 Chapter 3 The Legendary History of Egypt Part 6 As soon as his bark appeared at the last bend of the celestial Nile, the Cenosephaly, who guarded the entrance into night, began to dance and gesticulate upon the banks as they intoned their accustomed hymn. The gods of Abidos mingled their shouts of joy with the chant of the sacred baboons. The bark lingered for a moment upon the frontiers of day, and initiated souls seized the occasion to secure their recognition and their reception on board of it. Once admitted, they took their share in the management of the boat, and in the battles with hostile deities, but they were not all endowed with the courage or equipment needful to withstand the perils and terrors of the voyage. Many stopped short by the way in one of the regions which it traversed, either in the realm of Contamentate or in that of Socarus, or in those islands where the good Osiris welcomed them as though they had duly arrived in the ferry boat, or upon the wing of thought. There they dwelt in colonies under the suzerainty of local gods, rich and in need of nothing, but condemned to live in darkness, accepting for the one brief hour in which the solar bark passed through their midst, irradiating them with beams of light. The few persevered, feeling that they had courage to accompany the sun throughout, and these were indemnified for their sufferings by the most brilliant fate ever dreamed of by Egyptian souls. Born anew with the sun-god, and appearing with him at the gates of the east, they were assimilated to him, and shared his privilege of growing old and dying, only to be ceaselessly rejuvenated and to live again with ever-renewed splendor. They disembarked where they pleased, and returned at will into the world. If now and then they felt a wish to revisit all that was left of their earthly bodies, the human-headed sparrow-hawk descended the shaft in full flight, alighted upon the funeral couch, and with hands softly laid upon the spot where the heart had been want to beat, gazed upwards at the impassive mask of the mummy. This was but for a moment, since nothing compelled these perfect souls to be imprisoned within the tomb, like the doubles of earlier times, because they feared the light. They went forth by day, and dwelt in those places where they had lived. They walked in their gardens by their ponds of running water. They perched like so many birds on the branches of the trees which they had planted, or enjoyed the fresh air under the shade of their sycamores. They ate and drank at pleasure. They traveled by hill and dale. They embarked in the boat of raw, and disembarked without weariness, and without distaste for the same perpetual round. This conception, which was developed somewhat late, brought the Egyptians back to the point from which they had started when first they began to speculate on the life to come. The soul, after having left the place of its incarnation to which, in the beginning it clung, after having ascended into heaven and there sought congenial asylum in vain, foresook all havens which it had found above, and unhesitatingly fell back upon earth, there to lead a peaceful, free, and happy life in the full light of day, and with the whole valley of Egypt for a paradise. The connection, always increasingly intimate between Osiris and Ra, gradually brought about a blending of the previously separate myths and beliefs concerning each. The friends and enemies of the one became the friends and enemies of the other, and from a mixture of the original conceptions of the two deities arose new personalities, in which contradictory elements were blended together, often without true fusion. The celestial horuses one by one were identified with Horus, son of Isis, and their attributes were given to him, as his in the same way became theirs. A pulpy and the monsters, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the wild boar, who lay in wait for Ra as he sailed the heavenly ocean, became one with Sit and his accomplices. Sit still possessed his half of Egypt, and his primitive brotherly relation to the celestial horus remained unbroken, either on account of their sharing one temple as at Nubit, or because they were worshiped as one in two neighboring nomes, for example, at Oxyrincos and at Heracliopolis Magna. The repulsion with which the slayer of Osiris was regarded did not everywhere disassociate these two cults. Certain small districts persisted in this double worship down to the latest times of paganism. It was, after all, a marked fidelity to the oldest traditions of the race, but the bulk of the Egyptians, who had forgotten these, invented reasons taken from the history of the divine dynasties to explain the fact. The judgment of thought, or of Sibu, had not put an end to the machinations of Sit. As soon as Horus had left the earth, Sit resumed them, and pursued them, with varying fortune, under the divine kings of the second Aeneid. Now in the year 363 of Harmakis, the Typhonians reopened the campaign. Beaten at first near Edfu, they retreated precipitately northwards, stopping to give battle wherever their partisans predominated, at Zatmyk in the Thibunome, at Kite New Treet to the northeast of Dendurah, and at Hebonu in the Principality of the Gazelle. Several bloody combats which took place between Oxyrincos and Heracliopolis Magna, were the means of driving them finally out of the Nile Valley. They rallied for the last time in the eastern provinces of the Delta, were beaten at Zalu, and giving up all hope of success on land, they embarked at the head of the Gulf of Suez, in order to return to the Nubian Desert, their habitual refuge in times of distress. The sea was the special element of Typhon, and upon it they believed themselves secure. Oxyrincos, however, followed them, overtook them near Shas-Hirit, routed them, and on his return to Edfu celebrated his victory by a solemn festival. By degrees, as he made himself master of those localities which owed allegiance to Sit, he took energetic measures to establish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar cycle. In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish his enemies. Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonu, we next see him springing on to the back of Sit under a guise of the hippopotamus. In his shrine at Hibonu he is represented as a hawk perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the Nome where the struggle took place. Near to Zalu he became incarnate as a human-headed lion, crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which cut like a knife. It was under the form, too, of a lion that he was worshipped in the temple at Zalu. The correlation of Sit and the celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent times, a primitive religious fact. It was the consequence, and so to speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods. Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms. He had constructed a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and the followers of the rival deity. In this manner the battles of the gods were changed into human struggles, in which more than once Egypt was deluged with blood. The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of Typhon was perpetuated with such impeccability that the nomes which had persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit became odious to the rest of the population. The image of their master on the monuments was mutilated, their names were afaced from the geographical lists, they were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their sacred animals was reckoned a pious act. Thus originated those skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars and were continued down to Roman times. The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed in their veneration for the accursed god. Christianity alone overcame their obstinate fidelity to him. The history of the world for Egypt was therefore only the history of a struggle between the adherents of Osiris and the followers of Sit, an interminable warfare in which sometimes one and sometimes the other of the rival parties obtained a passing advantage, without ever gaining a decisive victory till the end of time. The divine kings of the second and third Aeneid devoted most of the years of their earthly reigns to this end. They were portrayed under the form of the great warrior pharaohs, who from the eighteenth to the twelfth century before our era extended their rule from the plains of the Euphrates to the marshes of Ethiopia. A few peaceful sovereigns are met with here and there in this line of conquerors, a few sages or legislators of whom the most famous was styled Thot, the doubly great, ruler of Hermopolis and of the Hermopolitan Aeneid. A legend of recent origin made him the prime minister of Horus, son of Isis. A still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horus' and attributes to him a reign of 3,226 years. He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a futile deity. Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their first source. He had taught mankind the methodical observation of the heavens and of the changes that took place in them, the slow revolutions of the sun, the rapid phases of the moon, the intersecting movements of the five planets and the shapes and limits of the constellations which each night were lit up in the sky. Most of the latter either remained or appeared to remain immovable and seemed never to pass out of the regions accessible to the human eye. Those which were situated on the extreme margin of the firmament accomplished movement there analogous to those of the planets. Every year at fixed times they were seen to sink one after another below the horizon to disappear and rising again after an eclipse of greater or less duration to regain insensibly their original positions. The constellations were reckoned to be thirty-six in number, the thirty-six to Conti to whom were attributed mysterious powers and of whom Sothis was queen. Sothis transformed into the star of Isis when Orion, Sahu, became the star of Osiris. The nights are so clear and the atmosphere so transparent in Egypt that the eye can readily penetrate the depths of space and distinctly see points of light which would be invisible in our foggy climate. The Egyptians did not therefore need special instruments to ascertain the existence of a considerable number of stars which we could not see without the help of our telescopes. They could perceive with the naked eye the stars of the fifth magnitude and note them upon their catalogs. It entailed it is true a long training and uninterrupted practice to bring their side up to its maximum keenness, but from very early times it was a function of the priestly colleges to found and maintain schools of astronomy. The first observatories established on the banks of the Nile seemed to have belonged to the temples of the sun. The High Priests of Ra, who, to judge from their title were alone worthy to behold the sun face to face, were actively employed from the earliest times in studying the configuration and preparing maps of the heavens. The priests of other gods were quick to follow their example at the opening of the historic period there was not a single temple from one end of the valley to the other that did not possess its official astronomers or, as they were called, watchers of the night. In the evening they went up to the high terraces above the shrine or on to the narrow platforms which terminated the pylons and fixing their eyes continuously on the celestial vault above them followed the movements of the constellations and carefully noted down the slightest phenomenon which they observed. A portion of the chart of the heavens known to Theban Egypt between the eighteenth and twelfth centuries before our era has survived to the present time. Parts of it were carved by the decorators on the ceilings of temples and especially on royal tombs. The deceased pharaohs were identified with Osiris in a more intimate fashion than their subjects. They presented the god even in the most trivial details on earth where after having played the part of the beneficent onophress of primitive ages they underwent the most complete and elaborate embalming like Osiris of the lower world in Hades where they embarked side by side with the sun Osiris to cross the night and to be born again at daybreak in heaven where they shone with Orion Sahu under the guardianship of Sothis and year by year led the procession of the stars. The maps of the firmament were called to them or if necessary taught them this part of their duties. They there saw the planets and the daqani sail past in their boats and the constellations follow one another in continuous secession. The lists annexed to the charts indicated the positions occupied each month by the principal heavenly bodies, their risings, their culminations and their settings. Unfortunately the workmen employed to execute these pictures either did not understand much about the subject in hand or did not trouble themselves to copy the originals exactly. They omitted many passages, transposed others, and made endless mistakes, which made it impossible for us to transfer accurately to a modern map the information possessed by the ancients. Chapter 3 The Legendary History of Egypt Part 7 In directing their eyes to the celestial sphere, thought had at the same time revealed to men the art of measuring time and the knowledge of the future. As he was the moon-god Parex Alans he watched with jealous care over the divine eye which had been entrusted to him by Horus and the thirty days during which he was engaged in conducting it through all the phases of its nocturnal life were reckoned as a month. Twelve of these months formed a year, a year of three hundred and sixty days, during which the earth witnessed the gradual beginning and ending of the cycle of the seasons. The nile rose, spread over the fields, sank again into its channel, to the vicissitudes of the inundations exceeded the work of cultivation. The harvest followed the seed time. These formed three distinct divisions of the year, each of nearly equal duration. Thought made of them the three seasons, that of the waters, Shait, that of vegetation, Pyrrhoot, and that of the harvest, Shomu, each comprised in four months, numbered one to four, the first, second, third, and fourth months of Shait, the first, second, third, and fourth months of Pyrrhoot, the first, second, third, and fourth months of Shomu. The twelve months completed, a new year began, whose birth was heralded by the rising of Sothis in the early days of August. The first month of the Egyptian year thus coincided with the eighth of hours. Thought became its patron, and gave it his name, relegating each of the others to a special protecting divinity. In this manner the third month of Shait fell to Hathor, and was called after her. The fourth of Pyrrhoot belonged to Ranuit or Ramuit, the lady of harvests, and derived from her its appellation of Parmuti. Official documents always designated the months by the ordinal number attached to them in each season, but the people gave them by preference the names of their tutelary deities, and these names, transcribed into Greek and then into Arabic, are still used by the Christian inhabitants of Egypt, side by side with the Musulman appellations. One patron for each month was, however, not deemed sufficient. Each month was subdivided into three decades, over which presided as many dekenai, and the days themselves were assigned to genie appointed to protect them. A number of festivals were set apart at irregular intervals during the course of the year, festivals for the new year, festivals for the beginning of the seasons, months, and decades, festivals for the dead, the supreme gods, and for local divinities. Every act of civil life was so closely allied to the religious life that it could not be performed without a sacrifice or a festival. A festival celebrated the cutting of the dykes, another the opening of the canals, a third the reaping of the first sheaf, or the carrying of the grain, a crop gathered or stored without a festival to implore the blessings of the gods would have been an act of sacrilege and fraught with disaster. The first year of 360 days, regulated by the revolutions of the moon, did not long meet the needs of the Egyptian people. It did not correspond with the length of the solar year, for it fell short of it by five and a quarter days, and this deficit, accumulating from twelve month to twelve month, caused such a serious difference between the calendar reckoning and the natural seasons that it soon had to be corrected. They intercalculated, therefore, the twelve month of each year, and before the first day of the ensuing year, five epigamonal days, which they termed the five days over and above the year. The legend of Osiris relates that thought created them in order to permit Nuit to give birth to all her children. These days constituted at the end of the great year a little month, which considerably lessened the difference between the solar and lunar computation, but did not entirely do away with it, and the six hours and a few minutes of which the Egyptians had not taken count gradually became the source of fresh perplexities. They at length amounted to a whole day, which needed to be added every four years to the regular three hundred and sixty days, a fact which was unfortunately overlooked. The difficulty at first sight, which this caused in public life, increased with time, and ended by disturbing the harmony between the order of the calendar and that of natural phenomenon. At the end of a hundred and twenty years the legal year had gained a whole month on the actual year, and the first of thought anticipated the heliacal rising of Thothus by thirty days, instead of coinciding with it as it ought. The astronomers of the Greco-Roman period, after a retrospective examination of all the past history of their country, discovered a very ingenuous theory for obviating this unfortunate discrepancy. If the omission of six hours annually entailed the loss of one day every four years, the time would come, after three hundred and sixty-five times four years, when the deficit would amount to an entire year, and when in consequence fourteen hundred and sixty whole years would exactly equal fourteen hundred and sixty one in complete years. The agreement of the two years, which had been disturbed by the force of circumstances, was re-established of itself after rather more than fourteen and a half centuries. The opening of the civil year became identical with the beginning of the astronomical year, and this again coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius, and therefore with the official date of the inundation. To the Egyptians of pharaonic times, this simple and eminently practical method was unknown. By means of it, hundreds of generations, who suffered endless troubles from the recurring difference between an uncertain and a fixed year, might have consoled themselves with the satisfaction of knowing that a day would come when one of their descendants would, for once in his life, see both years coincide with mathematical accuracy, and the seasons appear at their normal times. The Egyptian year might be compared to a watch, which loses a definite number of minutes daily. The owner does not take the trouble to calculate a cycle in which the total of minutes lost will bring the watch round to the correct time. He bears with the irregularity as long as his affairs do not suffer by it. But when it causes him inconvenience, he alters the hands to the right hour, and repeats this operation each time he finds it necessary, without being guided by a fixed rule. In like manner the Egyptian year fell into hopeless confusion with regard to the seasons, the discrepancy continually increasing until the difference became so great that the king or the priests had to adjust the two by a process similar to that employed in the case of the watch. The days, moreover, had each their special virtues, which it was necessary for man to know if he wished to profit by the advantages or to escape the perils which they possessed for him. There was not one among them that did not recall some incident of the divine wars, and had not witnessed a battle between the partisans of Sitt and those of Osiris or Ra. The victories or the disasters which they had chronicled had, as it were, stamped them with good or bad luck, and for that reason they remained forever auspicious or the reverse. It was on the seventeenth of Athir that Typhon had enticed his brother to come to him, and had murdered him in the middle of a banquet. Every year, on this day, the tragedy that had taken place in the earthly abode of the god seemed to be repeated afresh in the heights of heaven. Just as, at the moment of the death of Osiris, the powers of good were at their weakest, and the sovereignty of evil everywhere prevailed, so the whole of nature, abandoned to the powers of darkness, became inimical to man. Whatever he undertook on that day issued in failure. If he went out to walk by the riverside, a crocodile would attack him, as the crocodile sent by Sitt had attacked Osiris. If he set out on a journey, it was a last farewell which he bade to his family and his friends. Death would meet him by the way. To escape this fatality he must shut himself up at home, and wait in inaction until the hours of danger had passed, and the son of the ensuing day had put the evil one to flight. It was to his interest to know these adverse influences, and who would have known them all had not thought pointed them out and marked them in his calendars. One of these, long fragments of which have come down to us, indicated briefly the character of each day, the gods who presided over it, the perils which accompanied their patronage, or the good fortune which might be expected of them. The details of it are not always intelligible to us, as we are still ignorant of many of the episodes in the life of Osiris. The Egyptians were acquainted with the matter from childhood, and were guided with sufficient exactitude by these indications. The hours of the night were all inauspicious. Those of the day were divided into three seasons of four hours each, of which some were lucky, while others were invariably a vil omen. The fourth of Tibi, good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seeest on this day will be fortunate. Whosoever is born on this day will die more advanced in years than any of his family. He will attain to a greater age than his father. The fifth of Tibi, inimical, inimical, inimical. This is the day on which the goddess Sukfit, mistress of the double white palace, burnt the chiefs when they raised in insurrection, came forth and manifested themselves. Offerings of bread to Shu, Ptah, Thot, burn incense to Ra, and to the gods who are his followers, to Ptah, Thot, Husu on this day. Whatsoever thou seeest on this day will be fortunate. The sixth of Tibi, good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seeest on this day will be fortunate. The seventh of Tibi, inimical, inimical, inimical. Do not join thyself to a woman in the presence of the eye of Horus. Beware of letting the fire go out which is in thy house. The eighth of Tibi, good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seeest with thine eyes this day the Aeneas of the gods will grant to thee. The sick will recover. The ninth of Tibi, good, good, good. The gods cry out for joy at noon on this day. Bring offerings of festal cakes and of fresh bread, which rejoice the heart of the gods and of the Aeneas. The tenth of Tibi, inimical, inimical, inimical. Do not set fire to weeds on this day. It is the day on which the gods sap who set fire to the land of Betito. The eleventh of Tibi, inimical, inimical, inimical. Do not draw nigh to any flame on this day, for Ra entered the flames to strike all his enemies, and whosoever draws nigh to them on this day it shall not be well with him during his whole life. The twelfth of Tibi, inimical, inimical, inimical. See that thou beholdest not a rat on this day, nor approachest any rat within thy house. It is the day wherein so kit gave forth the decrees. In these cases a little watchfulness or exercise of memory suffice to put a man on his guard against evil omens. But in many circumstances all the vigilance in the world would not protect him, and the fatality of the day would overtake him without his being able to do ought to avert it. No man can at will place the day of his birth at a favourable time. He must accept it as it occurs, and yet it exercises a decisive influence on the manner of his death. According as he enters the world on the fourth, fifth, or sixth of Puffy, he either dies of marsh fever, of love, or of drunkenness. The child of the twenty-third perishes by the jaws of a crocodile. That of the twenty-seventh is bitten and dies by a serpent. On the other hand, the fortunate man whose birth they falls on the ninth or the twenty-ninth lives to an extreme old age, and passes away peacefully, respected by all. Thought, having pointed out the evil to men, gave to them at the same time the remedy. The magical arts of which he was the repository made him virtual master of the other gods. He knew their mystic names, their secret weaknesses, the kind of peril they most feared, the ceremonies which subdued them to his will, the prayers which they could not refuse to grant under pain of misfortune or death. His wisdom, transmitted to his worshippers, assured to them the same authority which he exercised upon those in heaven, on earth, or in the netherworld. The magicians instructed in his school had, like the god, control of the words and sounds which, emitted at the favourable moment, with the correct voice, would evoke the most formidable deities from beyond the confines of the universe. They could bind and loose at will Osiris, Sit, Anubis, even thought himself. They could send them forth and recall them, or constrain them to work and fight for them. The extent of their power exposed the magicians to terrible temptations. They were often led to use it to the detriment of others, to satisfy their spite or to gratify their grosser appetites. Many moreover made a gain of their knowledge, putting it at the service of the ignorant who would pay for it. When they were asked to plague or get rid of an enemy, they had a hundred different ways of suddenly surrounding him without his suspecting it. They tormented him with deceptive or terrifying dreams. They harassed him with apparitions and mysterious voices. They gave him as prey to sicknesses, to wandering specters, who entered into him and slowly consumed him. They constrained even at a distance the wills of men. They caused women to be the victims of infatuations, to forsake those they had loved, and to love those they had previously detested. In order to compose an irresistible charm, they merely required a little blood from a person, a few nail pairings, some hair or a scrap of linen which he had worn, and which from contact with his skin had become impregnated with his personality. Portions of these were incorporated with the wax of a doll which they modeled and clothed to resemble their victim. Thence forward all the inflections to which the image was subjected were experienced by the original. He was consumed with fever when his effigy was exposed to the fire. He was wounded when the figure was pierced with a knife. The pharaohs themselves had no immunity from these spells. CHAPTER III. THE LEGENDARY HISTORY OF EGYPT. PART VIII. These machinations were want to be met by others of the same kind, and magic, if invoked at the right moment, was often able to annul the ills which magic had begun. It was not indeed all powerful against fate. The man born on the twenty-seventh of Palfi would die of a snake-bite, whatever charm he might use to protect himself. But if the day of his death were foreordained, at all events the year in which it would occur was uncertain, and it was easy for the magician to arrange that it should not take place prematurely. A formula recited opportunely, a sentence of prayer traced on a papyrus, a little statuette worn about the person, the smallest amulet blessed and consecrated, put to flight the serpents who were the instruments of fate. Those curious stelae on which we see Horace half-naked, standing on two crocodiles and brandishing in his fists creatures which had reputed powers of fascination, were so many protective talismans, set up at the entrance to a room or a house, they kept off the animals represented and brought the evil fate to naught. Sooner or later destiny would doubtless prevail, and the moment would come when the fated serpent, eluding all precautions, would succeed in carrying out the sentence of death. At all events the man would have lived, perhaps to the verge of old age, perhaps to the years of a hundred and ten, to which the wisest of the Egyptians hoped to attain, and which period no man born of mortal mother might exceed. If the arts of magic could thus suspend the law of destiny, how much more efficacious were they when combating the influences of secondary deities, the evil eye and the spells of man. Thought, who was the patron of sortilage, presided also over exorcisms, and the criminal acts which some committed in his name could have reparation made for them by others in his name. To malicious genie, genie still stronger were opposed. To harmful amulets, those which were protective, to destructive measures, vitalizing remedies, and this was not even the most troublesome part of the magician's task. Nobody, in fact, among those delivered by their intervention, escaped unhurt from the trials to which he had been subjected. The possessing spirits, when they quitted their victim, generally left behind them traces of their occupation, in the brain, heart, lungs, intestines, in fact in the whole body. The illnesses to which the human race is prone were not indeed all brought about by enchanters relentlessly persecuting their enemies, but they were all attributed to the presence of an invisible being, whether specter or demon, who by some supernatural means had been made to enter the patient, or who, unbidden, had by malice or necessity taken up his abode within him. It was needful, after expelling the intruder, to re-establish the health of the sufferer by means of fresh remedies. The study of symbols and other materie, a medicaid, would furnish these. Thought had revealed himself to man as the first magician. He became, in like manner for them, the first physician and the first surgeon. Egypt is naturally a very salubrious country, and the Egyptians boasted that they were the healthiest of all mortals, but they did not neglect any precautions to maintain their health. Every month, for three successive days, they purged the system by means of a medics or clisters. The study of medicine with them was divided between specialists, each physician attending to one kind of illness only. Every place possessed several doctors, some for diseases of the eyes, others for the head, or the teeth, or the stomach, or for internal disorders. But the subdivision was not carried to the extent that Herodotus would make us believe. It was the custom to make a distinction only between the physician trained in the priestly schools and further instructed by daily practice and the study of books, the bone-setter attached to the worship of Salkit who treated fractures by the intercession of the goddess, and the exorcist who professed to cure by the sole virtue of amulets and magic phrases. The professional doctor treated all kinds of maladies, but as with us, there were specialists for certain affections, who were consulted in preference to general practitioners. If the number of these specialists was so considerable as to attract the attention of strangers, it was because the climatic character of the country necessitated it. Where ophthalmia and affections of the intestines raged violently, we necessarily find many oculists as well as doctors for internal maladies. The best instructed, however, knew but little of anatomy. As with Christian physicians of the Middle Ages, religious scruples prevented the Egyptians from cutting open or dissecting in the cause of pure science the dead body which was identified with that of Osiris. The processes of embalming, which would have instructed them in anatomy, were not entrusted to doctors. The horror was so great with which anyone was regarded who mutilated the human form that the parasite, on whom devolved the duty of making necessary incisions in the dead, became the object of universal excretion. As soon as he had finished his task the assistants assaulted him, throwing stones at him with such violence that he had to take to his heels to escape with his life. The knowledge of what went on within the body was therefore but vague. Life seemed to be a little air, a breath which was conveyed by the veins from member to member. The head contains twenty-two vessels which draw the spirits into it and send them thence to all parts of the body. There are two vessels for the breasts which communicate heat to the lower parts. There are two vessels for the thighs, two for the neck, two for the arms, two for the back of the head, two for the forehead, two for the eyes, two for the eyelids, two for the right ear by which enter the breaths of life, and two for the left ear which in like manner admit the breaths of death. The breaths entering the right ear are the good airs, the delicious airs of the north, the sea breeze which tempers the burning of summer and renews the strength of man, continually weakened by the heat and threatened with exhaustion. These vital spirits entering the veins and arteries by the ear or nose mingled with the blood which carried them to all parts of the body. They sustained the animal and were, so to speak, the cause of its movement. The heart, the perpetual mover, Ha'iti, collected them and redistributed them throughout the body. It was regarded as the beginning of all the members and whatever part of the living body the physician touched, whether the head, the nape of the neck, the hands, the breast, the arms, the legs, his hand lit upon the heart and he felt it beating under his fingers. Under the influence of the good breaths the vessels were inflated and worked regularly. Under that of the evil they became inflamed, were obstructed, were hardened, or gave way, and the physician had to remedy the obstruction, allay the inflammation and reestablish their vigor and elasticity. At the moment of death the vital spirits withdrew the soul, the blood deprived of air became coagulated, the veins and arteries emptied themselves, and the creature perished for want of breaths. The majority of the diseases from which the ancient Egyptians suffered are those which still attack their successors, ophthalmia, affections of the stomach, abdomen and bladder, intestinal worms, varicose veins, ulcers in the leg, the nile pimple, and finally the divine mortal malady, the Divinus morbus of the Latins, epilepsy. Anemia, from which at least one fourth of the present population suffers, was not less prevalent than at present, if we may judge from the number of remedies which were used against hematuria, the principal cause of it. The fertility of the women entailed a number of infirmities or local affections which the doctors attempted to relieve, not always with success. The science of those days treated externals only and occupied itself merely with symptoms easily determined by sight or touch. It never suspected that troubles which showed themselves in two widely remote parts of the body might only be different effects of the same illness, and they classed as distinct maladies those indications which we now know to be symptoms of one disease. They were able, however, to determine fairly well the specific characteristics of ordinary affections, and sometimes describe them in precise and graphic fashion. The abdomen is heavy, the pit of the stomach painful, the heart burns and palpitates violently. The clothing oppresses the sick man and he can barely support it. Nocturnal thirsts. His heart is sick, as that of a man who has eaten of the sycamore gum. The flesh loses its sensitivity as that of a man seized with illness. If he seek to satisfy a want of nature he finds no relief. Say to this, there is an accumulation of humours in the abdomen, which makes the heart sick. I will act. This is the beginning of gastric fever, so common in Egypt, and a modern physician could not better diagnose such a case. The phraseology would be less flowery, but the analysis of the symptoms would not differ from that given us by the ancient practitioner. The medicaments recommended comprise nearly everything, which can in some way or other be swallowed, whether in solid, misalageness, or liquid form. Vegetable remedies are reckoned by the score, from the most modest herb to the largest tree, such as the sycamore, palm, acacia, and cedar, of which the sawdust and shavings were supposed to possess both antiseptic and emollient properties. Among the mineral substances are to be noted sea salt, alum, nitra, sulfate of copper, and a score of different kinds of stones. Among the latter, the memphite stone was distinguished for its virtues. If applied to parts of the body which were lacerated or unhealthy, it acted as an antiseptic and facilitated the success of surgical operations. Flesh taken from the living subject, the heart, the liver, the gall, the blood, either dried or liquid, of animals, either dried or liquid, of animals, the hair and horn of stags, were all customarily used in many cases where the motive determining their preference above other material medicaid is unknown to us. Many recipes puzzle us by their originality and by the barbaric character of the ingredients recommended. The milk of a woman who has given birth to a boy, the dung of a lion, a tortoise's brains, an old book boiled in oil. The medicaments composed of these incongruous substances were often very complicated. It was thought that the healing power was increased by multiplying the curative elements. Each ingredient acted upon a specific region of the body, and after absorption separated itself from the rest to bring its influence to bear upon that region. The physician made use of all the means which we employ today to introduce remedies into the human system, whether pills or potions, poultices or ointments, drafts or clusters. Not only did he give the prescriptions, but he made them up, thus combining the art of the physician with that of the dispenser. He prescribed the ingredients, pounded them either separately or together, he macerated them in the proper way, boiled them, reduced them by heating, and filtered them through linen. Fat served him as the ordinary vehicle for ointments and pure water for potions, but he did not despise other liquids, such as wine, beer, fermented or unfermented, vinegar, milk, olive oil, ben oil, either crude or refined, even the urine of men and animals. The whole, sweetened with honey, was taken hot, night and morning. The use of more than one of these remedies became worldwide. The Greeks borrowed them from the Egyptians. We have piously accepted them from the Greeks, and our contemporaries still swallow with resignation many of the abominable mixtures invented on the banks of the Nile, long before the building of the pyramids. Chapter 3 The Legendary History of Egypt, Part 9 It was thought who had taught men arithmetic. Thought had revealed to them the mysteries of geometry and mensuration. Thought had constructed instruments and promulgated the laws of music. Thought had instituted the art of drawing, and had codified its unchanging rules. He had been the inventor or patron of all that was useful or beautiful in the Nile Valley, and the climax of his beneficence was reached by his invention of the principles of writing, without which humanity would have been liable to forget his teaching and to lose the advantages of his discoveries. It has been sometimes questioned whether writing, instead of having been a benefit to the Egyptians, did not rather injure them. An old legend relates that when the God unfolded his discovery to King Thomas, whose minister he was, the monarch immediately raised an objection to it. Children and young people, who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, now that they possessed a means of storing up knowledge without trouble, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories. Whether Thomas was right or not, the criticism came too late. The ingenious art of painting words and of speaking to the eyes had once for all been acquired by the Egyptians, and through them by the greater part of mankind. It was a very complex system in which were united most of the methods fitted for giving expression to thought, namely those which were limited to the presentment of the idea, and those which were intended to suggest sounds. At the outset the use was confined to signs intended to awaken the idea of the object in the mind of the reader by the more or less faithful picture of the object itself. For example, they depicted the sun by a centered disk, the moon by a crescent, a lion by a lion in the act of walking, a man by a small figure in a squatting attitude. As by this method it was possible to convey only a very restricted number of entirely materialistic concepts, it became necessary to have recourse to various artifices in order to make up for the shortcomings of the ideograms properly so-called. The part was put for the whole, the pupil in place of the whole eye, the head of the ox instead of the complete ox. The Egyptian substituted cause for effect and effect for cause, the instrument for the work accomplished, and the disk of the sun signified the day, a smoking brazier the fire, the brush, ink pot, and palette of the scribe denoting writing or written documents. They conceived the idea of employing some object which presented an actual or supposed resemblance to the notion to be conveyed. Thus the four parts of a lion denoted priority, supremacy, command, the wasp symbolized royalty, and a tadpole stood for hundreds of thousands. They ventured finally to use conventionalisms, as for instance when they drew the ax for a god or the ostrich feather for justice. The sign in these cases had only a conventional connection with the concept assigned to it. At times two or three of these symbols were associated in order to express conjuntly an idea which would have been inadequately rendered by one of them alone. A five-pointed star placed under an inverted crescent moon denoted a month, a calf running before the sign for water indicated thirst. All these artifices combined furnished, however, but a very incomplete means of seizing and transmitting thought. When the writer had written out twenty or thirty of these signs and the ideas which they were supposed to embody, he had before him only the skeleton of a sentence, from which the flesh and sense in use had disappeared. The tone and rhythm of the words were wanting, as were also the indications of gender, number, person, and inflection, which distinguished the different parts of speech and determined the varying relations between them. Besides this, in order to understand for himself and to guess the meaning of the author, the reader was obliged to translate the symbols which he deciphered by means of words which represented in the spoken language the pronunciation of each symbol. Whenever he looked at them, they suggested to him both the idea and the word for the idea, and consequently a sound or group of sounds, when each of them had thus acquired three or four invariable associations of sound, he forgot their purely idiographic value and accustomed himself to consider them merely notations of sound. The first experiment in phonetics was a species of rebus, where each of the signs divorced from its original sense served to represent several words, similar in sound, but differing in meaning in the spoken language. The same group of articulations, not fear, no fear, conveyed in Egyptian the concrete idea of a lute, and the abstract idea of beauty, the sign expressed at once the lute and beauty. The beetle was called kopiru, and the verb to be was pronounced kopiru. The figure of the beetle consequently signified both the insect and the verb, and by further combining with it other signs the articulation of each corresponding syllable was given in detail. The siv, mayu, the matpu, pi, the mouth, ra, ru, gave the formula kaupiru, which was equivalent to the sound of kopiru, the verb to be. Grouped together, they denoted in writing the concept of to be by means of a treble rebus. In this system each syllable of a word could be represented by one of several signs, all sounding alike. One half of these syllables stood for open, the other half for closed syllables, and the use of the former soon brought about the formation of a true alphabet. The final vowel in them became detached, and left only the remaining consonant, for example, r in ru, h in ha, n in ni, b in bu, so that ru, ha, bu eventually stood for r, h, n, and b only. This process in the course of time having been applied to a certain number of syllables furnished a fairly large alphabet in which several letters represented each of the twenty-two chief articulations which the scribes considered sufficient for their purposes. The signs corresponding to one in the same letter were homophones or equivalents in sound. One would have thought that when the Egyptians had arrived thus far they would have been led, as a matter of course, to reject the various characters which they had each used in its turn in order to retain an alphabet only. But the true spirit of invention of which they had given proof abandoned them here as elsewhere. If the merit of a discovery was often their due they were rarely able to bring their invention to perfection. They kept the idiographic and syllabic signs which they had used at the outset, and, with the residue of their successive notations, made for themselves a most complicated system in which syllables and ideograms were mingled with letters properly so-called. There is a little of everything in an Egyptian phrase, sometimes even in a word, as for instance in mazeru, the ear, or keru, the voice. There are the syllable k'er, the ordinary letters which complete the phonetic pronunciation, and finally the ideogram which gives the picture of the ear by the side of the written word for it, and another which proves that the letters represent a term designating an action of the mouth. This mentally had its advantages. It enabled the Egyptians to make clear by the picture of the object the sense of words which letters alone might sometimes insufficiently explain. The system demanded a serious effort of memory and long years of study. Indeed, many people never completely mastered it. The picturesque appearance of the sentences in which we see representations of men animals, furniture, weapons, and tools grouped together in successive little pictures rendered hieroglyphic writing specially suitable for the decoration of the temples of the gods or the palaces of kings. Mingled with scenes of worship, sacrifice, battle, or private life, the inscriptions frame or separate groups of personages, and occupy the vacant spaces which the sculptor or painter was at a loss to fill. Hieroglyphic writing is preeminently a monumental script. For the ordinary purposes of life it was traced in black or red ink on fragments of limestone or pottery, or on wooden tablets covered with stucco, and especially on the fibers of papyrus. The exigencies of haste and the unskillfulness of scribes soon changed both its appearance and its elements. The characters, when contracted, superimposed and united to one another with connecting strokes, preserved only the most distant resemblance to the persons or things which they had originally represented. This cursive writing, which was somewhat incorrectly termed hieratic, was used only for public or private documents, for administrative correspondence, or for the propagation of literary, scientific, and religious works. It was thus that tradition was pleased to ascribe to the gods, and among them to thought, the doubly great, the invention of all the arts and sciences which gave to Egypt its glory and prosperity. It was clear, not only to the vulgar, but to the wisest of the nation, that had their ancestors been left merely to their own resources, they would never have succeeded in raising themselves much above the level of the brutes. The idea that a discovery of importance to the country could have risen in a human brain, and once made known, could have been spread and developed by the efforts of successive generations, appear to them impossible to accept. They believed that every art, every trade, had remained unaltered from the outset, and if some novelty in its aspect tended to show them their error, they preferred to imagine a divine intervention rather than be undeceived. The mystic writing, inserted as chapter sixty-four in the Book of the Dead, and which subsequently was supposed to be a decisive moment to the future life of man, was, as they knew, posterior in date to the other formulas of which this book was composed. They did not, however, regarded any the less as being of divine origin. It had been found one day, without any one knowing once it came, traced in blue characters on a plaque of alabaster, at the foot of the statue of thought, in the sanctuary of Hermopolis. A prince, Hardidouf, had discovered it in his travels, and regarding it as a miraculous object, had brought it to his sovereign. This king, according to some, was Hassafaiti of the First Dynasty, but by others was believed to be the pious Mycorinos. In the same way the Book on Medicine, dealing with the diseases of women, was held not to be the work of a practitioner. It had revealed itself to a priest watching at night before the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Isis at Coptos. Although the earth was plunged into darkness, the moon shone upon it and enveloped it with light. It was sent as a great wonder to the holiness of King Kaops, the just of speech. The gods had thus exercised a direct influence upon men until they became entirely civilized, and this work of culture was apportioned among the three divine dynasties, according to the strength of each. The first, which comprised the most vigorous divinities, had accomplished the more difficult task of establishing the world on a solid basis. The second had carried on the education of the Egyptians, and the third had regulated, in all its minutia, the religious constitution of the country. When there was nothing more demanding supernatural strength or intelligence to establish it, the gods returned to heaven and were succeeded on the throne by mortal men. One tradition maintained dogmatically that the first human king whose memory it preserved followed immediately after the last of the gods, who, in quitting the palace, had made over the crown to Manus' heir, and that the chains of nature had not entailed any interruption in the line of sovereigns. Another tradition would not allow that the contact between the human and divine series had been so close. Between the Aeneid and Menes it intercalculated one or more lines of Theban or Thynite kings, but these were of so formless, shadowy, and undefined an aspect that they were called Manes, and there was attributed to them at most only a passive existence, as of persons who had always been in the condition of the dead, and had never been subjected to the trouble of passing through life. Menes was the first in order of those who were actually living. From his time the Egyptians claimed to possess an uninterrupted list of the pharaohs who had ruled over the Nile Valley. As far back as the eighteenth dynasty this list was written upon Papyrus, and furnished the number of years that each prince occupied the throne, or the length of his life. CHAPTER III THE LEGENDARY HISTORY OF EGYPT PART X Extracts from it were inscribed in the temples, or even in the tombs of private persons, and three of these abridged catalogs are still extant, two coming from the temples of Sedi I and Ramses II at Abidos, while the other was discovered in the tomb of a person of rank named Tunari at Sakara. They divided this interminable secession of often problematical personages into dynasties, following in this division rules of which we are ignorant, and which varied in the course of ages. In the time of the Ramicides, names in the list which subsequently under Luggeties formed five groups were made to constitute one single dynasty. MANETHO OF SEVENITUS, WHO WROTE A HISTORY OF EUROPE FOR THE USE OF ALEXANDRINE GRIEKS, HAD ADOPTED, ON SOME UNKNOWN AUTHORITY, A DIVISION OF 31 DYNASTIES FOR MANIES TO THE MASSEDONIAN CONQUEST, AND HIS SYSTEM HAS PREVALED, NOT INDEED ON ACCOUNT OF ITS EXCELLENCE, BUT BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY COMPLETE ONE WHICH HAS COME DOWN TO US. All the families inscribed in his list ruled in succession. The country was no doubt frequently broken up into a dozen or more independent states, each possessing its own kings during several generations, but the analysts had from the outset discarded these collateral lines and recognized only one legitimate dynasty, of which the rest were but vassals. Their theory of legitimacy does not always agree with actual history, and the particular line of princes which they rejected as usurpers represented at times the only family possessing true rights to the crown. In Egypt as elsewhere, the official chroniclers were often obliged to accommodate the past to the exigencies of the present, and to manipulate the annals to suit the reigning party, while obeying their orders the chroniclers deceived posterity, and it is only by a rare chance that we can succeed in detecting them in the act of falsification, and can reestablish the truth. The system of Manetho, in the state in which it has been handed down to us by epitomizers, has rendered and continues to render service to science. If it is not the actual history of Egypt, it is a sufficiently faithful substitute to warrant our not neglecting it when we wish to understand and reconstruct the sequence of events. His dynasties furnished the necessary framework for most of the events and revolutions, of which the monuments have preserved us a record. At the outset, the center to which the affairs of the country gravitated was in the extreme north of the valley. The principality which extended from the entrance of the Fayum to the apex of the Delta, and subsequently to the town of Memphis itself, imposed their sovereigns upon the remaining nomes, served as an emporium for commerce and national industries, and received homage and tribute from neighboring peoples. About the time of the sixth dynasty, this center of gravity was displaced, and tended towards the interior. It was arrested for a short time at Herakliopolis, ninth and tenth dynasties, and ended by fixing itself at Thebes, eleventh dynasty. From henceforth, Thebes became the capital, and furnished Egypt with her rulers. With the exception of the fourteenth Zayet dynasty, all the families occupying the throne from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasty were Theban. When the barbarian shepherds invaded Africa from Asia, the Thebaid became the last refuge and bulwark of Egyptian nationality. Its chiefs struggled for many centuries against the conquerors before they were able to deliver the rest of the valley. It was a Theban dynasty, the eighteenth, which inaugurated the era of foreign conquest. But after the nineteenth, a movement, the reverse of that which had taken place towards the end of the first period, brought back the center of gravity, little by little, towards the north of the country. From the time of the twenty-first dynasty, Thebes ceased to hold the position of capital. Tannis, Bubastis, Mendis, Subonitos, and above all Syes, disputed the supremacy with each other, and political life was concentrated in the maritime provinces. Those of the interior, ruined by Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence and gradually dwindled away. Thebes became impoverished and depopulated. It fell into ruins, and soon was nothing more than a resort for devotees or travelers. The history of Egypt is, therefore, divided into three periods, each corresponding to the suzerainty of a town or principality. One, the Memphite period, usually called the Ancient Empire, from the first to the tenth dynasty, kings of Memphite origin ruled over the whole of Egypt during the greater part of this epoch. Two, Theban period, from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasty. It is divided into two parts by the invasion of the shepherds, sixteenth dynasty. Two, a, the first Theban empire, middle empire, from the eleventh to the fourteenth dynasty. Two, b, the new Theban empire, from the seventeenth to the twentieth dynasty. Three, Syet period, from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasty, divided into two unequal parts by the Persian conquest. Three, a, the first Syet period, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth dynasty. The second Syet period, from the twenty-eighth to the thirtieth dynasty. The Memphites had created the monarchy. The Thebans extended the rule of Egypt far and wide and made of her a conquering state, for nearly six centuries she ruled over the upper Nile and over western Asia. Under the Syedes she retired gradually within her natural frontiers, and from having been aggressive became assailed, and suffered herself to be crushed in turn by all the nations she had once oppressed. The monuments have, as yet, yielded no account of the events which tended to unite the country under the rule of one man. We can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focused in the north, from which civilization radiated over the rich plains and the marshes of the delta. Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the principal myths of the local religions. The Aeneid to which it gave conception would never have obtained the popularity, which we must acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty over the neighboring plains. It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of lower Egypt was organized. Everything there bore traces of Heliopolitan theories, the protocol of the kings, their supposed descent from Ra, the enthusiastic worship which they offered to the sun. The delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one center. The Nile Valley proper, narrow, torturous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It too represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems, but its component parts were more loosely united, its religion was less systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city to serve as a political and sacerdotal center. Hermopolis contained schools of theologians who certainly played an important part in the development of myths and dogmas, but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt. In the south, Syud disputed their supremacy, and Herakliopolis stopped their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting authority over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a particular character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down to its latest days. The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Meeney or Menes of Thinus, that tradition ascribes the honor of having fused the two egyptians into a single empire, and having inaugurated the reign of the human dynasties. Thinus figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian cities. It barely maintained existence on the left bank of the Nile, if not on the exact spot now occupied by Gerga, at least only a short distance from it. The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain range to the other, and gradually extended across the desert as far as the great Theban Oasis. Its inhabitants worshiped a sky god, and Hury, or rather two twin gods, and Hury Shu, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities and became a warlike personification of Ra. And Hury Shu, like all the other solar manifestations, came to be associated with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness, a Sokhit, who took for the occasion the epithet of Mihit, the northern one. Some of the dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the modern village of Mishak, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose steep cliffs here approach somewhat near the river. The principal in Necropolis was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abidos. It would appear that, at the outset, Abidos was the capital of the country, for the entire Nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed. In very early times Abidos fell into decay, and resigned its political rank to thinness, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The city occupied a long and narrow strip of land between the canal and the first slopes of the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the dead reared its naked walls. Here Anhurri, having passed from life to death, was worshipped under the name of Contamentit, the chief of that western region with her soul's repair on quitting the serf. It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what political combinations this son of the night came to be identified with Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote antiquity. It had become an established fact long before the most ancient sacred books were compiled. Osiris Contamentit grew rapidly in popular favor, and his temple attracted annually an increasing number of pilgrims. The great Oasis had been considered at first as a sort of mysterious paradise, whether the dead went in search of peace and happiness. It was called Uifk, the Sepulchre. This name clung to it after it had become an actual Egyptian province, and the remembrance of its ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people, so that the cleft, or gorge in the mountain through which the doubles journeyed towards it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the other world. At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all parts of the valley. They there awaited the coming of the dying sun in order to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Contamentit. Abidus, even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god the only god whose worship, practiced by all Egyptians, inspired them all with an equal devotion. The excavations of the last few years have brought to light some, at all events, of the oldest pharaohs known to the Egyptian analysts, namely those whom they placed in their first human dynasties, and the locality where the monuments of these princes were discovered, shows us that these writers were correct in representing thinnests, as playing an important part in the history of the early ages of their country. In the tomb of many, that sovereign whom we are inclined to look upon as the first king of the official lists, lies near the village of Nagata, not far from Thebes, those of his immediate successors are close to thinnests in the cemeteries of Abidus. They stand at the very foot of the Libyan hills, near the entrance to the ravine, the cleft through which the mysterious oasis was reached, and thither the souls flocked in order that they might enter by a safeway, the land beyond the grave. The mass of pottery, whole and broken, which has accumulated on this site from the offerings of centuries, has obtained for it among the Felaen the name of Am Al-Ghab, the mother of pots. The tombs lie there in seried ranks. They present for the most part a rough model of the pyramids of the Memphite period, rectangular structures of bricks without mortar rising slightly above the level of the plain. The funeral chamber occupies the center of each, and is partly hollowed out of the soil, like a shallow well, the sides being bricked. It had a flat timber roof covered by a layer of about three feet of sand. The floor was also of wood, and in several cases the remains of the beams of both ceiling and pavement have been brought to light. The body of the royal inmate was laid in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by its funeral furniture and by a part of the offerings. The remainder was placed in the little rooms which opened out of the principal vault, sometimes on the same level, sometimes on one higher than itself. After their contents had been laid within them, the entrance to these rooms was generally walled up. Human bodies had been found inside them, probably those of slaves killed at the funeral, that they might wait upon the dead in his life beyond the grave. The objects placed in these chambers were mostly offerings, but besides these there were coarse stelle bearing the name of a person, and dedicated to the double of his luminary. Some of them mentioned a dwarf, or a favorite dog of the sovereign, who accompanied his master into the tomb. Tablets of ivory or bones skillfully incised furnisheths with scenes representing some of the ceremonies of the deification of the king in his lifetime, and the sacrifices offered at the time of his burial. In rarer instances they record his exploits. The offerings themselves were such as we meet with in burials of a subsequent age. Bread, cakes, meat, and poultry of various sorts. Indeed, everything we find mentioned in the lists inscribed in the tombs of the later dynasties, particularly the jars of wine and liquors, on the clay bungs of which are still legible the impression of the signet bearing the name of the sovereign for whose use they were sealed. Besides stuffs and mats, the furniture comprised chairs, beds, stools, an enormous number of vases, some in coarse pottery for common use, others in choice stone, such as deorite, granite, or rock crystal very finely worked, on the fragments of all of which may be read, cut, and outlined the names and preamble of the pharaoh to whom the object belonged. The ceremonial of the funerary offering and its significance was already fully developed at this early period. This can be gathered by the very nature of the objects buried with the deceased, by their number, quantity, and by the manner in which they were arranged. Like their successors in the Egypt of later times, these ancient kings expected to continue their material existence within the tomb, and they took precautions that life there should be as comfortable as circumstances should permit. Access to the tomb was sometimes gained by a sloping, passage, or staircase. This made it possible to see if everything within was in a satisfactory condition. After the dead had been enclosed in his chamber, and five or six feet of sand had been spread over the beams which formed its roof, the position of the tomb was shown merely by a scarcely perceptible rise in the soil of the necropolis, and its sight would soon have been forgotten, if its eastern most limits had not been marked by two large stele, on which were carefully engraved one of the appellations of the king, that of his double, or his horus name. It was on this spot, upon an altar place between the two stele, that the commemorative ceremonies were celebrated, and the provisions renewed on certain days fixed by the religious law. Groups of private tombs were scattered around, the resting places of the chief officers of the sovereign, the departed pharaoh being thus surrounded in death by the same courtiers as those who had attended him during his earthly existence. The princes, whose names and titles have been revealed to us by the inscriptions on these tombs, have not by any means been all classified as yet, the prevailing custom at that period having been to designate them by their horus names, but rarely by their proper names, which latter is the only one which figures in the official list which we possess of the Egyptian kings. A few texts, more explicit than the rest, enable us to identify three of them with the Ussephaeus, the Miebis, and the synempsis of Menetho, the fifth, sixth, and seventh kings of the first dynasty. The fact that they are buried in the necropolis of Apidos apparently justifies the opinion of the Egyptian chroniclers that they were natives of thinness. Is the menes who usually figures at their head also Athenite prince? Several scholars believe that his ordinary name, Meeney, is to be read on an ivory tablet engraved for a sovereign whose horus name, Ahuiti, the warlike, is known to us from several documents, and whose tomb also has been discovered, but at Nagata. It is a great rectangular structure of bricks one hundred and sixty-five feet long and eighty-four broad, the external walls of which were originally ornamented by deep, polygonal grooves, resembling those which score the façade of Chaldean buildings. But the Nagata tomb has a second brick wall which fills up all the hollows left in the first one, and thus hides the primitive decoration of the monument. The building contains twenty-one chambers, five of which in the center apparently constituted the dwelling of the deceased, while the others, grouped around these, serve as storehouses from once he could draw his provisions at will. Did the king varied within indeed bear the name of many, and if such was the case, how are we to reconcile the tradition of his thinite origin with the existence of his far-off tomb in the neighborhood of Thebes? Objects bearing his horse name have been found at Am-Al-Gab, and it is evident that he belonged to the same age as the sovereigns interred in this necropolis. If indeed, Menes was really his personal name, there is no reason against his being the Menes of tradition, he whom the pharaohs of the glorious Theban dynasties regarded as the earliest of their purely human ancestors. Whether he was really the first king who reigned over the whole of Egypt, or whether he had been preceded by other sovereigns whose monuments we may find in some sites still unexplored, is a matter for conjecture. That princes had exercised authority in various parts of the country is still uncertain, but that the Egyptian historians did not know them seems to prove that they had left no written records of their names. At any rate, a Menes lived who reigned at the outset of history, and doubtless before long the Nile valley, when more carefully explored, will yield us monuments regarding his actions and determining his date. The civilization of the Egypt of his time was ruder than that which we have hitherto been familiar on its soil, but even at that early period it was almost as complete. It had its industries and its arts, of which the cemeteries furnish us daily with the most varied examples, weaving, modeling in clay, wood carving, the incising of ivory, gold, and the hardest stone were all carried on, the ground was cultivated with hoe and plow, tombs were built showing us the model of what the houses and palaces must have been, the country had its army, its administrators, its priests, its nobles, its riding, and its system of epigraphy differs so little from that to which we are accustomed in later ages that we can decipher it with no great difficulty. Frankly speaking, all that we know at present of the first of the pharaohs beyond the mere fact of his existence is practically nil, and the stories related of him by the writers of classical times are mere legends arranged to suit the fancy of the compiler. This menace, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with his dykes, for the river formerly followed the sandhills for some distance on the Libyan side. Menace, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to the south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the river through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain ranges. Then Menace, the first who was a king, having enclosed a firm space of ground with dykes, there founded that town which is still called Memphis. He then made a lake around it to the north and west, fed by the river, the city being bounded on the east by the nile. The history of Memphis, such as it can be gathered from the monuments, differs considerably from the tradition current in Egypt at the time of Herodotus. It appears indeed that at the outset the site on which it subsequently arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbu Hazu, the White Wall, which was dependent on Heliopolis, and in which Ptah possessed a sanctuary. After the White Wall was separated from the Heliopolitan principality to form Anome by itself, it assumed a certain importance, and furnished, so it was said, the dynasties which succeeded the thinite. Its prosperity dates only, however, from the time when the sovereigns of the fifth and sixth dynasties fixed on it for their residence. One of them, Papi I, there founded for himself and for his double after him a new town which he called Minofiru from his tomb. Minofiru, which is the correct pronunciation in the origin of Memphis, probably signified the good refuge, the haven of the good, the burying place where the blessed dead came to rest beside Osiris. The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably did not fall within their taste for romantic tales. They were rather disposed, as a rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the countries or cities in which they were familiar took their names. If no tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any scruple in inventing one. Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies, who were guided in their philological speculations by the pronunciation in vogue around them, attributed the patron- ship of their city to a princess Memphis, a daughter of its founder, the fabulous Ucraeus, those of preceding ages before the name had become altered, thought to find in Minofiru a mininofir, or Menes the Good, the reputed founder of the capital of the delta. Menes the Good, divested of his epithet, is none other than Menes the first king, and he owes this episode in his like to a popular attempt at etymology. The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the construction of the city must have originated at a time when Memphis was still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at latest about the end of the Memphite period. It must have been an old tradition in the time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted unhesitatingly the authenticity of the statements, which ascribed to the northern city so marked a superiority over their own country. When once this half-mythical Menes was firmly established in his position, there was little difficulty in inventing a story which would portray him as an ideal sovereign. He was represented as architect, warrior, and statesman. He had begun the temple of Fatah, written laws and regulated the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hapis, and he had conducted expeditions against the Libyans. When he lost his only son in the flower of his age, the people improvised to him of mourning to console him, the Mineros, both the words and the tune of which were handed down from generation to generation. He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining posture. One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or other, fell upon him to devour him. He escaped with difficulty, and pursued by them, fled to the shore of Lake Morris, and was there brought to bay. He was on the point of succumbing to them when a crocodile took him on his back and carried him across to the other side. In gratitude he built a new town, which he called Crocodilopolis, and assigned to it for its god the crocodile which had saved him. He then erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a pyramid for his tune. Other traditions show him in a less favorable light. They accuse him of having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and alleged that after a reign of sixty to sixty-two years he was killed by hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile. They also related that the Said Tafnaki Ti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of royal life, had solemnly cursed him, and had caused his implications to be inscribed upon a stele set up in the temple of Ammonet Thebes. Nevertheless, in the memory that Egypt preserved of its first pharaoh, the good outweighed the evil. He was worshiped in Memphis side by side with Ptah and Ramesses II. His name figured at the head of the royal lists, and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies. His immediate successors had an actual existence, and their tombs are there in proof of it. We know where Eusepheus, Myebes, and some Emses were laid to rest, besides more than a dozen other princes whose real names and whose position in the official list are still uncertain. The order of their secession was often a matter of doubt to the Egyptians themselves, but perhaps the discoveries of the next few years will enable us to clear up and settle definitely matters which were shrouded in mystery in the time of the Theban pharaohs. As a fact, the forms of such of their names as have been handed down to us by later tradition are curt and rugged, indicative of an early state of society and harmonizing with the more primitive civilization to which they belong. Ati the wrestler, Teti the runner, Quincani the crusher, are suitable rulers for a people. The first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight. Some of the monuments they have left us seem to show that their reigns were as much devoted to war as those of later pharaohs. The king whose horus name was neuromir is seen on a contemporary object which has come down to us, standing before a heap of beheaded foes. The bodies are all stretched out on the ground, each with his head placed neatly between his legs. The king had overcome, apparently in some important engagement, several thousand of his enemies, and was inspecting the execution of their leaders. That the foes with whom these early kings contended were in most cases Egyptian princes of the nomes is proved by the list of city names which are inscribed on the fragments of other documents of the same nature, and we gather from them that Dobu, Edfu, Hazutonu, Sinopolis, Habonu, Hipponon, Hakau, Memphis, and others were successfully taken and dismantled. On this fragment King Den is represented standing over a prostate chief of the Bedouin, striking him with his mace. Sondi, who is classed in the second dynasty, received a continuous worship towards the end of the third dynasty. But did all those whose names proceeded or followed his on the lists really exist as he did? And if they existed, to what extent do the order and the relation assigned to them agree with the actual truth? The different lists do not contain the same names in the same positions. Certain pharaohs are added or suppressed without appreciable reason. Where Manetho inscribes Kenkenes and Unifes, the tables of the time of Sedi I give us Ati and Atah. Manetho reckons nine kings to the second dynasty while they register only five. The monuments indeed show us that Egypt in the past obeyed princes whom her analysts were unable to classify. For instance, they associate with Sondi of Piersenu, who is not mentioned in the annals. We must therefore take the record of all this opening period of history for what it is, namely, a system invented at a much later date, by means of various artifices and combinations, to be partially accepted in default of a better, but without according to it that excessive confidence which it has hitherto received. The two Thanite dynasties, in direct dissent from the first human king Menes, furnish, like this hero himself, only a tissue of romantic tales and miraculous legends in the place of history. A double-headed stork, which had appeared in the first year of Teddy, son of Menes, had foreshadowed to Egypt a long prosperity, but a famine under Unifes and a terrible plague under Sinemsis had depopulated the country. The laws had been relaxed, great crimes had been committed, and revolts had broken out. During the reign of Balthos a gulf had opened near Bubastus and swallowed up many people. Then the Nile had flowed with honey for fifteen days in the time of Nefer Charis and Cessacris was supposed to have been a giant in stature. A few details about royal edifices were mixed up with these prodigies. Teddy had laid the foundation of the great palace of Memphis. Unifes had built the pyramids of Coquembe near Saqqara. Several of the ancient pharaohs had published books on theology or had written treatises on anatomy and medicine. Several had made laws which lasted down to the beginning of the Christian era. One of them was called Kaku, the male of males or the bull of bulls. They explained his name by the statement that he had concerned himself about the sacred animals. He had proclaimed as gods Hopi's of Memphis, Menevis of Heliopolis, and the Goat of Mendes. After him Benothris had conferred the rite of secession upon all the women of the blood royal. The secession of the Third Dynasty, a Memphite one according to Menetho, did not at first change the miraculous character of this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necker-office, and the two armies were encamped before each other, when one night the disc of the moon became immeasurably enlarged to the great alarm of the rebels, who recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven and yielded without fighting. Tosothros, the successor of Necker-office, brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone cutting to perfection. He composed, as Teddy did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be identified with the healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these things seriously, and the Greek riders took them down from their lips with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the wise men of Egypt. What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see, than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination, but in sass or dodal dogma. They were invented long after the times they dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the monuments. Towards the middle of the third century before our era, the Greek troops stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract, developed a particular veneration for Isis of Phile. Their devotion spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the whole population of the Thebid, and finally reached the court of the Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshipers to a common sanctuary, and united in one cult the two races over which they ruled. They pulled down the meager building of the Sait period which had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess the richest landowner in southern Egypt. Kanumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit, who before Isis had been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy their neighbor's prosperity. The civil wars and invasions of the centuries immediately proceeding had ruined their temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the newcomer. The priests resolved to lay the sad state of affairs before King Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the generosity of the ancient pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty of the times, the recent pharaohs had been unable to follow. Doubtless authentic documents were wanting in their archives to support their pretensions. They therefore inscribed upon a rock in the island of Sahil, a long inscription which they attributed to Zosiri of the Third Dynasty. This sovereign had left behind him a vague reputation for greatness. As early as the Twelfth Dynasty, Usurtasin III had claimed him as his father, his ancestor, and had erected a statue to him. The priests knew that, by invoking him, they had a chance of obtaining a hearing. The inscription which they fabricated set forth that in the eighteenth year of Zosiri's reign he had sent to my dear, Lord of Elephantine, a message couched in these terms. I am overcome with sorrow for the throne and for those who reside in the palace, and my heart is afflicted and suffers greatly because the Nile has not risen in my time for the space of eight years. Corn is scarce, there is a lack of herbage, and nothing is left to eat. When any one calls upon his neighbors for help they take pains not to go. The child weeps, the young man is uneasy, the hearts of the old men are in despair, their limbs are bent. Did the Ptolemies admit the claims which the local priests attempted to deduce from this romantic tale? And did the god regain possession of the domains and dues which they declared had been his right? The stelae shows us, with what ease the scribes could forge official documents, when the exigencies require they crouch on the earth, they fold their hands, the courtiers have no further resources, the shops formally furnished with rich wares are now only filled with air, all that was in them has disappeared. My spirit also, mindful of the beginning of things, seeks to call upon the Saviour who is here where I am, during the centuries of the gods, upon Thot Ibis, that great wise one, upon Imhotpu, son of Ptah of Memphis. Where is the place in which the Nile is born? Who is the God or God is concealed there? What is his likeness? The Lord of Elephantine brought his reply in person. He described to the king, who was evidently ignorant of it, the situation of the island and the rocks of the cataract. The phenomena of the inundation, the gods who presided over it, and who alone could relieve Egypt from her disastrous plight. So Ciri repaired to the temple of the principality and offered the prescribed sacrifices. The god arose, opened his eyes, panted and cried aloud, I am Kanumukh created thee, and promised him a speedy return of a high Nile and the cessation of the famine. Pharaoh was touched by the benevolence which his defiant father had shown him. He forthwith made a decree by which he seated to the temple all his rites of suzerainty over the neighbouring nomads within a radius of twenty miles. Hence forward the entire population, tillers and vine-dressers, fishermen and hunters, had to yield the tithes of their incomes to the priests. The quarries could not be worked without the consent of Kanumukh and the payment of a suitable indemnity into his coffers. And finally all metals and precious wood shipped thence for Egypt had to submit to a toll on behalf of the temple. Though the daily life forced the necessity upon them, it teaches us at the same time how that fabulous chronicle was elaborated, whose remains have been preserved for us by classical writers. Every prodigy, every fact related by Menetho, was taken from some document analogous to the supposed inscription of Zosiri. The real history of the early centuries, therefore, eludes our researches, and no contemporary record traces for us those vicissitudes which Egypt passed through before being consolidated into a single kingdom under the rule of one man. Many names, apparently of powerful and illustrious princes, had survived in the memory of the people. These were collected, classified, and grouped in a regular manner into dynasties, but the people were ignorant of any exact facts connected with the names, and the histories, on their own account, were reduced to collect apocryphal traditions for their sacred archives. The monuments of these remote ages, however, cannot have entirely disappeared. They exist in places where we have not as yet thought of applying the pick, and chance excavations will someday most certainly bring them to light. The few which we do possess barely go back beyond the Third Dynasty, namely the Hypogeum of Shiri, priest of Sandi and of Pirsinu, possibly the tomb of Kuit Thotpu at Sakara, the great Sphinx of Giza, a short inscription on the rocks of the Wadi Manghara which represents Zosiri, the same king of whom the priests of Kanumu in the Greek period made a precedent, working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai, and finally the steppe pyramid where this same pharaoh rests. It forms a rectangular mass, incorrectly oriented, with a variation from the true north of four degrees thirty-five minutes, three hundred and ninety-three feet eight inches long from east to west, and three hundred and fifty-two feet deep, with a height of one hundred and fifty-nine feet nine inches. It is composed of six cubes with sloping sides, each being about thirteen feet less in width than the one below it. That nearest to the ground measures thirty-seven feet eight inches in height, and the uppermost one twenty-nine feet nine inches. It was entirely constructed of limestone from the neighboring mountains. The blocks are small and badly cut, the stone courses being concave to offer a better resistance to downward thrust, and to shocks of earthquake. When breaches in the masonry are examined, it can be seen that the external surface of the steps has, as it were, a double stone facing, each facing being carefully dressed. The body of the pyramid is solid, the chambers being cut in the rock beneath. These chambers have been often enlarged, restored, and reworked in the course of centuries, and the passages which connect them form a perfect labyrinth into which it is dangerous to venture without a guide. The columned porch, the galleries and halls all lead to a sort of enormous shaft at the bottom of which the architect had contrived a hiding place, destined, no doubt, to contain the more precious objects of the funiary furniture. Until the beginning of this century, the vault had preserved its original lining of glazed pottery. Three-quarters of the wall's surface were covered with green tiles, oblong and slightly convex on the outer side, but flat on the inner. A square projection pierced with a hole served to fix them at the back in a horizontal line by means of flexible wooden rods. The three bands which frame one of the doors are inscribed with the titles of the pharaohs. The hieroglyphs are raised in either blue, red, green, or yellow on a fawn-colored ground. Other kings had built temples, palaces, and towns, as, for instance, King Kasakimu, of whose construction some traces exist at Heracleopolis, opposite to Al-Kab, or King Kasakmui, who proceeded by a few years the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, but the monuments which they raised to be witnesses of their power or piety to future generations have in the course of ages disappeared under the tramplings and before the triumphal blasts of many invading hosts. The pyramid alone has survived, and the most ancient of the historic monuments of Egypt is a tomb. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org