has been driven away from Egypt by his stepmother. Then the chief of Nahirena was very angry, and said, Shall I give my daughter to an Egyptian fugitive? Let him go back to Egypt. But when the messengers came to tell the young man to go away, the princess seized his hand, and said, If you take him from me I will not eat, I will not drink, I shall die in that same hour. Then the chief sent men to kill the youth where he was in the house. But the princess said, If you kill him I shall be dead before the sun goes down. I will not live an hour if I am parted from him. So the chief was obliged to agree to the marriage, and the young prince was married to the princess, and her father gave them a house, and slaves, and fields, and all sorts of good things. But after a time the young prince said to his wife, I am doomed to die, either by crocodile or by serpent or by a dog. And his wife answered, Why then do you keep this dog always with you? Let him be killed. Nay, said he, I am not going to kill my faithful dog, which I have brought up since the time he was a puppy. So the princess feared greatly for her husband, and would never let him go out of her sight. Now it happened in course of time that the prince went back to the land of Egypt, and his wife with him and his dog, and he dwelt in Egypt. And one day, when the evening came, he grew drowsy, and fell asleep, and his wife filled a bowl with milk and placed it by his side, and sat to watch him as he slept. Then a great serpent came out of his hole to bite the youth. But his wife was watching, and she made the servants give the milk to the serpents, and he drank till he could not move. Then the princess killed the serpent with blows of her dagger. So she woke her husband, and he was astonished to see the serpent lying dead, and his faithful wife said to him, Behold, God has given one of thy dooms into thy hand. He will also give the others. And the prince made sacrifices to God and praised him. Now it fell on a day that the prince went out to walk in his estate, and his dog went with him. As they walked the dog ran after some game, and the prince followed the dog. They came to the river Nile, and the dog went into the river, and the prince followed him. Then a great crocodile rose in the river, and laid hold on the youth, and said, I am thy doom following after thee. But just here the old papyrus roll on which the story is written is torn away, and we do not know what happened to the doomed prince. I fancy that in some way or other his dog would save him from the crocodile, and that later, by some accident, the poor faithful dog would be the cause of his master's death. At least it looks as if the end of the story must have been something like that, for the Egyptians believed that no one could escape from the doom that was laid upon him, but had to suffer it sooner or later. Perhaps some day one of the explorers who were searching the land of Egypt for relics of the past may come upon another papyrus roll with the end of the story, and then we shall find out whether the dog did kill the prince, or whether God gave all his dooms into his hand as his wife had hoped. These are some of the stories that little Tahoudi and Senseb used to listen to in the long evenings when they were tired of play. Perhaps they seem very simple and clumsy to you, but I have no doubt that when they were told in those old days the black eyes of the little Egyptian boys and girls used to grow very big and round, and the wizard who could fasten on the heads which had been cut off seemed a very wonderful person, and the talking serpents and crocodiles seemed very real and very dreadful. Anyhow you have heard the oldest stories in the world, the fathers and mothers, so to speak, of all the great family of wonder-tales that have delighted and terrified children ever since. CHAPTER IX There is no more wonderful or interesting story than that which tells how, bit by bit, the great dark continent of Africa has been explored, and made to yield up its secrets. But did you ever think what a long history it is, and how very early it begins? It is in Egypt that we find the first chapters of the story, and they can still be read, written in the quaint old picture-writing the Egyptians used, on the rock tombs of a palace in the south of Egypt called Elephantine. In early days the land of Egypt used to end in what was called the first cataract of the Nile, a place where the river came down in a series of rapids, along a lot of rocky isles. The first cataract has disappeared now, for British engineers have made a great dam across the Nile just at this point, and turned the whole country, for miles above the dam, into a lake. But in those days the Egyptians used to believe that the Nile, to which they owed so much, began at the first cataract. Yet they knew of the wild country of Nubia beyond, and in very early times indeed, about five thousand years ago, they used to send exploring expeditions into that half desert land, which we have come to know as the Sudan. Near the first cataract there lies the island of Elephantine, and when the Egyptian kingdom was young the great barons who owned this island were called the lords of the Egyptian marshes, just as the Percy's and the Douglas's were the lords of the marshes in England and Scotland. It was their duty to keep order in the wild Nubian tribe south of the cataract, to see that they allowed the trading caravans to pass safely, and sometimes to lead these caravans through the deserts themselves. A caravan was a very different thing then, from the long train of camels that we think of now when we hear the name. For though there are some very old pictures which show that, before Egyptian history begins at all, the camel was known in Egypt, somehow that useful animal seems to have disappeared from the land for many hundreds of years. The pharaohs and their adventurous barons never used the queer, ungainly creature that carries the desert postman in our picture, and the ivory, gold dust, and ebony that came from the Sudan had to be carried on the backs of hundreds of asses. The barons of Elephantine bore the proud title of Keepers of the Door of the South, and in addition they display, seemingly just as proudly, the title Caravan Conductors. In those days it was no easy task to lead a caravan through the Sudan, and bring it back safe with its precious load, through all the wild and savage tribes who inhabited the land of Nubia. More than one of the barons of Elephantine set out with a caravan never to return, but to leave his bones and those of his companions to whiten along the desert sands, and one of them has told us how, hearing that his father had been killed on one of these adventurous journeys, he mustered his retainers, marched south with a train of a hundred asses, punished the tribe which had been guilty of the deed, and brought his father's body home to be buried with all due honors. Some of the records of these early journeys, the first attempts to explore the interior of Africa, may still be read, carved on the walls of the tombs where the brave explorers sleep. One baron, called Herkuf, has told us of no fewer than four separate expeditions which he made in the Sudan. On his first journey he was still young, he went in company with his father, and was away from seven months. The next time he was allowed to go home, and brought back his caravan safely after an absence of eight months. On his third journey he went farther than before, and gathered so large a quantity of ivory and gold dust that three hundred asses were required to bring his treasure home. Such a rich caravan was attempting prize for the wild tribes on the way, but Herkuf persuaded one of the Sudanese chiefs to furnish him with a large escort, and the caravan was so strongly guarded that the other tribes did not venture to attack it, but were glad to help its leader with guides and gifts of cattle. Herkuf brought his treasures safely back to Egypt, and the king was so pleased with his success that he sent a special messenger with a boat full of delicacies to refresh the weary traveler. But the most successful of all his expeditions was the fourth. The king who had sent him on the other journeys had died, and was succeeded by a little boy called Pepi, who was only about six years old when he came to the throne, and who reigned for more than ninety years, the longest reign in the world's history. In the second year of Pepi's reign the bold Herkuf set out again for the Sudan, and this time, along with other treasures, he brought back something that his boy-king valued far more than gold or ivory. You know how, when Stanley went in search of Emin Pasha, he discovered in the Central African forests a strange race of dwarves living by themselves and very shy of strangers. Well, for all these thousands of years the forefathers of these little dwarves must have been living in the heart of the dark continent. In the early days they evidently lived not so far away from Egypt as when Stanley found them, for on at least one occasion one of Pharaoh's servants had been able to capture one of the little men and bring him down as a present to his master, greatly to the delight of the king and court. Herkuf was equally fortunate. He managed to secure a dwarf from one of these pygmy tribes and brought him back with his caravan that he might please the young king with his quaint antics and his curious stances. When the king heard of the present which his brave servant was bringing back for him, he was wild with delight. The thought of this new toy was far more to the little eight- year-old, king though he was, than all the rest of the treasure which Herkuf had gathered, and he caused a letter to be written to the explorer, telling him of his delight and giving him all kinds of advice as to how careful he should be that the dwarf should come to no harm on the way to court. The letter, through all its curious old phrases, is very much the kind of letter that any boy might send on hearing of some new toy that was coming to him. My Majesty, says the little eight-year-old Pharaoh, wishes to see this pygmy more than all the tribute of punt, and if thou comest to court having this pygmy with thee sound and whole, my Majesty will do more for thee than king Asa did for the chancellor barded. This was the man who had brought back the dwarf in earlier days. Little King Pepe then gives careful instructions that Herkuf is to provide proper people to see that the precious dwarf does not fall into the Nile on his way down the river, and these guards are to watch behind the place where he sleeps and look into his bed ten times each night, that they may be sure that nothing has gone wrong. The poor little dwarf must have had rather an uncomfortable time of it, one fancies, if his sleep was to be broken so often. Perhaps there was more danger of killing him with kindness and care than if they had left him a little more to himself, but Pepe's anxiety was very like a boy. However, Herkuf evidently succeeded in bringing his dwarf safe and sound to the king's court, and no doubt the quaint little savage proved a splendid toy for the young king. One wonders what he thought of the great cities in the magnificent court of Egypt, and whether his heart did not weary sometimes for the wild freedom of his lost home. Herkuf was so proud of the king's letter that he caused it to be engraved, word for word, on the walls of the tomb which he hewed out for himself at Elephantine, and there to this day the words can be read which tell us how old is the story of African exploration, and how a boy was always just a boy, even though he lived five thousand years ago and reigned over a great kingdom. END OF CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. OF PEPE'S AT MINNY LANDS. ANCIENT EGYPT. BY JAMES BAKY. READ INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR LEBERVOX.ORG. A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY. About thirty-five hundred years ago there reigned a great queen in Egypt. It was not usual for the Egyptian throne to be occupied by a woman, though great respect was always shown to women in Egypt, and the rank of a king's mother was considered quite as important as that of his father. But once at least in her history Egypt had a great queen, whose fame deserves to be remembered, and who takes honorable rank among the great women, like Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, who have ruled kingdoms. During part of her life Queen Hatshepsut was only joint sovereign along with her husband, and in the latter part of her reign she was joint sovereign with her half-brother or nephew, who succeeded her. But for at least twenty years she was really the sole ruler of Egypt, and governed the land wisely and well. Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened in her reign was the voyage of discovery which she caused to be made by some ships of her fleet. Centuries before her time, when the world was young, the Egyptians had made expeditions down the Red Sea to a land which they sometimes called Punt, and sometimes the Divine Land. Probably it was part of the country that we now know as Somaliland. But for a very long time these voyages had ceased, and people only knew by hearsay and by the stories of ancient days of this wonderful country that lay away by the Southern Sea. One day the queen tells us she was at prayers in the temple of the god Amin at Thebes when she fell to sudden inspiration. The god was giving her a command to send an expedition to this almost forgotten land. A command was heard in the sanctuary, a behest of the god himself, that the ways which lead to Punt should be explored, and that the roads to the ladders of incense should be trodden. In obedience to this command the queen at once equipped a little fleet of the quaint old galleys that the Egyptians then used and sent them out, with picked crews and a royal envoy in command, to sail down the Red Sea in search of the Divine Land. The ships were laden with all kinds of goods to barter with the Punites, and a guard of Egyptian soldiers was placed on board. We do not know how long it took the little squadron to reach its destination. Sea voyages in those days were slow and dangerous. But the last ships safely reached the mouth of the Elephant River in Somaliland, and went up the river with the tide till they came to the village of the natives. They found that the Punites lived in curious beehive-shaped houses, some of them made of wicker work, and placed on piles, so that they had to climb into them by ladders. The men were not negroes, though some negroes lived among them. They were very much like the Egyptians in appearance, wore pointed beards, and were dressed only in loincloths, while the women wore a yellow sleeveless dress which reached half way between the knee and ankle. Nessie, the royal envoy, landed with an officer and eight soldiers, and to show that he came in peace, he spread out on a table some presents for the chief of the Punites. Five bracelets, two gold necklaces, a dagger, with belt and sheath, a battle axe, and eleven rings of glass beads, much such a present as an European explorer might today give to an African chief. The natives came down in great excitement to see the strangers who had brought such treasures, and were astonished at the arrival of such a fleet. How is it, they said, that you have reached this country hitherto unknown to men? Have you come by way of the sky, or have you sailed on the waters of the divine sea? The chief, who was called Perahu, came down with his wife Ati, and his daughter. Ati rode on a donkey, but dismounted to see the strangers, and indeed the poor donkey must have been greatly relieved, for the chieftainess was an exceedingly fat lady, and her daughter, though so young, showed every intention of being as fat as her mother. After the envoy and the chief had exchanged compliments, business began. The Egyptians pitched a tent in which they stored their goods for barter, and to put temptation out of the way of the natives, they drew a guard of soldiers around the tent. For several days the market remained opened, and the country people brought down their treasures, till the ships were laden as deeply as was safe. The cargo was a varied and valuable one. Incense tusks, gold, ebony, apes, greyhounds, leopard skins, all were crowded into the galleys, the apes sitting gravely on the top of the bales of goods, and looking longingly at the land which they were leaving. But the most important part of the cargo was the incense and the incense trees. Great quantities of the gum from which the incense was made were placed on board, and also thirty-one of the incense sycamores, their roots carefully surrounded with a large ball of earth and protected by baskets. Several young chiefs of the Puneids accompanied the expedition back to Thebes to see what life was like in the strange new world which had been revealed to them. Altogether the voyage home must have been no easy undertaking, for the ships, with their heavy cargos, must have been very difficult to handle. The arrival of the squadron at Thebes, which they must have reached by a canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea, made the occasion of a great holiday festival. Long lines of troops in Gala attire came out to meet the brave explorers, and an escort of the royal fleet accompanied the exploring squadron up to the temple-key where the ships were to moor. Then the Thebans feasted their eyes on the wonderful treasures that had come from Punt, wandering at the natives, the incense, the ivory, and above all at a giraffe which had been brought home. How the poor creature was stowed away on the little Egyptian ship it is hard to see, but there he was, with his spots on his long neck, the most wonderful creature that the good folks of Thebes had ever seen. The precious incense-gum was stored in the temple, and the queen herself gave a bushel-measure made of a mixture of gold and silver to measure it out with. So the voyage of discovery had ended in a great success. But Queen Hatshepsut's purpose was only half fulfilled as yet. In a nook of the limestone cliffs, not far from Thebes, her father before her had begun to build a very wonderful temple, just beside the ruins of an older sanctuary which had stood there for hundreds of years. Hatshepsut had been gradually completing his work, and the temple was now growing into a most beautiful building, very different from ordinary Egyptian temples. From the desert sands in front of it rose terrace above terrace, each platform bordered with rows of beautiful limestone pillars, until at last it reached the cliffs, and the most sacred chamber of it, the Holy of Holies, was hewn into the solid wall of rock behind. This temple the queen resolved to make into what she called a paradise for Amun, the god who had told her to send out the ships. So she planted on the terraces the sacred incense trees which had been brought from Punt, and thanks to careful tending and watering they flourished well in their new home. And then, all along the walls of the temple she caused her artist to carve and paint the whole story of the voyage. We do not know the names of the artist who did the work, so we know that of the architect, Senmut, who planned the building. But whoever they were they must have been very skillful sculptors, for the whole story of the voyage is told in pictures on the wall of this wonderful temple, so that everything can be seen just as it actually happened more than three thousand years ago. You can see the ships toiling along with Oren's sail towards their destination, the meeting with the natives, the Palaver and the trading, the loading of the galleys, and the long procession of the even soldiers going out to meet the returning explorers. Not a single detail is missed, and thanks to the queen and her artists, we can go back over all these years and see how the sailors worked, and how people lived in savage lands in that far off time, and realize that explorers dealt with the natives in foreign countries in those days very much as they deal with them now. When our explorers of today come back for their journeys, they generally tell the story of their adventures in a big book with many pictures. But no explorer ever published the account of a voyage of discovery on such a scale as did Queen Hatshepsut, when she carved the voyage to punt on the walls of her great temple at Dar al-Bahari, and no pictures in any modern book are likely to last as long, or to tell so much as these pictures that have come to light again during the last few years, after being buried for centuries under the desert sands. Queen Hatshepsut has left other memorials of her greatness besides the temple with its story of her voyage. She has told us how one day she was sitting in her palace and thinking of her creator when the thought came into her mind to rear two great obelisks before the temple of ominant Karnak. So she gave the command, and Senmut, her clever architect, went up the Nile to Aswan, and carried two huge granite blocks and floated them down the river. Cleopatra's needle, which stands on the Thames embankment, is sixty-eight and one-half feet high, and it seems to us a huge stone for men to handle. Our own engineers had trouble enough in bringing it to this country and setting it up. But these two great obelisks of Queen Hatshepsut were ninety-eight and one-half feet high, and weighed about three hundred and fifty tons apiece. Yet Senmut had them quarried and set up and carved all over from base to summit in seven months from the time when the queen gave her command. One of them still stands at Karnak, the tallest obelisk in the temple there, while the other great shaft has fallen and lies broken close to its companion. They tell us their own plain story of the wisdom and skill of those far-off days, and perhaps the great queen who thought of her creator as she sat in her palace, and long to honour him, found that the God whom she ignorantly worshipped was indeed not far from his servant's heart. CHAPTER X Egyptian Books The Egyptians were, if not quite the earliest, at least among the earliest of all peoples of the world to find out how to put down their thoughts and writing, or in other words, to make a book, and one of their old books, full of wise advice from a father to his son, is perhaps the oldest book in the world. Two words which we are constantly using might help to remind us of how much we owe to their cleverness. The one is Bible, and the other is paper. When we talk of the Bible, which just means the book, we are using one of the words which the Greeks used to describe the plant out of which the Egyptians made the material on which they wrote, and when we talk of paper we are using another name, the commoner name of the same plant. For the Egyptians were the first people to make paper, and they used it for many centuries before other people had learned how much handier it was than the other things which they used. Yet if you saw an Egyptian book you would think it was a very curious and clumsy thing indeed, and very different from the handy volumes which we use nowadays. When an Egyptian wanted to make a book he gathered the stems of a kind of reed called the papyrus, which grew in some parts of Egypt in marshy ground. This plant grew to a height of from twelve to fifteen feet, and had a stalk about six inches thick. The outer rind was peeled off this stalk, and then the inner part of it was separated by means of a flat needle into thin layers. These layers were joined to one another on a table, and a thin gum was spread over them, and then another layer was laid crosswise on the top of the first. The double sheet thus made was then put into a press, squeezed together and dried. The sheets varied, of course, in breadth according to the purpose for which they were needed. The broadest that we know of measure about seventeen inches across, but most are much narrower than that. When the Egyptian had got his paper he did not make it up into a volume with the sheets bound together at the back as we do. He joined the men to end, adding on sheet after sheet as he wrote, and rolling up his book as he went along. So when the book was done it formed a big roll, sometimes many feet long. There is one great book in the British Museum which measures one hundred and thirty-five feet in length. You would think it very strange and awkward to have to handle a book like that. But if the book seemed curious to you, the writing in it would seem still more curious, for the Egyptian writing was certainly the quaintest and perhaps the prettiest that has ever been known. It is called hieroglyphic, which means sacred carving, and it is nothing but little pictures from beginning to end. The Egyptians began by putting down a picture of the thing which was represented by the word they wanted to use, and though by and by they formed a sort of alphabet to spell words with, and had besides signs that represented the different syllables of a word, still these signs were all little pictures. For instance, one of their signs for A was the figure of an eagle, their sign for M was a lion, and for you a little chicken, so that when you look at an Egyptian book written in the hieroglyphic character you see column after column of birds and beasts and creeping things, of men and women and boats, and all sorts of other things, marching across the page. When the Egyptians wanted any of their writings to last for a very long time they did not trust them to the frail papyrus rolls but used another kind of book altogether. You have heard of sermons of the stones? Well, a great many of the Egyptian books that tell us of the great deeds of the pharaohs were written on stone, carved deep and clear in the hard granite of a great obelisk, or in the limestone of a temple wall. When one of the kings came back from the wars he generally published the account of his battles and victories by carving them on the walls of one of the great temples, or in a pillar set up in the court of a temple, and there they remained to this day for scholars to read. When the hieroglyphics were cut in stone the lines were often filled in with pastes of different colors, so that the whole writing was a blaze of beautiful tints, and the walls looked as if they were covered with finely colored hangings. Of course the colors have mostly faded now, but there are still some temples and tombs where they can be seen, almost as fresh as when they were first laid on, and from these we can gather some idea of how wonderfully beautiful were these stone books of ancient Egypt. The scribes and carvers knew very well how beautiful their work was, and were careful to make it look as beautiful as possible, so that if they found the grouping of figures to make up a particular word or sentence was going to be ugly or clumsy, they would even prefer to spell the word wrong rather than spoil the appearance of their picture-writing. Some of you, I dare say, spell words wrong now and again, but I fancy it isn't because you think that they look prettier that way. But now let us turn back again to our papyrus roll. Suppose that we have got it clean and fresh and that our friend the scribe is going to write upon it. How does he go about it? To begin with, he draws from his belt a long, narrow wooden case and lays it down beside him. This is his palette, rather a different kind of palette from the one which artists use. It is a piece of wood with one long hollow in it, and two or three shallow round ones. The long hollow holds a few pens, which are made out of thin reeds, bruised at the ends, so that their points are almost like little brushes. The shallow round hollows are for holding ink, black for most of the writing, red for special words, and perhaps one or two other colors if the scribe is going to do a very fine piece of work. So he squats down, cross-legged, dips a reed pen in the ink, and begins. As he writes, he makes his little figures of men and beasts and birds face all in the one direction, and his readers will know they must always read from the point towards which the characters face. Now and then, when he comes to some specially important part, he draws, in gay colors, a little picture of the scene which the words describe. Now, you can understand that this picture writing was not very easy work to do when you had nothing but a bruised reed to draw all sorts of animals with. Gradually the pictures grew less and less like the creatures they stood for to begin with, and at last the old hieroglyphic broke down into a kind of running hand where a stroke or two might stand for an eagle, a lion, or a man. And many of the Egyptian books are written in this kind of broken-down hieroglyphic which is called hieratic, or priestly writing. But some of the finest and costliest books were still written in the beautiful old style. On their papyrus rolls the Egyptians wrote all sorts of things, books of wise advice, stories like the fairy tales which we have been hearing, legends of the gods, histories, and poems, but the book that is often as met with is one of their religious books. It is nearly always called the Book of the Dead now, and some people call it the Egyptian Bible, but neither of these names is the right one. Certainly it is not in the least like the Bible, and the Egyptians themselves never called it the Book of the Dead. They called it the chapters of coming forth by day, and the reason they gave it that name was because they believed that if their dead friends knew all the wisdom that was written in it, they would escape all the dangers of the other world, and would be able, in heaven, to go in and out just as they had done upon earth, and to be happy forever. The book is full of all kinds of magical charms against the serpents and dragons, and all the other kinds of evil things that sought to destroy the dead person in the other world. The scribe used to write off copies of it by the dozen, and keep them in stock, with blank places for the names of the persons who were to use them. When any one died, his friends went away to a scribe, and brought a roll of the Book of the Dead, and the scribe filled in the name of the dead person in the blank places. Then the book was buried along with his mummy, so that when he met the demons and serpents on the road to heaven he would know how to drive them away, and when he came to gates that had to be opened, or rivers that had to be crossed, he would know the right magical words to use. Some of these rolls of the Book of the Dead are very beautifully written, and illustrated with most wonderful little colored pictures, representing different scenes of life in the other world, and it is from these that we have learned a great deal of what the Egyptians believed about the judgment after death, and heaven. But the common ones are very carelessly done. The scribes knew that the book was going to be buried at once, and that nobody was likely to ever see it again, so they did not care much whether they made mistakes or not, and often they missed out parts of the book altogether. They little thought that, thousands of years after they were dead, scholars would dig up their writings again, and read them, and see all their blunders. Of course a great deal of this book is dreadful rubbish, and anything more unlike the noble and beautiful teachings of the Bible you can scarcely imagine. It has no more sense in it than the fee-fie-foe-foam of our fairy stories. Here is one little chapter from it. It is called the Chapter of Repulsing Serpents, and the Egyptians suppose that when a serpent attacked you on your way to heaven, you had only to recite this verse, and the serpent would be powerless to harm you. Hail, thou serpent raric, advance not hither, stand still now, and thou shalt eat the rat which is in abomination under raw, the sun-god, and thou shalt crunch the bones of a filthy cat. It sounds very silly, doesn't it? And there are many things quite as silly as this in the book. You can scarcely imagine how wise people like the Egyptians could have ever believed in such drivel. But then, side by side with his miserable stuff, you find really wonderful and noble thoughts, that surely came to these men of ancient days from God himself, telling them how every man must be judged at last for all that he has done on earth, and how only those who have done justly, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with God will be accepted by him. CHAPTER XI.