 Introduction to the History of Egypt by Gaston Maspero. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of Egypt, Caldia, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria by Gaston Maspero, Honorable Doctor of Civil Laws and Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, member of the Institute and Professor at the College of France. Edited by A. H. Sasey, Professor of Assyriology, Oxford. Translated by M. L. McClure, member of the Committee of the Egypt Exploration Fund. Editors' Preface. Professor Maspero does not need to be introduced to us. His name is well known in England and America as that of one of the chief masters of Egyptian science, as well as of ancient oriental history and archaeology. Alike as a philologist, a historian, and an archaeologist, he occupies a foremost place in the annals of modern knowledge and research. He possesses that quick apprehension and fertility of resource without which the decipherment of ancient texts is impossible, and he also possesses a sympathy with the past and the power of realizing it which are indispensable if we would picture it a right. His intimate acquaintance with Egypt and its literature, and the opportunities of discovery afforded him by his position for several years as Director of the Bulak Museum, give him an unique claim to speak with authority on the history of the Valley of the Nile. In the present work he has been prodigal of his abundant stores of learning and knowledge, and it may therefore be regarded as the most complete account of ancient Egypt that has ever yet been published. In the case of Babylonia and Assyria he no longer, it is true, speaks at first hand. But he has thoroughly studied the latest and best authorities on the subject, and has weighted their statements with the judgment which comes from an exhaustive acquaintance with a similar department of knowledge. Naturally, in progressive studies like those of Egyptology and Assyriology, a good many theories and conclusions must be tentative and provisional only. Discovery crowds so quickly on discovery that the truth of today is often apt to be modified or amplified by the truth of tomorrow. A single fresh fact may throw a wholly new and unexpected light upon the results we have already gained, and cause them to assume a somewhat changed aspect. But this is what must happen in all sciences in which there is a healthy growth, and archaeological science is no exception to the rule. The spelling of ancient Egyptian proper names adopted by Professor Mespero will perhaps seem strange to many. But it must be remembered that all our attempts to represent the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian words can be approximate only. We can never ascertain with certainty how they were actually sounded. All that can be done is to determine what pronunciation was assigned to them in the Greek period, and to work backwards from this, so far as it is possible to more remote ages. This is what Professor Mespero has done, and it must be no slight satisfaction to him to find that on the whole his system of transliteration is confirmed by the cuneiform tablets of Tel-Elamana. The difficulties attaching to the spelling of Assyrian names are different from those which beset our attempts to reproduce, even approximately, the names of ancient Egypt. The cuneiform system of writing was syllabic, each character denoting a syllable, so that we know what were the vowels in a proper name as well as the consonants. Moreover, the pronunciation of the consonants resembled that of the Hebrew consonants, the transliteration of which has long since become conventional. When therefore an Assyrian or Babylonian name is written phonetically, its correct transliteration is not often a matter of question. But unfortunately the names are not always written phonetically. The cuneiform script was an inheritance from the non-Semitic predecessors of the Semites in Babylonia, and in this script the characters represented words as well as sounds. Not infrequently the Semitic Assyrians continue to write a name in the old Sumerian way, instead of spelling it phonetically, the result being that we do not know how it was pronounced in their own language. The name of the Chaldean Noab, for instance, is written with two characters which ideographically signify the sun, or day of life, and of the first of which the Sumerian values were ʻʻʻʻuʻt, babbar, kiss, tarn, and par, while the second had the value of z. Were it not that the Chaldean historian Barassos writes the name Zisestros, we should have no clue to its Semitic pronunciation. Sir Miss Baros' learning and indefatagable industry are well known to me, but I confess I was not prepared for the exhaustive acquaintance he shows with Assyriological literature. Nothing seems to have escaped his notice. Papers and books just published, and half-forgotten articles in obscure periodicals, which appeared years ago, have all alike been used and quoted by him. Naturally, however, there are some points on which I should be inclined to differ from the conclusions he draws, or to which he has been led by other Assyriologists. Without being an Assyriologist himself, it was impossible for him to be acquainted with that portion of the evidence on certain disputed questions, which is only to be found in still unpublished or untranslated inscriptions. There are two points which it seemed to me of sufficient importance to justify my expression of dissent from his views. These are the geographical situation of the land of Magan, and the historical character of the annals of Sargon of Akkad. The evidence about Magan is very clear. Magan is usually associated with the country of Melukhakh, the salt desert, and in every text in which its geographical position is indicated it is placed in the immediate vicinity of Egypt. Thus Asurbanipal, after stating that he had gone to the lands of Magan and Melukhakh, goes on to say that he directed his road to Egypt and Kush, and then describes the first of his Egyptian campaigns. Similar testimony is borne by Esur Haddan. The latter king tells us that after quitting Egypt he directed his road to the land of Melukhakh, a desert region in which there were no rivers, and which extended to the city of Rapik, the modern Rapiya, at the edge of the wadi of Egypt, the present wadi al-Arish. After this he received camels from the king of the Arabs, and made his way to the land and city of Magan. The Tel-Elamana tablets enable us to carry the record back to the fifteenth century B.C. In certain of the tablets, now as Berlin, Winkler, and Abel, forty-two and forty-five, the Phoenician governor of the Pharaoh asks that help should be sent him from Melukhakh and Egypt. The kings should hear the words of his servant and send ten men of the country of Melukhakh, and twenty men of the country of Egypt, to defend the city of Gebel for the king. And again I have sent to Pharaoh, literally the Great House, a garrison of men from the country of Melukhakh, and the king has just dispatched a garrison from the country of Melukhakh. At a still earlier date we have indications that Melukhakh and Magan denoted the same region of the world. In an old Babylonian geographical list which belongs to the early days of Chaldean history, Magan is described as the country of bronze, and Melukhakh as the country of the Samdu, or Malachite. It was this list which originally led Opert, Lennermont, and myself independently to the conviction that Magan was to be looked for in the Sinaitic peninsula. Magan included, however, the Midian of Scripture, and the city of Magan, called Makhan in Semitic Assyrian, is probably the Makna of classical geography, now represented by the ruins of Muqna. As I have always maintained the historical character of the annals of Sargon of Akkad, long before recent discoveries led Professor Hilprecht and others to adopt the same view, it is as well to state why I consider them worthy of credit. In themselves the annals contain nothing improbable. Indeed, what might seem the most unlikely portion of them, that which describes the extension of Sargon's empire to the shores of the Mediterranean, has been confirmed by the progress of research. Amisatana, a king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, about 2200 BC, calls himself King of the Country of the Amorites, and the Tel-Elimarna tablets have revealed to us how deep and long-lasting Babylonian influence must have been throughout Western Asia. Moreover, the vase described by Professor Mespero in the present work proves that the expedition of Naram-Sin against Magan was an historical reality, and such an expedition was only possible if the land of the Amorites, the Syria and Palestine of later days, had been secured in the rear. But what chiefly led me to the belief that the annals are a document contemporaneous with the events narrated in them are two facts which do not seem to have been sufficiently considered. On the one side, while the annals of Sargon are given in full, those of his son Naram-Sin break off abruptly in the early part of his reign. I see no explanation of this, except that they were composed while Naram-Sin was still on the throne. On the other side, the campaigns of the two monarchs are coupled with the astrological phenomenon on which the success of the campaigns was supposed to depend. We know that the Babylonians were given to the practice and study of astrology from the earliest days of their history. We know also that even in the time of the later Assyrian monarchy it was still customary for the general in the field to be accompanied by the Asipu, or prophet, the Ashaf of Daniel, II, X, on whose interpretation of the signs of heaven the movements of the army are depended, and in the infancy of Kaldian history we should accordingly expect to find the astrological sign recorded along with the event with which it was bound up. At a subsequent period the sign and the event were separated from one another in literature, and had the annals of Sargon been a later compilation, in their case also the separation would assuredly have been made. But on the contrary the annals have the form which they could have assumed and ought to have assumed, only at the beginning of contemporaneous Babylonian history, is to me a strong testimony in favour of their genuineness. It may be added that Babylonian sea cylinders have been found in Cyprus, one of which is of the age of Sargon of Akkad, its style and workmanship being the same as that of the cylinder figured in Volume III, page 96, while the other, though of later date, belonged to a person who describes himself as the servant of the deified Narum Sin. Such cylinders may, of course, have been brought to the island in later times, but when we remember that a characteristic object of prehistoric Cypriot art is an imitation of the seal cylinder of Kaldsia, their discovery cannot be wholly an accident. Professor Mespero has brought his facts up to so recent a date that there is very little to add to what he has written. Since his manuscript was in type, however, a few additions have been made to our Assyriological knowledge. A fresh examination of the Babylonian dynastic tablet has led Professor Delich to make some alterations in the published account of what Professor Mespero calls the Ninth Dynasty. According to Professor Delich, the number of kings composing the dynasty is stated on the tablet to be twenty-one, and not thirty-one, as was formally read, and the number of lost lines exactly corresponds with this figure. The first of the kings reigned thirty-six years, and he had a predecessor belonging to the previous dynasty, whose name has been lost. There would consequently have been two Elamite usurpers instead of one. I would further draw attention to an interesting text, published by Mr. Strong in the Babylonian and Oriental record, which I believe to contain the name of a king, who belonged to the legendary dynasty as of Kaldsia. This is Samas Natsir, who is coupled with Sargana Vakad and other early monarchs in one of the lists. The legend, if I interpret it rightly, states that Elam shall be altogether given to Samas Natsir, and the same prince is further described as building Nipur and Durilu as king of Babylon, and as conqueror both of a certain Valdakha and of Kumbh Satir, the king of the Cedar Forest. It will be remembered that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Kumbh Baba is also stated to have been the lord of the Cedar Forest. But of new discoveries and facts there is a constant supply, and it is impossible for the historian to keep pace with them. Even while the sheets of his work are passing through the press, the excavator, the explorer, and the decipherer are adding to our previous stores of knowledge. In Egypt Mr. De Morgan's unwearyed energy has raised, as it were, out of the ground at Kom Ambo, a vast and splendidly preserved temple of whose existence we had hardly dreamed. He has discovered twelfth dynasty jewelry at Dasher of the most exquisite workmanship, and at Meir and Asuat has found in tombs of the sixth dynasty painted models of the trades and professions of the day, as well as fighting battalions of soldiers, which for freshness and lifelike reality contrast favorably with the models which come from India today. In Babylonia the American expedition, under Mr. Haines, has at Nifer unearthed monuments of older date than those of Sargon of Akkad. Nor must I forget to mention the lotiform column found by Mr. De Morgan in a tomb of the old empire at Abusir, or the interesting discovery made by Mr. Arthur Evans of seals and other objects from the prehistoric sites of Crete and other parts of the Aegean, inscribed with hieroglyphic characters which reveal a new system of writing that must at one time have existed by the side of the Hittite hieroglyphs, and may have had its origin in the influence exercised by Egypt on the peoples of the Mediterranean in the age of the twelfth dynasty. In volumes four, five, and six we find ourselves in the full light of an advanced culture. The nations of the ancient east are no longer each pursuing an isolated existence and separately developing the seeds of civilization and culture on the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile. Asia and Africa have met in mortal combat. Babylonia has carried its empire to the frontiers of Egypt, and Egypt itself has been held in bondage by the Hixos strangers from Asia. In return Egypt has driven back the wave of invasion to the borders of Mesopotamia, has substituted an empire of its own in Syria for that of the Babylonians, and has forced the Babylonian king to treat with its pharaoh in equal terms. In the track of war and diplomacy have come trade and commerce. Western Asia is covered with roads, along which the merchant and the courier travel incessantly, and the whole civilized world of the Orient is knit together in a common literary culture and common commercial interests. The age of isolation has thus been seceded by an age of intercourse, partly military and antagonistic, partly literary and peaceful. Professor Mespero paints for us this age of intercourse, perhaps its rising character, its decline in fall. For the unity of Eastern civilization was again shattered. The Hittites descended from the ranges of the Taurus upon the Egyptian province of northern Syria, and cut off the Semites of the West from those of the East. The Israelites poured over the Jordan out of Edom and Moab, and took possession of Canaan, while Babylonia itself, for so many centuries the ruling power of the Oriental world, had to make way for its upstart rival, Assyria. The old imperial powers were exhausted and played out, and it needed time before the new forces which were to take their place could acquire sufficient strength for their work. As usual, Professor Mespero has been careful to embody in his history the very latest discoveries in information. Notice it will be found has been taken even of the Stella of Mineptah, recently disinterred by Professor Petri, on which the name of the Israelites is engraved. At Elephantine I found, a short time since, on a granite boulder, an inscription of Khufu Anka, whose sarcophagus of red granite is one of the most beautiful objects in the Giza Museum, which carries back the history of the island to the age of the pyramid builders of the Fourth Dynasty. The boulder was subsequently concealed under the southern side of the city wall, and as fragments of inscribed papyrus co-evil with the Sixth Dynasty have been discovered in the immediate neighborhood, on one of which mention is made of this domain of Pepe II, it would seem that the town of Elephantine must have been founded between the period of the Fourth Dynasty and that of the Sixth. Manetho is therefore justified in making the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties of Elephantine origin. It is in Babylonia, however, that the most startling discoveries have been made. At Tello, Monsieur de Sarsac has found a library of more than thirty thousand tablets, all neatly arranged, piled in order one on the other, and belonging to the age of Judea, B.C. 2700. Many more tablets of an early date have been unearthed at Abu Habaa, Separa, and Jaka, Isin, by Dr. Shiel, working for the Turkish government. But the most important finds have been at Nipper, the ancient Nipper in northern Babylonia, where the American expedition has brought to a close its long work of systematic excavation. Here, Mr. Haynes has dug down to the very foundations of the Great Temple of Al-Leil, and the chief historical results of his labors have been published by Professor Hilpert in the Babylonian expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Volume 1, 1896. About midway between the summit and the bottom of the mound, Mr. Haynes laid bare a pavement constructed of huge bricks, formed with the names of Sargon of Akkad and his son, Naram Sin. He found also the ancient wall of the city, which had been built by Naram Sin, thirteen point seven meters wide. The debris of ruined buildings, which lies below the pavement of Sargon, is as much as nine point two five meters in depth, while that above it, the topmost stratum of which brings us down to the Christian era, is only eleven meters in height. We may form some idea from this of the enormous age to which the history of Babylonian culture and writing reaches back. In fact, Professor Hilpert quotes with approval Mr. Haynes' words. We must cease to apply the adjective earliest to the time of Sargon, or to any age or epoch within a thousand years of his advanced civilization. The golden age of Babylonian history seems to include the reign of Sargon and of Ur-Gur. Many of the inscriptions which belong to this remote age of human culture have been published by Professor Hilpert. Among them is a long inscription, in one hundred and thirty-two lines, engraved on multitudes of large stone vases presented to the temple of El-Leil by a certain Lugal Zaghizi. Lugal Zaghizi was the son of Ucus, the Patisi or high priest of the land of the Bo, as Mesopotamia, with its Bedouin inhabitants, was called. He not only conquered Babylonia, then known as Khengi, the land of canals and reeds, but founded an empire which extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. This was centuries before Sargon of Akkad followed in his footsteps. Erich became the capital of Lugal Zaghizi's empire, and doubtless received at this time its Sumerian title of the city, Par-Excellence. For a long while previously there had been war between Babylonia and the land of the Bo, whose rulers seemed to have established themselves in the city of Kis. At one time we find the Babylonian prince En-Sagh-Saghana, capturing Kis and its king. At another time it is a king of Kis who makes offerings to the god of Nipur, in gratitude for his victories. To this period belongs the famous Stella of the Vultures, found at Tel-O, on which is depicted the victory of E. Dinger-An-Ajin, the king of Lagos, Tel-O, over the Semitic hordes of the land of the Bo. It may be noted that the recent discoveries have shown how correct Professor Mespero has been in assigning the kings of Lagos to a period earlier than that of Sar-Ghan of Akkad. Professor Hilprecht would place E. Dinger-An-Ajin after the Lugal Zaghizi, and seize in the Stella of the Vultures a monument of the revenge taken by the Sumerian rulers of Lagos for the conquest of the country by the inhabitants of the north. But it is equally possible that it marks the successful reaction of Kaldsia against the power established by Lugal Zaghizi. However, this may be the dynasty of Lagos to which Professor Hilprecht has added a new king, and Kegil, reigned in peace for some time, and belonged to the same age as the First Dynasty of Ur. This was founded by a certain Lugal Kignub Nidudu, whose inscriptions have been found at Nipur. The dynasty which arose at Ur in later days, circa B. C. 2700, under Ur, Gur, and Bungie, which has hitherto been known as the First Dynasty of Ur, is thus dethroned from its position and becomes the Second. The succeeding dynasty, which also made Ur its capital, and whose kings Ayn-Sin, Pur-Sin-Il, and Gimil-Sin, were the immediate predecessors of the First Dynasty of Babylon, to which Karn-Murabi belonged must henceforth be termed the Third. Among the latest acquisitions from Tello are the seals of the Patizi, Lugal Usumgal, which finally remove all doubts as to the identity of Sargani, king of the city, with the famous Sargan of Akkad. The historical accuracy of Sargan's annals, moreover, have been fully vindicated. Not only have the American excavators found the contemporary monuments of him and his son, Naram-Sin, but also tablets stated in the years of his campaigns against the land of the Amorites. In short, Sargan of Akkad, so lately spoken of as a half-mythical personage, has now emerged into the full glare of authentic history. That the native chronologist had sufficient material for reconstructing the past history of their country is also now clear. The early Babylonian contract tablets are dated by events which officially distinguished the several years of a king's reign, and tablets have been discovered compiled at the close of a reign, which gave year by year the events which thus characterize them. One of these tablets, for example, from the excavations at Nifer, begins with the words, 1. The year when Parsin II becomes king. 2. The year when Parsin the king conquers Erbilum, and ends with the year when Gimelscene becomes king of Ur, and conquers the land of Zabsali in the Lebanon. Of special interest to the biblical students are the discoveries made by Mr. Pinches among some of the Babylonian tablets which have recently been acquired by the British Museum. Four of them relate to no less a personage than Kudur-Laghammer, or Chedur-Lawmer, king of Elam, as well as to Eri-Aku, or Eriak, king of Larsa, and his son Dermak-Ilani, to Tughula or Tidal, the son of Ghazani, and to their war against Babylon in the time of Kamnurabi. In one of the texts the question is asked, who is the son of a king's daughter who has sat on the throne of royalty? Dermak-Ilani, the son of Eri-Aku, the son of the Lady Kour, has sat on the throne of royalty, from which it may perhaps be inferred that Eri-Aku was the son of Kudur-Laghammer's daughter, and in another we read, who is Kudur-Laghammer, the doer of mischief? He has gathered together the Umam-Manda, has devastated the land of Beel, Babylonia, and has marched at their side. The Umam-Manda were the barbarian hordes of the Kurdish mountains, on the northern frontier of Elam, and the name corresponds with that of the Goyim, or nations, in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. We here see Kudur-Laghammer acting as their susran lord. Unfortunately all four tablets are in a shockingly broken condition, and it is therefore difficult to discover in them a continuous sense, or to determine their precise nature. They have, however, been supplemented by further discoveries made by Dr. Shiel at Constantinople. Among the tablets preserved there, he has found letters from Khan Marabi to his vassals, Sin Idinam of Larsa, from which we learned that Sin Idinam had been dethroned by the Elamites, Kudur-Mabag and Eri-Aku, and had fled for refuge to the court of Khan Marabi at Babylon. In the war which subsequently broke out between Khan Marabi and Kudur-Laghammer, the king of Elam, who it would seem exercised susarenti over Babylonia for seven years, Sin Idinam gave material assistance to the Babylonian monarch, and Khan Marabi accordingly bestowed presence upon him as a recompense for his valor on the day of the overthrow of Kudur-Laghammer. I must also refer to a fine scarab found in the rubbish mounds of the ancient city of Qamambos in Upper Egypt, which bears upon it the name of Sutku-Apope. It shows us that the author of the story of the expulsion of the Hyksos, in calling the king Ra Apope, merely like an orthodox Egyptian, substituted the name of the god of Heliopolis for that of the foreign deity. Equally interesting are the scarabs brought to light by Professor Flinders Petrie, on which a hitherto unknown Yaakub El receives the titles of a pharaoh. In Vol. 7, 8, and 9, Professor Mespero concludes his monumental work on the history of the ancient East. The overthrow of the Persian Empire by the Greek soldiers of Alexander marks the beginning of a new era. Europe at last enters upon the stage of history, and becomes air of the culture and civilization of the Orient. The culture which had grown up and developed on the banks of the Euphrates and Nile passes to the west, and there assumes new features and is inspired with a new spirit. The East parishes of age and decrepitude. Its strength is outworn. Its power to initiate is past. The long ages through which it had toiled to build up the fabric of civilization are at an end. Fresh races are needed to carry on the work which it had achieved. Greece appears upon the scene, and behind Greece looms the colossal figure of the Roman Empire. During the past decade, excavation has gone on apace in Egypt and Babylonia, and discoveries of a startling and unexpected nature have followed in the wake of excavation. Ages that seemed prehistoric stepped suddenly forth into the daedon of history. Personages whom a skeptical criticism had consigned to the land of myth or fable are clothed once more with flesh and blood, and events which had been long forgotten demand to be recorded and described. In Babylonia, for example, the excavations at Nifer and Telo have shown that Sargon of Akkad, so far from being a creature of romance, was as much a historical monarch as Nebuchadnezzar himself. Monuments of his reign have been discovered, and we learn from them that the empire he is said to have founded had a very real existence. Contracts have been found dated in the years when he was occupied in conquering Syria and Palestine, and a cadastral survey that was made for the purposes of taxation mentions a Canaanite, who had been appointed governor of the land of the Amorites. Even a postal service had already been established along the high roads which knit the several parts of the empire together, and some of the clay seals which frank the letters are now in the Museum of the Louvre. At Susa, Monsieur de Morgan, the late director of the service of antiquities in Egypt, has been excavating below the remains of the Akraminian period among the ruins of the ancient Elamite capital. Here he has found numberless historical inscriptions, besides a text in hieroglyphics which may cast light on the origin of the cuneiform characters. But the most interesting of his discoveries are two Babylonian monuments that were carried off by Elamite conquerors from the cities of Babylonia. One of them is a long inscription of about twelve hundred lines belonging to Manistusu, one of the early Babylonian kings, whose name has been met with at Nifer. The other is a monument of Naramsin, the son of Sargon of Akkad, which it seems was brought as a booty to Susa by Simti Silka, the grandfather, perhaps, of Ariaku or Ariak. In Armenia also equally important inscriptions have been found by Belk and Lehmann. More than two hundred new ones have been added to the list of Vanic texts. It has been discovered from them that the kingdom of B.N. Ainas, or Van, was founded by Ispu Ainas and Menus, who rebuilt Yann itself and the other cities which they had previously sacked and destroyed. The older name of the country was Kamusu, and it may be that the language spoken in it was allied to that of the Hittites, since a tablet in hieroglyphics of the Hittite type has been unearthed at Taprakkala. One of the newly found inscriptions of Sardurus III shows that the name of the Assyrian god, hitherto Red Raman or Riman, was really pronounced Haddad. It describes a war of the Vanic king against Asr Nirari, son of Haddad Nirari, Adda D. Nirari of Assyria, thus revealing not only the true form of the Assyrian name, but also the parentage of the last king of the older Assyrian dynasty. From another inscription, belonging to Rusas II, the son of Argystus, we learned that campaigns were carried on against Hittites and the Mashi in the later years of Sennacherib's reign, and therefore only just before the eruption of the Chamerians into the northern regions of western Asia. The two German explorers have also discovered the site and even the ruins of Muzazar, called Ardennes by the people of Van. They lie on the hill of Shkenna, near Tapsana, on the road between Kalishin and Sidak. In the immediate neighborhood the travellers succeeded in deciphering a monument of Rusas I, partly in Vanic, partly in Assyrian, from which it appears that the Vanic king did not, after all, commit suicide when the news of the fall of Muzazir was brought to him, as is stated by Sargon, but that on the contrary he marched against the mountains of Assyria and restored the fallen city itself. Erzana, the king of Muzazir, had fled to him for shelter, and after the departure of the Assyrian army he was sent back by Rusas to his ancestral domains. The whole of the district in which Muzazir was situated was termed Lulu, and was regarded as the southern province of Ararat. In it was Mount Nazir, on whose summit the Ark of the Kaldsian Noah rested, and which is therefore rightly described in the book of Genesis as one of the mountains of Ararat. It was probably the Rwandis of today. The discoveries made by Drs. Belk and Lehmann, however, have not been confined to Vanic texts. At the sources of the Tigris Dr. Lehmann has found two Assyrian inscriptions of the Assyrian king Shaumanisir II, one dated in his fifteenth and the other in his thirty-first year, and relating to his campaigns against Aram of Ararat. He has further found that the two inscriptions previously known to exist at the same spot, and believed to belong to Tiglith Ninnip and Assyr Nazirpal, are really those of Shaumanisir II, and refer to the war of his seventh year. But it is from Egypt that the most revolutionary revelations have come. At Abidos and Qam al-Amar, opposite al-Qab, monuments have been disinterred of the kings of the first and second dynasties, if not of even earlier princes. While at Nagata, north of Thebes, Mr. de Morgan has found a tomb which seems to have been that of many's himself. A new world of art has been opened out before us. Even the hieroglyphic system of writing is as yet immature and strange. But the art is already advanced in many respects. Hard stone was cut into vases and bowls, and even into statuary of considerable artistic excellence. Glazed porcelain was already made, and bronze, or rather copper, was fashioned into weapons and tools. The writing material, as in Babylonia, was often clay, over which sealed cylinders of a Babylonian pattern were rolled. Equally Babylonian are the strange and composite animals engraved on some of the objects of this early age, as well as the structure of the tombs, which were built not of stone but of crude brick, with their external walls paneled and plastered. Professor Hommel's theory, which brings Egyptian civilization from Babylonia along with the ancestors of the historical Egyptians, has thus been largely verified. But the historical Egyptians were not the first inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile. Not only have Paleolithic implements been found on the plateau of the desert, the relics of Neolithic man have turned up in extraordinary abundance. When the historical Egyptians arrived with their copper weapons and their system of writing, the land was already occupied by a pastoral people, who had attained a high level of Neolithic culture. Their implements of flint are the most beautiful and delicately finished that have ever been discovered. They were able to carve vases of great artistic excellence out of the hardest of stone, and their pottery was of no mean quality. Long after the country had come into the possession of the historical dynasties, and had even been united into a single monarchy, their settlements continued to exist on the outskirts of the desert, and the Neolithic culture that distinguished them passed only gradually away. By degrees, however, they intermingled with their conquerors from Asia, and thus formed the Egyptian race of a later day. But they had already made Egypt what it has been throughout the historical period. Under the direction of the Asiatic immigrants and of the engineering science whose first home had been in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, they accomplished those great works of irrigation which confined the Nile to its present channel, which cleared away the jungle and the swamp that had formerly bordered the desert and turned them into fertile fields. There's were the hands which carried out the plans of their more intelligent masters, and cultivated the valley when once it had been reclaimed. The Egypt of history was the creation of a twofold race. The Egyptians of the monuments supplied the controlling and directing power. The Egyptians of the Neolithic graves bestowed upon it their labor and their skill. The period treated of by Professor Mespero in these volumes is one for which there is an abundance of materials such as do not exist for the earlier portions of his history. The evidence of the monuments is supplanted by that of the Hebrew and classical writers. But on this very account it is in some respects more difficult to deal with, and the conclusions arrived at by the historian are more open to question and dispute. In some cases conflicting accounts are given of an event which seemed to rest on equally good authority. In other cases there is sudden failure of materials just where the thread of the story becomes most complicated. Of this the decline and fall of the Assyrian Empire is a prominent example. For our knowledge of it we have still to depend chiefly on the untrustworthy legends of the Greeks. Our views must be colored more or less by our estimate of Herodotus. Those who, like myself, place little or no confidence in what he tells us about Oriental affairs will naturally form a very different idea of the death struggle of Assyria, from that formed by writers who still see in him the father of Oriental history. Even where the native monuments have come to our aid they have not infrequently introduced difficulties and doubts where none seem to exist before, and have made the task of the critical historian harder than ever. Cyrus and his forefathers, for instance, turn out to have been kings of Anzen and not of Persia, thus explaining why it is that the Neo-Susian language appears by the side of the Persian and the Babylonian as one of the three official languages of the Persian Empire. But we still have to learn what was the relation of Anzen to Persia on one hand, and to Susa on the other, and when it was that Cyrus of Anzen became also king of Persia. In the Analystic Tablet he is called king of Persia for the first time in the ninth year of Nabonidos. Similar questions arise as to the position and nationality of Asciagus. He is called in the inscriptions, not Amedi, but Amanda, a name which, as I showed many years ago, meant for the Babylonian a barbarian of Kurdistan. I have myself little doubt that the manda over whom Asciagus ruled were the Scythians of classical tradition, who, as may be gathered from a text published by Mr. Strong, had occupied the ancient kingdom of Ellipi. It is even possible that in the Medias of Herodotus we have a reminiscence of the manda of cuneiform inscriptions, that the Greek writers should have confounded the mada or medis with the manda or barbarians is not surprising. We find even Barassos describing one of the early dynasties of Babylonia as Median, where manda and not mada must plainly be meant. These and similar problems, however, will doubtless be cleared up by the progress of excavation and research. Perhaps Mr. De Morgan's excavations at Susa may throw some light on them, but it is to the work of the German expedition, which has recently begun the systematic exploration of the site of Babylon, that we must chiefly look for help. The Babylon of Nabopoliser and Nebuchadnezzar rose on the ruins of Nineveh, and the story of downfall of the Assyrian Empire must still be lying buried under its mounds. A. H. Sacy. Translators' Preface In completing the translation of this great work, I have to thank Professor Mespero for kindly permitting me to appeal to him on various questions which arose while preparing the translation. His patience and courtesy have alike been unfailing in every matter submitted for his decision. I am indebted to Miss Bradbury for kindly supplying, in the midst of much other literary work for the Egypt Exploration Fund, the translation of the Chapter on the Gods, and also of the earlier parts of some of the first chapters. She has, moreover, helped me in my own share of the work, with many suggestions and hints, which are intimate connection with the late Miss Amelia B. Edwards fully qualified her to give. As in their original there is a lack of uniformity in the transcription and accentuation of Arabic names, I have ventured to alter them in several cases to the form most familiar to English readers. The spelling of the ancient Egyptian words has, at Professor Mespero's request, been retained throughout, with the exception that the French Ouh has been invariably represented by you, for example, Khnumu by Khnumu. By an act of international courtesy, the director of the imprimarine national has allowed the beautifully cut hieroglyphic and cuneiform type used in the original to be employed in the English edition, and I take advantage of this opportunity to express to him our thanks and the appreciation of his graceful act. M. L. McClure. End of introduction. Read by Professor Heather M. Baye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section I of History of Egypt Volume I by Gaston Mespero. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter I. The Nile and Egypt Part I. A long, low-level shore, scarcely rising above the sea, a chain of vaguely defined and ever-shifting lakes and marshes, then the triangular plain beyond, whose apex is thrust thirty leagues into the land, this the delta of Egypt, has gradually been acquired from the sea, and is, as it were, the gift of the Nile. The Mediterranean once reached to the foot of the sandy plateau on which stand the pyramids, and formed a wide gulf where now stretches plain beyond plain of the delta. The last undulations of the Arabian hills, from Gebel Makhatam to Gebel Genefa, were its boundaries on the east, while a sinuous and shallow channel running between Africa and Asia united the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Westward the littoral followed closely the contour of the Libyan plateau, but a long limestone spur broke away from it at about thirty-one degrees north, and terminated in Cape Abukir. The alluvial deposits first tilled up the depths of the bay, and then, under the influence of the currents which swept along its eastern coasts, accumulated behind that rampart of sandhills whose remains are still to be seen near Benha. Thus was formed a miniature delta whose structure pretty accurately corresponded with that of the great delta of today. Here the Nile divided into three divergent streams, roughly coinciding with the southern courses of the Rosetta and Damietta branches, and with the modern canal of Abu Menege. The ceaseless accumulation of mud brought down by the river soon overpassed the first limits, and steadily encroached upon the sea until it was carried beyond the shelter furnished by Cape Abukir. Thence it was gathered into the great littoral current flowing from Africa to Asia, and formed an incurvated coastline ending in the headland of Cassios on the Syrian frontier. From that time Egypt made no further increase towards the north, and her coast remains practically such as it was thousands of years ago. The interior alone has suffered change, having been dried up, hardened, and gradually raised. Its inhabitants thought they could measure the exact length of time in which this work of creation had been accomplished. According to the Egyptians, many, the first of their mortal kings, had found, so they said, the valley under water. The sea came in almost as far as the Fayum, and accepting the province of Thebes, the whole country was a pestilential swamp. Hence the necessary period for the physical formation of Egypt would cover some centuries after Menege's. This is no longer considered a sufficient length of time, and some modern geologists declare that the Nile must have worked at the formation of its own estuary for at least seventy-four thousand years. This figure is certainly exaggerated, for the alluvium would gain on the shallows of the ancient gulf far more rapidly than it gains upon the depths of the Mediterranean. But even though we reduced the period, we must still admit that the Egyptians little suspected the true age of their country. Not only did the delta long precede the coming of Menege's, but its plain was entirely completed before the first arrival of the Egyptians. The Greeks, full of the mysterious virtues which they attributed to Numbers, discovered that there were seven principal branches and seven mouths of the Nile, and that as compared with these the rest were but false mouths. As a matter of fact there were only three chief outlets. The Canopic branch flowed westward, and fell into the Mediterranean near Cape Abukir, at the western extremity of the ark described by the coastline. The Peluseic branch followed the length of the Arabian chain, and flowed forth at the other extremity, and the Seminitic stream almost bisected the triangle contained between the Canopic and Peluseic channels. Two thousand years ago these branches separated from the main river at the city of Circusaurus, nearly four miles north of the site where Cairo now stands. But after the Peluseic branch had ceased to exist, the fork of the river gradually wore away from the land from age to age, and is now some nine miles lower down. These three great waterways are united by a network of artificial rivers and canals, and by ditches, some natural, others dug by the hand of man, but all ceaselessly shifting. They silt up, close, open again, replace each other, and ramify in innumerable branches over the surface of the soil, spreading life and fertility on all sides. As the land rises towards the south, this web contracts and is less confused, while black mold and cultivation alike dwindle, and the fawn-colored line of the desert comes into sight. The Libyan and Arabian hills appear above the plain, draw nearer to each other, and gradually shut in the horizon until it seems as though they would unite. And there the delta ends, and Egypt proper has begun. It is only a strip of vegetable mold stretching north and south between the regions of drought and desolation, a prolonged oasis on the banks of the river, made by the Nile and sustained by the Nile. The whole length of the land is shut in between two ranges of hills, roughly parallel at a mean distance of about twelve miles. During the earlier ages the river filled all this intermediate space, and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very summits, still bear the unmistakable traces of its action. Wasted and shrunken within the depths of its ancient bed, the stream now makes a way through its own thick deposits of mud. The bulk of its waters keep to the east, and constitutes the true Nile, the great river of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. A second arm flows close to the Libyan desert, here and there formed into canals, elsewhere left to follow its own course. From the head of the delta to the village of Dempte it is called the Bar-Yusuf, beyond Eirut, up to Gebel-Silsila, it is the Ibrahemia, the Sohagia, the Rayan. But the ancient names are unknown to us. The western Nile dries up in winter throughout all its upper courses, where it continues to flow. It is by scantiest sessions from the main Nile. It also divides north of Hennessia, and by the gorge of Ilahun sends out a branch which passes beyond the hills into the basin of the Fayern. The true Nile, the eastern Nile, is less a river than a sinuous lake encumbered with islets and sand-banks, and its navigable channel winds capriciously between them, flowing with a strong and steady current below the steep, black banks cut sheer through the alluvial earth. There are light groves of the date-palm, groups of acacia trees and sycamores, square patches of barley or of wheat, fields of beans or of bersim, and here and there a long bank of sand which the least breeze raises into whirling clouds. And overall there breeds a great silence, scarcely broken by the cry of birds or the song of rowers in a passing boat. Something of human life may stir on the banks, but it is softened into poetry by distance. A half-failed woman bearing a bundle of herbs upon her head is driving her goats before her. An irregular line of asses or of laden camels emerges from one hollow of the undulating road, only to disappear within another. A group of peasants, crouched upon the shore in the ancient posture of knees to chin, patiently awaits the return of the ferryboat. A dainty village looks forth smiling from beneath its palm trees. Near at hand it is all naked filth and ugliness, a cluster of low grey huts built of mud and lathe, two or three taller houses whitewashed, an enclosed square shaded by sycamores, a few old men each seated peacefully at his own door, a confusion of fowls, children, goats, and sheep, half a dozen boats made fast ashore. But as we pass on, the wretchedness all fades away, meanness of detail is lost in light, and long before it disappears at a bend of the river, the village is again clothed with gaiety and serene beauty. Day by day the landscape repeats itself. The same groups of trees alternate with the same fields, growing green or dusty in the sunlight according to the season of the year. With the same measured flow the Nile winds beneath its steep banks and about its scattered islands. One village succeeds another, each alike smiling and sorted under its crown of foliage. The terraces of the Libyan hills, away beyond the western Nile, scarcely rise above the horizon, and lie like a white edging between the green of the plain and the blue of the sky. The Arabian hills do not form one unbroken line, but a series of mountain masses with their spurs, now approaching the river, and now withdrawing to the desert at almost regular intervals. At the entrance to the valley rise Gebel Mokatam and Gebel El Ammar. Gebel Hemer Shemuel and Gebel Sheikh Embarak next stretch in Echelon from north to south, and are succeeded by Gebel Et Ter, where according to an old legend all the birds of the world are annually assembled. Then follows Gebel Abu Feda, dreaded by the sailors for its sudden gusts, limestone predominates throughout, white or yellowish, broken by veins of alabaster, or of red and gray sandstones. Its horizontal strata are so symmetrically laid one above another as to seem more like the walls of a town than the side of a mountain. But time has often dismantled their summits and loosened their foundations. Man has broken into their facades to cut his quarries and his tombs, while the current is secretly undermining the base, wherein it has made many a breach. As soon as any margin of mud has collected between cliffs and river, halfa and wild plants take hold upon it, and date palms grow there, whence their seed no one knows. Presently a hamlet rises at the mouth of the ravine among clusters of trees and fields and miniature. Beyond suit the light becomes more glowing, the air drier and more vibrating, and the green of cultivation loses its brightness. The angular outline of the dome palm mingles more and more with that of the common palm and the heavy sycamore, and the castor oil plant increasingly abounds. But all these changes come about so gradually that they are affected before we notice them. The plain continues to contract. At Thebes it is still ten miles wide. At the gorge of Ghebelin it has almost disappeared, and at Ghebel Silsila it has completely vanished. There it was crossed by a natural dike of sandstone, under which the waters have with difficulty scooped for themselves a passage. From this point Egypt is nothing but the bed of the Nile lying between two escarpments of naked rock. Further on the cultivable land reappears, but narrowed and changed almost beyond recognition. Hills hewn out of solid standstone succeed each other at distances of about two miles, low, crushed, somber and formless. Presently a forest of palm trees, the last on that side, announces Aswan and Nubia. Five banks of granite ranged in lines between latitude twenty-four degrees and eighteen degrees north, cross Nubia from east to west, and from northeast to southwest, like so many ramparts thrown up between the Mediterranean and the heart of Africa. The Nile has attacked them from behind, and made its way over them one after another in rapids, which have been glorified by the name of Catarax. Classic riders were pleased to describe the river as hurled into the gulfs of Sine with so great a roar that the people of the neighborhood were deafened by it. Even a colony of Persians, sent thither by Cambesis, could not bear the noise of the falls, and went forth to seek a quieter situation. The first Catarax is a kind of sloping insinuous passage six and a quarter miles in length, descending from the island of Filet to the port of Aswan, the aspect of its approach relieved and brightened by the ever-green groves of Elephantine. The Elephantine are cliffs of sandy beaches, chains of blackened Roche-Moutonnayes, marking out the beds of the currents, and fantastic reefs, sometimes bare and sometimes veiled by long grasses and climbing plants, in which thousands of birds have made their nests. There are islets, too, occasionally large enough to have once supported something of a population, such as Emerald, Salug, Sahil. The granite threshold of Nubia is broken beyond Sahil, but its debris, massed in disorder against the right bank, still seem to dispute the passage of the waters, dashing turbulently and roaring as they flow along through torturous channels, where every streamlet is broken up into small cascades, the channel running by the left bank is always navigable. During the inundation the rocks and sandbanks of the ride are completely under water, and their presence is only betrayed by eddies. But on the rivers reaching its lowest point, a fall of some six feet is established, and there, big boats, hugging the shore, are hauled up by means of ropes, or easily drift down with the current. End of Section 1 End of Section 1 Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 2 of History of Egypt Volume 1 by Gaston Maspero Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 1 The Nile and Egypt, Part 2 All kinds of granite are found together in this corner of Africa. There are the pink and red cyanites, porphyritic granite, yellow granite, gray granite, both black granite and white, and granites veined with black and veined with white. As soon as these disappear behind us, various sandstones begin to crop up, allied to the coarsest calcare-grossier. The hills bristle with small split blocks, with peaks half overturned, with rough and denuded mounds. League beyond league they stretch in low, ignoble outline. Here and there a valley opens sharply into the desert, revealing an infinite perspective of summits and escarpments in echelon, one behind another, to the furthest plain of the horizon, like motionless caravans. The now confined river rushes on with a low, deep murmur, made night and day by the croaking of frogs and the rhythmic creek of the Saquilla. Jetties of rough stonework, made in unknown times by an unknown people, run out like breakwaters into mid-stream. From time to time waves of sand are born over, and drown the narrow fields of dura and of barley. Scraps of close, aromatic pasturage, acacia's, date-palms, and dome-palms, together with a few shriveled sycamores, are scattered along both banks. The ruins of a crumbling pylon mark the side of some ancient city, and overhanging the water is a vertical wall of rock honeycombed with tombs. Amid these relics of another age, miserable huts, scattered hamlets, a town or two surrounded with little gardens, are the only evidence that there is yet life in Nubia. South of Wadi-Halfa, the second granite bank is broken through, and the second cataract spreads its rapids over a length of four leagues. The archipelago numbers more than three hundred and fifty islets, of which some sixty have houses upon them, and yield harvest to their inhabitants. The main characteristics of the first two cataracts are repeated with slight variation in the cases of the three which follow, at Hanuk, at Guarandeed, and El-Humar. It is Egypt still, but a joyless Egypt bereft of its brightness, impoverished, disfigured, and almost desolate. There is the same double wall of hills, now closely confining the valley, and again withdrawing from each other as though to flee into the desert. Everywhere are moving sheets of sand, steep black bangs with their narrow strips of cultivation, villages which are scarcely visible on account of the lowness of their huts. Sycamore ceases at Gebel Barkle. Date palms become fewer and finally disappear. The Nile alone has not changed. And it was at Filet, so it is at Berber. Here, however, on the right bank, six hundred leagues from the sea, is its first effluent, the Dakhaze, which intermittently brings to it the waters of northern Ethiopia. At Khartoum, the single channel in which the river flowed divides, and two other streams are opened up in a southerly direction, each of them apparently equal in volume to the main stream. Which is the true Nile? Is it the Blue Nile, which seems to come down from the distant mountains? Or is it the White Nile, which has traversed the immense planes of equatorial Africa? The old Egyptians never knew. The river kept the secret of its source from them as obstinately as it withheld it from us until a few years ago. Vanely did their victorious armies follow the Nile for months together as they pursued the tribes who dwelt upon its banks, only to find it as wide, as full, as irresistible in its progress as ever. It was a freshwater sea, and sea Eoma Eoma was the name by which they called it. The Egyptians, therefore, never sought its source. They imagined the whole universe to be a large box, nearly rectangular in form, whose greatest diameter was from south to north, and its least from east to west. The earth, with its alternate continents and seas, formed the bottom of the box. It was a narrow, oblong, and slightly concave floor, with Egypt in its center. The sky stretched over it like an iron ceiling, flat, according to some, vaulted according to others. Its earthward face was capriciously sprinkled with lamps hung from strong cables, and which, extinguished or unperceived by day, were lighted or became visible to our eyes at night. Since this ceiling could not remain in mid-air without support, four columns, or rather four forked trunks of trees, similar to those which maintained to the primitive house, were supposed to uphold it. But it was doubtless feared lest some tempest should overturn them, for they were superseded by four lofty peaks, rising at the four cardinal points, and connected by a continuous chain of mountains. The Egyptians knew little of the northern peak, the Mediterranean, the very green, interposed between it and Egypt, and prevented their coming near enough to see it. The southern peak was named Apit the Horn of the Earth. That on the east was called Bakhu, the Mountain of Birth, and the western peak was known as Manu, sometimes as Ankhit, the region of Lype. Bakhu was not a fictitious mountain, but the highest of those distant summits seen from the Nile and looking towards the Red Sea. In the same way Manu answered to some hill of the Libyan desert, whose summit closed the horizon. When it was discovered that neither Bakhu nor Manu were the limits of the world, the notion of upholding the celestial roof was not on that account given up. It was only necessary to withdraw the pillars from sight, and imagine fabulous peaks invested with familiar names. These were not supposed to form the actual boundary of the universe, a great river, analogous to the ocean stream of the Greeks, lay between them and its utmost limits. This river circulated upon a kind of ledge projecting along the sides of the box, a little below the continuous mountain chain upon which the starry heavens were sustained. On the north of the ellipse the river was bordered by a steep and abrupt bank, which took its rise at the peak of Manu on the west, and soon rose high enough to form a screen between the river and the earth. The narrow valley which hid it from view was known as Da'it, from remotest times. Eternal night enfolded that valley in thick darkness and filled it with dense air such as no living being could breathe. Towards the east the steep bank rapidly declined and ceased altogether, a little beyond Baku, while the river flowed on between low and almost level shores from east to south, and then from south to west. The sun was a disk of fire placed upon a boat. At the same equable rate the river carried it round the ramparts of the world. From evening until morning it disappeared within the gorges of Da'it. Its light did not then reach us and it was night. From morning until evening its rays, being no longer intercepted by any obstacle, were freely shed abroad from one end of the box to the other and it was day. The Nile branched off from the celestial river at its southern bend. Hence the south was the chief cardinal point to the Egyptians, and by that they oriented themselves, placing sunrise to their left and sunset to their right. After they passed beyond the defiles of Gebel Silsila they thought that the spot, once the celestial waters left the sky, was situate between Elephantine and Phile, and that they descended in an immense waterfall whose last leaps were at Sain. It may be that the tales about the first cataract, told by classical writers, are but a far-off echo of this tradition of a barbarous age. Conquests carried into the heart of Africa forced the Egyptians to recognize their error, but did not weaken their faith in the supernatural origin of the river. They only placed its source farther south, and surrounded it with greater marvels. They told how, by going up the stream, sailors at length reached an undetermined country, a kind of borderland between this world and the next, a land of shades whose inhabitants were dwarves, monsters, or spirits. Thence they passed into a sea sprinkled with mysterious islands, like those enchanted archipelagos which Portuguese and Breton mariners were want to see at times when on their voyages and which vanished at their approach. These islands were inhabited by serpents with human voices, sometimes friendly and sometimes cruel to the shipwrecked. He who went forth from the islands could never more re-enter them. They were resolved into the waters and lost within the bosom of the waves. A modern geographer can hardly comprehend such fancies. Those of Greek and Roman times were perfectly familiar with them. They believed that the Nile communicated with the Red Sea near Suakin by means of the Astaborus, and this was certainly the route which the Egyptians of old had imagined for their navigators. The supposed communication was gradually transferred farther and farther south, and we have only to glance over certain maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see clearly drawn what the Egyptians had imagined. The center of Africa is a great lake, once issued the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Nile. Arab merchants of the Middle Ages believed that a resolute man could pass from Alexandria or Cairo to the land of the Zingis and the Indian Ocean by rising from river to river. Many of the legends relating to this subject are lost, while others have been collected and embellished with fresh features by Jewish and Christian theologians. The Nile was said to have its source in paradise, to traverse burning regions inaccessible to man, and afterwards to fall into a sea once it made its way to Egypt. Sometimes it carried down from its celestial sources branches and fruits unlike any to be found on earth. The sea mentioned in all these tales is perhaps a less extravagant invention than we are at first inclined to think. A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nianza, once covered the marshy plain where the bar al-Abyad unites with the sobat and with the bar el-Gozal. Alluvial deposits have filled up all but its deepest depression, which is known as Burkhet Nuh. But in ages preceding our own it must still have been vast enough to suggest to Egyptian soldiers and boatmen the idea of an actual sea opening into the Indian Ocean. The mountains, whose outline was vaguely seen far to southward on the further shores, doubtless contained within them its mysterious source. There the inundation was made ready, and there it began upon a fixed day. The celestial Nile had its periodic rise and fall, on which those of the earthly Nile depended. Every year, towards the middle of June, Isis, mourning for Osiris, let fall into it one of the tiers which she shed over her brother, and thereupon the river swelled and descended upon earth. Isis has had no devotees for centuries, and her very name is unknown to the descendants of her worshipers, but the tradition of her fertilizing tears has survived her memory. Even to this day, every one in Egypt, Muslim or Christian, knows that a divine drop falls from heaven during the night between the seventeenth and eighteenth of June, and forthwith brings about the rise of the Nile. Swollen by the rains which fall in February over the region of the Great Lakes, the white Nile rushes northward, sweeping before it the stagnant sheets of water left by the inundation of the previous year. On the left, the bar El Ghazal brings it to the overflow of the ill-defined basin, stretching between Darfur and the Congo. And the sobat pours in on the right a tribute from the rivers which furrow the southern slopes of the Abyssinian Mountains. The first swell passes cartoon by the end of April, and raises the water level there by about a foot. Then it slowly makes its way through Nubia, and dies away in Egypt at the beginning of June. Its waters, infected by half-putrid organic matter from the equatorial swamps, are not completely freed from it even in the course of this long journey, but keep a greenish tint as far as the delta. They are said to be poisonous, and to give severe pains in the bladder to any who may drink them. I am bound to say that every June for five years I drank this green water from the Nile itself, without taking any other precaution than the usual one of filtering it through a porous jar. Near I, nor the many people living with me, ever felt the slightest inconvenience from it. Happily, this green Nile does not last long, but generally flows away in three or four days, and is only the forerunner of the real flood. The melting of the snows and the excessive spring rains having suddenly swollen the torrents which rise in the central plateau of Abyssinia, the blue Nile, into which they flow, rolls so impetuously towards the plain that, when its waters reach cartoom in the middle of May, they refuse to mingle with those of the white Nile, and do not use their peculiar color before reaching the neighborhood of Abu Hamad, three hundred miles below. From that time the height of the Nile increases rapidly day by day. The river, constantly reinforced by floods following one upon another from the Great Lakes and from Abyssinia, rises in furious bounds, and would become a devastating torrent where its rage not checked by the Nubian cataracts. There are six basins, one above another, in which the water collects, check its course, and permit it to flow thence only as a partially filtered and moderated stream. It is signaled at Syene towards the eighth of June, at Cairo by the seventeenth to the twentieth, and there its birth is officially celebrated during the night of the drop. Two days later it reaches the delta, just in time to save the country from drought and sterility. Egypt, burnt up by the Khamsin, a west wind blowing continuously for fifty days, seems nothing more than an extension of the desert. The trees are covered and choked by a layer of gray dust. About the villages, meager and laboriously watered patches of vegetables struggle for life, while some show of green still lingers along the canals, and in hollows, whence all moisture has not yet evaporated. The plain lies panting in the sun, naked, dusty, and ashen, scoured with intersecting cracks as far as the eye can see. The Nile is only half its usual width, and holds not more than a twentieth of the volume of water which is born down in October. It has at first hard work to recover its former bed, and attains it by such subtle gradations that the rise is scarcely noted. It is, however, continually gaining ground. Here a sand bank is covered, there an empty channel is filled. Islets are outlined, where there was a continuous beach. A new stream detaches itself and gains the old shore. The first contact is disastrous to the banks. Their steep sides, disintegrated and cracked by the heat, no longer offer any resistance to the current, and fall with a crash in lengths of a hundred yards and more. CHAPTER I As the successive floods grow stronger and are more heavily charged with mud, the whole mass of water becomes turbid and changes color. In eight or ten days it has turned from grayish blue to dark red. Occasionally if so intense a color is to look like newly shed blood. The red Nile is not unwholesome like the green Nile, and the suspended mud to which it owes its suspicious appearance deprives the water of none of its freshness and lightness. It reaches its full height towards the fifteenth of July, but the dykes which confine it, and the barriers constructed across the mouths of canals, still prevent it from overflowing. The Nile must be considered high enough to submerge the land adequately before it is set free. The ancient Egyptians measured its height by cubits of twenty-one and a quarter inches. At fourteen cubits they pronounced it an excellent Nile. Below thirteen, or above fifteen, it was accounted insufficient or excessive, and in either case meant famine and perhaps pestilence at hand. To this day the natives watched its advance with the same anxious eagerness, and from the third of July public criers walking the streets of Cairo, announced each morning what progress it has made since evening. More or less authentic traditions assert that the prelude to the opening of the canals, in the time of the pharaohs, was the solemn casting to the waters of a young girl decked as for her bridal, the bride of the Nile. Even after the Arab conquest the eruption of the river into the bosom of the land was considered as an actual marriage. The contract was drawn up by Akhadi, and witnesses confirmed its consummation with the most fantastic formalities of Oriental ceremonial. It is generally between the first and sixteenth of July that it is decided to break through the dykes. When that proceeding has been solemnly accomplished in state, the flood still takes several days to fill the canals, and afterwards spreads over the low lands, advancing little by little to the very edge of the desert. District is then one sheet of turbid water spreading between two lines of rock and sand, flecked with green and black spots where there are towns or where the ground rises, and divided into irregular compartments by raised roads connecting the villages. In Nubia the river attains its greatest height towards the end of August, at Cairo and in the delta, not until three weeks or a month later. For about eight days it remains stationary, and then begins to fall imperceptibly. Sometimes there is a new freshet in October, and the river again increases in height. But the rise is unsustained. Once more it falls as rapidly as it rose, and by December the river has completely retired to the limits of its bed. One after another the streams which fed it fail or dwindle. The Takaze is lost among the sands before rejoining it, and the blue Nile, well-nigh deprived of tributaries, is but scantily maintained by Abyssinian snows. The white Nile is indebted to the Great Lakes for the greater persistence of its waters, which feed the river as far as the Mediterranean, and save the valley from utter drought in winter. But even with this resource the level of the water falls daily, and its volume is diminished. Long hidden sandbanks reappear, and are again linked into continuous line. Islands expand by the rise of shingly beaches, which gradually reconnect them with each other and with the shore. More branches of the river cease to flow, and form a mere network of stagnant pools and muddy ponds, which fast dry up. The main channel itself is only intermittently navigable, after March boats run aground in it, and are forced to await the return of the inundation for their release. From the middle of April to the middle of June, Egypt is only half alive, awaiting the new Nile. Those ready and heavily charged waters, rising and retiring with almost mathematical regularity, bring and leave the spoils of the countries they have traversed—sand for Nubia, whitish clay from the regions of the lakes, pharaginus mud, and the various rock formations of Abyssinia. These materials are not uniformly disseminated in the deposits, their precipitation being regulated both by their specific gravity and the velocity of the current. Flattened stones and rounded pebbles are left behind at the cataract between Sain and Kenna, while coarser particles of sand are suspended in the undercurrents, and serve to raise the bed of the river, or are carried out to sea and form the sandbanks which are slowly rising at the Damietta and Rosetta mouths of the Nile. The mud and finer particles rise towards the surface, and are deposited upon the land after the opening of the dykes. Soil which is entirely dependent on the deposit of a river and periodically invaded by it necessarily maintains but a scanty flora, and though it is well known that, as a general rule, flora is rich in proportion to its distance from the poles and its approach to the equator, it is also admitted that Egypt offers an exception to this rule. At the most she has not more than a thousand species, while with equal area, England, for instance, possesses more than fifteen hundred, and of this thousand the greater number are not indigenous. Many of them have been brought from Central Africa by the river, birds and winds have continued the work, and man himself has contributed his part in making it more complete. From Asia he has at different times brought wheat barley, the olive, the apple, the white or pink almond, and some twenty other species now acclimatized on the banks of the Nile. Marsh plants predominate in the delta, but the papyrus and the three varieties of blue, white, and pink lotus which once flourished there, being no longer cultivated, have now almost entirely disappeared and reverted to their original habitats. The sycamore and the date palm, both importations from Central Africa, have better adapted themselves to their exile, and are now fully naturalized on Egyptian soil. The sycamore grows in sand on the edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely, even where drought seems to reign supreme. The heavy, squat, gnarled trunk occasionally attains to colossal dimensions, without ever growing very high. Its rounded masses of compact foliage are so widespread that a single tree in the distance may give the impression of several grouped together, and its shade is dense and impenetrable to the sun. A striking contrast to the sycamore is presented by the date palm. Its round and slender stem rises uninterruptedly to a height of thirteen to sixteen yards. Its head is crowned with a cluster of flexible leaves arranged in two or three tiers, but so scanty, so pitilessly slit, that they fail to keep off the light, and cast but a slight and unrefreshing shadow. Few trees have so elegant an appearance, yet few are so monotonously elegant. There are palm trees to be seen on every hand, isolated, clustered by twos and threes at the mouths of ravines and about the villages, planted in regular file along the banks of the river, like rows of columns, symmetrically arranged in plantations. These are the invariable background against which other trees are grouped, diversifying the landscape. The feathery tamarisk, and the nopk, the moringa, the garab, or locust tree, several varieties of acacia and mimosa, the saunt, the mimosa habas, the white acacia, the acacia parnitsana, and the pomegranate tree, increase in number with the distance from the Mediterranean. The dry air of the valley is marvelously suited to them, but makes the tissue of their foliage hard and fibrous, imparting an aerial aspect, and such faded tints as are unknown to their growth in other climates. The greater number of these trees do not reproduce themselves spontaneously, and tend to disappear when neglected. The acacia sail, formerly abundant by the banks of the river, is now almost entirely confined to certain valleys of the Theban Desert, along with a variety of the kernel dome palm, of which a poetical description has come down to us from the ancient Egyptians. The common dome palm bifurcates at eight or ten yards from the ground. These branches are subdivided, and terminate in bunches of twenty to thirty palm-eight and fibrous leaves, six to eight feet long. At the beginning of this century the tree was common in upper Egypt, but is now becoming scarce, and we are within measurable distance of the time when its presence will be an exception north of the first cataract. Willows are decreasing in number, and the persia, one of the sacred trees of ancient Egypt, is now only to be found in gardens. None of the remaining tree species are common enough to grow in large clusters, and Egypt, reduced to her lofty groves of date palms, presents the singular spectacle of a country where there is no lack of trees, but an almost entire absence of shade. If Egypt is a land of imported flora, it is also a land of imported fauna, and all its animal species have been brought from neighboring countries. Some of these, as for example the horse and the camel, were only introduced at a comparatively recent period, two thousand to eighteen hundred years before our era, the camel still later. The animals, such as the long and short horned oxen, together with varieties of goats and dogs, are like the plants generally of African origin, and the ass of Egypt preserves an original purity of form and a vigor to which the European donkey has long been a stranger. The pig and the wild boar, the long-eared hare, the hedge hog, the iknumian, the mufflon or mane sheep, innumerable gazelles, including the Egyptian gazelles, and antelopes with leers-shaped horns are as much West Asian as African, like the carnivores of all sizes, whose prey they are, the wild cat, the wolf, the jackal, the striped and spotted hyenas, the leopard, the panther, the hunting leopard, and the lion. On the other hand, most of the serpents, large and small, are indigenous. Some are harmless, like the kalubbers. Others are venomous, such as the soy-tail, the serasties, the hajj viper, and the asp. The asp was worshipped by the Egyptians under the name of Aureus. It occasionally attains to a length of six and a half feet, and when approached will erect its head and inflate its throat in readiness for darting forward. The bite is fatal, like that of the serasties. Birds are literally struck down by the strength of the poison, while the great mammals and man himself almost invariably succumb to it after a longer or shorter death struggle. The aureus is rarely found except in the desert or in the fields. The scorpion crawls everywhere, in desert and city alike, and if its sting is not always followed by death, it invariably causes terrible pain. Probably there were once several kinds of gigantic serpent in Egypt, analogous to the pythons of equatorial Africa. They are still to be seen in representations of funerary scenes, but not elsewhere, for like the elephant, the giraffe, and other animals which now only thrive far south, they had disappeared at the beginning of historic times. The hippopotamus long maintained its ground before returning to those equatorial regions once it had been brought by the Nile. Common under the first dynasties, but afterwards withdrawing to the marshes of the delta, it there continued to flourish up to the thirteenth century of our era. The crocodile, which came with it, has, like it also, been compelled to be to retreat. Lord of the river throughout all ancient times, worshipped and protected in some provinces, excrated and proscribed in others, it might still be seen in the neighborhood of Cairo towards the beginning of our century. In 1840 it no longer passed beyond the neighborhood of Gebet at Tehr, nor beyond that of Manfalut. Thirty years later Mariette asserted that it was steadily retreating before the guns of tourists, and the disturbance which the regular passing of steamboats produced in the deep waters. Today, no one knows of a single crocodile existing below Aswan, but it continues to infest Nubia and the rocks of the first cataract. One of them is occasionally carried down by the current into Egypt, where it is speedily dispatched by the Felaen, or by some traveler in quest of adventure. The fertility of the soil and the vastness of the lakes and marshes attract many migratory birds. Passerinae and palm-petties flock thither from all parts of the Mediterranean. Our European swallows, our quails, our geese and wild ducks, our herons, to mention only the most familiar, come here to winter, sheltered from cold and inclement weather. Chapter 1 The Nile and Egypt, Part 4 Even the non-migratory birds are really, for the most part, strangers acclimatized by long sojourn. Some of them, the turtledove, the magpie, the kingfisher, the partridge, and the sparrow, may be clasped with our European species, while others betray their equatorial origin in the brightness of their colors. White and black ibises, red flamingos, pelicans and cormorants enliven the waters of the river and animate the reedy swamps of the delta in infinite variety. They are to be seen ranged in long files upon the sandbanks, ringing and basking in the sun. Suddenly the flock is seized with panic, rises heavily, and settles away further off. In hollows of the hills, eagle and falcon, the merlin, the bald-headed vulture, the kestrel, the golden sparrow-hop, find inaccessible retreats, whence they descend upon the plains like so many pillaging and well-armed barons. A thousand little chattering birds come at eventide to perch in flocks upon the frail boughs of tamarisk and acacia. Many sea-fish make their way upstream to fish in fresh waters, shad, mullet, perch, and labris, and carry their excursions far into the syed. Those species which are not Mediterranean came originally, still come annually, from the heart of Ethiopia, with the inundation of the Nile, including two kinds of Alestes, the Eld Turtle, the Bagris Dogmuk, and the Marmaris. Some attain to a gigantic size, the Bagris Bayad and the Turtle to about one yard, the Lattice to three-and-a-half yards in length, while others, such as the Sylvris, or Catfish, are noted for their electric properties. Nature seems to have made the Fayaka, the globe-fish, in a fit of playfulness. It is a long fish from beyond the cataracts, and it is carried by the Nile the more easily on account of the faculty it has, of filling itself with air, and inflating its body at will. When swelled out immoderately, the Fayaka overbalances and drifts along upside down, its belly to the wind, covered with spikes so that it looks like a hedgehog. During the inundation it floats with the current from one canal to another, and is cast by the retreating waters upon the muddy fields, where it becomes the prey of birds or of jackals, or serves as a plaything for children. Everything is dependent upon the river, the soil, the produce of the soil, the species of animals it bears, the birds which it feeds, and hence it was the Egyptians placed the river among their gods. They personified it as a man with regular features, and a vigorous and portly body, such as befits the rich of high lineage. His breasts, fully developed like those of a woman, though less firm, hang heavily upon a wide bosom where the fat lies and folds. A narrow girdle, whose end falls free about the thighs, supports his spacious abdomen, and his attire is completed by sandals and a close fitting headdress, generally surmounted with a crown of water plants. Sometimes water springs from his breast, sometimes he presents a frog or libation vases, or holds a bundle of the cruces ansado as symbols of life, or bears a flat tray full of offerings, bunches of flowers, ears of corn, heaps of fish, and geese tied together by the feet. The inscriptions call him Hopi, father of the gods, lord of sustenance, who maketh food to be, and covereth the two lands of Egypt with his products, who giveth life, banisheth want, and filleth the granaries to overflowing. He is evolved into two personages, one being sometimes colored red and the other blue. The former, who wears a cluster of lotus flowers upon his head, presides over the Egypt of the south. The latter has a bunch of papyrus for his headdress, and watches over the delta. Two goddesses, corresponding to the two Hopis, Merit Kimet for Upper and Merit Mahit for Lower Egypt, personified the banks of the river. They are often represented as standing without stretched arms, as though begging for the water which should make them fertile. The Nile god had his chapel in every province, and priests whose ride it was to bury all bodies of men or beasts cast up by the river, for the god had claimed them and to his servants they belonged. Several towns were dedicated to him, Hatt Hopi, Nuit Hopi, Nilopolis. It was told in the Theobod how the god dwelt within a grotto, or shrine, Tupheet, in the island of Hbiga, whence he issued at the Enundation. This tradition dates from a time when the cataract was believed to be at the end of the world, and to bring down the heavenly river upon earth. Two yawning gulps, kauriti, at the foot of the two granite cliffs, moniti, between which it ran, gave access to this mysterious retreat. A bowerly from filet represents blocks of stone piled one above another, the vulture of the south and the hawk of the north, each perched on a summit, wearing a panther skin, with both arms upheld in adoration. The statue is mutilated, the end of the nose, the beard, and part of the tray have disappeared, but are restored in the illustration. The two little birds hanging alongside the geese, together with a bunch of ears of corn, are fat quails, and the circular chamber wherein Hopi crouches concealed, clasping a libation vase in either hand. A single coil of a serpent outlines the contour of this chamber, and leaves a narrow passage between its overlapping head and tail, through which the rising waters may overflow at the time appointed, bringing to Egypt all things good and sweet and pure, whereby gods and men are fed. Towards the summer solstice, at the very moment when the sacred water from the gulfs of Sain reached Silsila, the priests of the place, sometimes the reigning sovereign, or one of his sons, sacrificed a bull and geese, and then cast into the waters a sealed roll of papyrus. This was a written order to do all that might ensure to Egypt the benefits of a normal inundation. When Pharaoh himself deigned to officiate, the memory of the event was preserved by Estela engraved upon the rocks. Even in his absence the festivals of the Nile were among the most solemn and joyous of the land. According to a tradition transmitted from age to age, the prosperity or adversity of the year was dependent upon the splendor and fervor with which they were celebrated. Had the faithful shown the slightest lukewarmness, the Nile might have refused to obey the command, and failed to spread freely over the surface of the country. Peasants from a distance, each bringing his own provisions, ate their meals together for days, and lived in a state of brutal intoxication as long as this kind of fair lasted. On the great day itself the priests came forth in procession from the sanctuary, bearing the statue of the God along the banks, to the sound of instruments and the chanting of hymns. 1. Hail to thee, Hapi, who appearest in the land and comeest to give life to Egypt, thou who dost hide thy coming in darkness, in this very day whereon thy coming is some, wave which spreadest over the orchards created by Ra, to give life to all of them that are thirst, who refuses to give drink unto the desert, of the overflow of the waters of heaven, as soon as thou descendest, Sibu, the earth God, is enamored of bread, Napri, the God of grain, presents his offering, Fatah maketh every workshop to prosper. 2. Lord of the fish, as soon as he passeth the cataract, the birds no longer descend upon the fields, creator of corn, maker of barley, he prolongeth the existence of temples. Do his fingers cease from their labours, or doth he suffer? Then are the millions of beings in misery. Doth he wane in heaven? Then the gods themselves, and all men perish. 3. The cattle are driven mad, and all the world, both great and small, are in torment. But if on the contrary the prayers of men are heard at this rising, and for them he maketh himself canoe-moo, when he arises, then the earth shouts for joy. Then are all bellies joyful, each back is shaken with laughter, and every tooth grindeth. 4. Bringing food, rich in sustenance, creator of all good things, lord of all seeds of life, pleasant unto his elect, if his friendship is secured, he produceeth fodder for the cattle, and he provideeth for the sacrifices of all the gods. Finer than any other is the incense which cometh from him. He taketh possession of the two lands, and the granaries are filled, the storehouses are prosperous, and the goods of the poor are multiplied. 5. He is at the service of all prayers to answer them, withholding nothing. To make boats to be that is his strength. Stones are not sculptured for him, nor statues whereon the double crown is placed. He is unseen. No tribute is paid unto him, and no offerings are brought unto him. He is not charmed by words of mystery. The place of his dwelling is unknown, nor can his shrine be found by virtue of magic writings. 6. There is no house large enough for thee, nor any who may penetrate within thy heart. Nevertheless the generations of thy children rejoice in thee, for thou dost rule as a king, whose decrees are established for the whole earth, who is manifest in presence of the people of the south and of the north, by whom the tears are washed from every eye, and who is lavish of his bounties. 7. Where sorrow was, there doth break forth joy, and every heart rejoiceth. Sovku, the crocodile, the child of Nitt, leaps for gladness, for the nine gods who accompany thee have ordered all things. The overflow giveth drink unto the fields, and maketh all men valiant. One man taketh to drink of the labour of another, without charge being brought against him. 8. If thou dost enter in the midst of songs to go forth in the midst of gladness, if they dance with joy when thou comest forth of the unknown, it is that thy heaviness is death and corruption. And when thou art implored to give the water of the year, the people of the Theobod and the North are seen side by side, each man with the tools of his trade, none terrieth behind his neighbour, of all those who clothe themselves, no man clotheeth himself with festive garments. The children of thought, the god of riches, no longer adorn themselves with jewels, nor the nine gods, but they are in the night. As soon as thou hast answered by the rising, each one anointed himself with perfumes. 9. Establisher of true riches, desire of men, hear our seductive words in order that thou mayest reply. If thou dost answer mankind by ways of the heavenly ocean, Napri, the grain god, presents his offering. All the gods ador thee, the birds no longer descend upon the hills, though that which thy hand formeth were of gold, or in the shape of a brick of silver. It is not lapis lazuli that we eat, but wheat is of more worth than precious stones. 10. They have begun to sing unto thee upon the heart. They sing unto thee, keeping time with their hands, and the generations of thy children rejoice in thee, and they have filled thee with salutations of praise, for it is the god of riches who adorneth the earth, who maketh barks to prosper in the sight of men, who rejoiceth the heart of women with child, who loveth the increase of the flocks. 11. When thou art risen in the city of the prince, then is the rich man filled, the small man, the poor, disdaineth the lotus. All is solid and of good quality. All herbage is for his children. Doth he forget to give food? Prosperity forsakeeth the dwellings, and earth falleth into a wasting sickness. CHAPTER I. The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Kiti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hopi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phrases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition. Perhaps it was taken from the temple name of Memphis, Aycufta, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomitu, Botu, and their country, Kimit, the Black Land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well-determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine, furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening, but looking eastward from the valley they could see the peak of Baku, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man. Some of these regions lay the beginnings of Tonutri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert. Northward the world came to an end toward the Lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning place of souls after death. As regards the South, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Silsila, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsila, the province of Konusit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had, as it were, marked out their frontiers continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. Baku and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme east and west. Necabit and Buto, the most populous towns in the neighborhoods of Gebel Silsila and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate south and north. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, and the country once it came, the races to which they belonged, is today unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia, but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the immigration to Africa. Some think that the people took the shortest road across the isthmus of Suez. Others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated itinerary. They would have them cross the straits of Bob Elmandeb and then the Assyrian mountains, and spreading northward in keeping along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of today. A more minute examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult to maintain. The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the characteristics of those white races which have been found established from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent. This population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the west or southwest. In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race which it drove back or destroyed, and there, perhaps too, it afterwards received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the isthmus and the marshes of the delta. But whatever may be the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians, they were scarcely settled upon the banks of the Nile before the country conquered and assimilated them to itself, as it has never ceased to do in the case of strangers who have occupied it. At the time when their history begins for us, all the inhabitants had long formed but one people, with but one language. This language seems to be connected with the Semitic tongues by many of its roots. It forms its personal pronouns, whether isolated or suffixed, in a similar way. One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes. Without insisting upon resemblances, which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian. One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same group, had separated very early, at a time when the vocabulary and the grammatical system of the group had not as yet taken definite shape. Subject to different influences, the two families would treat in diverse fashion the elements common to both. The Semitic dialects continued to develop for centuries, while the Egyptian language, although earlier cultivated, stopped short in its growth. If it is obvious that there was an original connection between the language of Egypt and that of Asia, this connection is nevertheless sufficiently remote to leave to the Egyptian race a distinct physiognomy. We recognize it in sculptured and painted portraits, as well as in thousands of mummified bodies out of subterranean tombs. The highest type of Egyptian was tall and slender, with a proud and imperious air in the carriage of his head and in his whole bearing. He had wide and full shoulders, well marked and vigorous pectoral muscles, muscular arms, a long, fine hand, slightly developed hips, and sinewy legs. The detail of the knee joint and the muscles of the calf are strongly marked beneath the skin. The long, thin, and low arched feet are flattened out at the extremities owing to the custom of going barefoot. The head is rather short, the face oval, the forehead somewhat retreating. The eyes are wide and fully opened, the cheekbones not too marked, the nose fairly prominent, and either straight or aqua-line. The mouth is long, the lips full, and lightly ridged along their outline, the teeth small, even, well-set, and remarkably sound, the ears are set high on the head. At birth the skin is white, but darkens in proportion to his exposure to the sun. Men are generally painted red in the pictures, though as a matter of fact there must already have been all the shades which we see among the present population, from a most delicate rose-tinted complexion to that of a smoke-colored bronze. Women who were less exposed to the sun are generally painted yellow, the tint paler in proportion as they rise in the social scale. The hair was inclined to be wavy, and even to curl into little ringlets, but without ever turning into the wool of the negro. The beard was scanty, thick only upon the chin. Such was the highest type. The commoner was squat, dumpy, and heavy. Chest and shoulders seemed to be enlarged at the expense of the pelvis and hips, to such an extent as to make the want of proportion between the upper and lower parts of the body startling and ungraceful. The skull is long, somewhat retreating, and slightly flattened on the top. The features are coarse, and as though carved in flesh by great strokes of the blocking-out chisel. Small, fursuaded eyes, a short nose, flanked by widely distended nostrils, round cheeks, a square chin, thick but not curling lips. This unattractive and ludicrous physiognomy, sometimes animated by an expression of cunning which recalls the shrewd face of an old French peasant, is often lighted up by gleams of gentleness and of melancholy good nature. The external characteristics of these two principal types in the ancient monuments, in all varieties of modifications, may still be seen among the living. The profile copied from a Theban mummy taken at hazard from a necropolis of the eighteenth dynasty, and compared with the likeness of a modern Luxor peasant, would almost pass for a family portrait. Wandering B'Sharan have inherited the type of face of a great noble, the contemporary of Kiev's, and any peasant woman of the delta may bear upon her shoulders the head of a twelfth dynasty king. A citizen of Cairo, gazing with wonder at the statues of Kafra or of Sedi I in the Giza Museum, is himself, feature for feature, the very image of those ancient pharaohs, though were moved from them by fifty centuries. Until quite recently nothing, or all but nothing, had been discovered which could be attributed to the primitive races of Egypt. Even the flint weapons and implements which had been found in various places could not be ascribed to them with any degree of certainty. For the Egyptians continued to use stone long after metal was known to them. They made stone arrowheads, hammers and knives, not only in the time of the pharaohs but under the Romans and during the whole period of the Middle Ages, and the manufacture of them has not yet entirely died out. These objects and the workshops where they were made might therefore be less ancient than the greater part of the inscribed monuments. But if so far we had found no examples of any work belonging to the first ages, we met in historic times with certain customs which were out of harmony with the general civilization of the period. A comparison of these customs with analogous practices of barbarous nations threw light upon the former, completed their meaning, and showed us at the same time the successive stages through which the Egyptian people had to pass before reaching their highest civilization. We knew, for example, that even as late as the Caesars girls belonging to noble families at Thebes were consecrated to the surface of Amun, and were thus licensed to a life of immorality, which, however, did not prevent them from making rich marriages when age obliged them to retire from office. Theban women were not the only people in the world to whom such license was granted or imposed upon them by law. Wherever in a civilized country we see similar practice we may recognize in it an ancient custom, which in the course of centuries has degenerated into a religious observance. The institution of the women of Amun is a legacy from a time when the practice of polyandry obtained and marriage did not yet exist. Age and maternity relieved them from this obligation and preserved them from those incestuous connections of which we find examples in other races. A union of father and daughter, however, was perhaps not wholly forbidden, and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural. The words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us. Paternity was necessarily doubtful in a community of this kind, and hence the tie between fathers and children was slight, there being no family in the sense in which we understand the word, except as it centered around the mother. Maternal descent was therefore the only one openly acknowledged, and the affiliation of the child was indicated by the name of the mother alone. When the woman ceased to belong to all and confined herself to one husband, the man reserved to himself the privilege of taking as many wives as he wished, or as he was able to keep, beginning with his own sisters. All wives did not enjoy identical rights. Those born of the same parents as the man, or those of equal rank with himself, preserved their independence. If the law pronounced him the master, Nibbu, to whom they owed obedience and fidelity, they were mistresses of the house, Nibbit Piru, as well as wives, Himitu, and the two words of the title express their condition. Each of them occupied, in fact, her own house, Piru, which she had from her parents or her husband, and of which she was absolute mistress, Nibbit. She lived in it and performed in it without constraint all a woman's duties, feeding the fire, grinding the corn, occupying herself in cooking and weaving, making clothing and perfumes, nursing and teaching her children. When her husband visited her, he was a guest whom she received on an equal footing. It appears that at the outset these various wives were placed under the authority of an older woman, whom they looked on as their mother, and who defended their rights and interests against the master. But this custom gradually disappeared, and in historic times we read of it as existing only in the families of the gods. The female singers consecrated to Ammon and other deities owed obedience to several superiors, of whom the principal, generally the widow of a king or high priest, was called chief superior of the ladies of the harem of Ammon. Besides these wives there were concubines, slaves purchased or borne in the house, prisoners of war, Egyptians of inferior class, who were the chattels of the man and of whom he could dispose as he wished. All the children of one father were legitimate, whether their mother were a wife or merely a concubine, but they did not all enjoy the same advantages. Those among them who were born of a brother or sister united in legitimate marriage took precedence of those whose mother was a wife of inferior rank or a slave. In the family thus constituted, the woman, to all appearances, played the principal part. Children recognized the parental relationship in the mother alone. The husband appears to have entered the house of his wives, rather than the wives to have entered his, and this appearance of inferiority was so marked that the Greeks were deceived by it. They affirmed that the woman was supreme in Egypt, the man at the time of marriage promised obedience to her, and entered into a contract not to raise any objection to her commands. Section 5. Read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audio books or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.