Our Oriental Heritage

5. Letters and Arts

Writing—Literature—Temples and palaces—Statuary—Ceramics-Jewelry—Summary of Sumerian civilization

The startling fact in the Sumerian remains is writing. The marvelous art seems already well advanced, fit to express complex thought in commerce, poetry and religion. The oldest inscriptions are on stone, and date apparently as far back as 3600 B.C.⁵⁴ Towards 3200 B.C. the clay tablet appears, and from that time on the Sumerians seem to have delighted in the great discovery. It is our good fortune that the people of Mesopotamia wrote not upon fragile, ephemeral paper in fading ink, but upon moist clay deftly impressed with the wedge-like (“cuneiform”) point of a stylus. With this malleable material the scribe kept records, executed contracts, drew up official documents, recorded property, judgments and sales, and created a culture in which the stylus became as mighty as the sword. Having completed the writing, the scribe baked the clay tablet with heat or in the sun, and made it thereby a manuscript far more durable than paper, and only less lasting than stone. This development of cuneiform script was the outstanding contribution of Sumeria to the civilizing of mankind.

Sumerian writing reads from right to left; the Babylonians were, so far as we know, the first people to write from left to right. The linear script, as we have seen, was apparently a stylized and conventionalized form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon primitive Sumerian pottery.* Presumably from repetition and haste over centuries of time, the original pictures were gradually contracted into signs so unlike the objects which they had once represented that they became the symbols of sounds rather than of things. We should have an analogous process in English if the picture of a bee should in time be shortened and simplified, and come to mean not a bee but the sound be, and then serve to indicate that syllable in any combination as in being. The Sumerians and Babylonians never advanced from such representation of syllables to the representation of letters—never dropped the vowel in the syllabic sign to make be mean b; it seems to have remained for the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step.⁵⁵

The transition from writing to literature probably required many hundreds of years. For centuries writing was a tool of commerce, a matter of contracts and bills, of shipments and receipts; and secondarily, perhaps, it was an instrument of religious record, an attempt to preserve magic formulas, ceremonial procedures, sacred legends, prayers and hymns from alteration or decay. Nevertheless, by 2700 B.C., great libraries had been formed in Sumeria; at Tello, for example, in ruins contemporary with Gudea, De Sarzac discovered a collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged one upon another in neat and logical array.⁵⁶ As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian historians began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles. Among the original fragments, however, is a tablet found at Nippur, bearing the Sumerian prototype of the epic of Gilgamesh, which we shall study later in its developed Babylonian expression.⁵⁷ Some of the shattered tablets contain dirges of no mean power, and of significant literary form. Here at the outset appears the characteristic Near-Eastern trick of chanting repetition—many lines beginning in the same way, many clauses reiterating or illustrating the meaning of the clause before. Through these salvaged relics we see the religious origin of literature in the songs and lamentations of the priests. The first poems were not madrigals, but prayers.

Behind these apparent beginnings of culture were doubtless many centuries of development, in Sumeria and other lands. Nothing has been created, it has only grown. Just as in writing Sumeria seems to have created cuneiform, so in architecture it seems to have created at once the fundamental shapes of home and temple, column and vault and arch.⁵⁸ The Sumerian peasant made his cottage by planting reeds in a square, a rectangle or a circle, bending the tops together, and binding them to form an arch, a vault or a dome;⁵⁹ this, we surmise, is the simple origin, or earliest known appearance, of these architectural forms. Among the ruins of Nippur is an arched drain 5000 years old; in the royal tombs of Ur there are arches that go back to 3500 B.C., and arched doors were common at Ur 2000 B.C.⁶⁰ And these were true arches: i.e., their stones were set in full voussoir fashion—each stone a wedge tapering downward tightly into place.

The richer citizens built palaces, perched on a mound sometimes forty feet above the plain, and made purposely inaccessible except by one path, so that every Sumerian’s home might be his castle. Since stone was scarce, these palaces were mostly of brick. The plain red surface of the walls was relieved by terracotta decoration in every form—spirals, chevrons, triangles, even lozenges and diapers. The inner walls were plastered and painted in simple mural style. The house was built around a central court, which gave shade and some coolness against the Mediterranean sun; for the same reason, as well as for security, the rooms opened upon this court rather than upon the outer world. Windows were a luxury, or perhaps they were not wanted. Water was drawn from wells; and an extensive system of drainage drew the waste from the residential districts of the towns. Furniture was not complex or abundant but neither was it without taste. Some beds were inlaid with metal or ivory, and occasionally, as in Egypt, armchairs flaunted feet like lions’ claws.⁶¹

For the temples stone was imported, and adorned with copper entablatures and friezes inlaid with semiprecious material. The temple of Nannar at Ur set a fashion for all Mesopotamia with pale blue enameled tiles; while its interior was paneled with rare woods like cedar and cypress, inlaid with marble, alabaster, onyx, agate and gold. Usually the most important temple in the city was not only built upon an elevation, but was topped with a ziggurat—a tower of three, four or seven stories, surrounded with a winding external stairway, and set back at every stage. Here on the heights the loftiest of the city’s gods might dwell, and here the government might find a last spiritual and physical citadel against invasion or revolt.*⁶²

The temples were sometimes decorated with statuary of animals, heroes and gods; figures plain, blunt and powerful, but severely lacking in sculptural finish and grace. Most of the extant statues are of King Gudea, executed resolutely but crudely in resistant diorite. In the ruins of Tell-el-Ubaid, from the early Sumerian period, a copper statuette of a bull was found, much abused by the centuries, but still full of life and bovine complacency. A cow’s head in silver from the grave of Queen Shub-ad at Ur is a masterpiece that suggests a developed art too much despoiled by time to permit of our giving it its due. This is almost proved by the bas-reliefs that survive. The “Stele of the Vultures” set up by King Eannatum of Lagash, the porphyry cylinder of Ibnishar,⁶³, the humorous caricatures (as surely they must be) of Ur-nina,⁶⁴ and above all the “Victory Stele” of Naram-sin share the crudity of Sumerian sculpture, but have in them a lusty vitality of drawing and action characteristic of a young and flourishing art.

Of the pottery one may not speak so leniently. Perhaps time misleads our judgment by having preserved the worst; perhaps there were many pieces as well carved as the alabaster vessels discovered at Eridu;⁶⁵ but for the most part Sumerian pottery, though turned on the wheel, is mere earthenware, and cannot compare with the vases of Elam. Better work was done by the goldsmiths. Vessels of gold, tasteful in design and delicate in finish, have been found in the earliest graves at Ur, some as old as 4000 B.C.⁶⁶ The silver vase of Entemenu, now in the Louvre, is as stocky as Gudea, but is adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved.⁶⁷ Best of all is the gold sheath and lapis-lazuli dagger exhumed at Ur;⁶⁸ here, if one may judge from photographs,* the form almost touches perfection. The ruins have given us a great number of cylindrical seals, mostly made of precious metal or stone, with reliefs carefully carved upon a square inch or two of surface; these seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures, and indicate a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naïve conception of progress as a continuous rise of man through the unfortunate cultures of the past to the unrivaled zenith of today.

Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between crude pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the limits of our present knowledge, are the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry, the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and temples, the first ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first arch, column, vault and dome. Here, for the first known time on a large scale, appear some of the sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war. It was a life differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex. Already the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad variations.

III. PASSAGE TO EGYPT

Sumerian influence in Mesopotamia—Ancient Arabia—Mesopotamian influence in Egypt

Nevertheless, we are still so near the beginning of recorded history when we speak of Sumeria that it is difficult to determine the priority or sequence of the many related civilizations that developed in the ancient Near East. The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian; this, which may be a whim of circumstance, a sport of mortality, does not prove that the first civilization was Sumerian. Statuettes and other remains akin to those of Sumeria have been found at Ashur and Samarra, in what became Assyria; we do not know whether this early culture came from Sumeria or passed to it along the Tigris. The code of Hammurabi resembles that of Ur-engur and Dungi, but we cannot be sure that it was evolved from it rather than from some predecessor ancestral to them both. It is only probable, not certain, that the civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria were derived from or fertilized by that of Sumer and Akkad.⁶⁹ The gods and myths of Babylon and Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumerian theology; and the languages of these later cultures bear the same relationship to Sumeria that French and Italian bear to Latin.

Schweinfurth has called attention to the interesting fact that though the cultivation of barley, millet and wheat, and the domestication of cattle, goats and sheep, appear in both Egypt and Mesopotamia as far back as our records go, these cereals and animals are found in their wild and natural state not in Egypt but in western Asia—especially in Yemen or ancient Arabia. He concludes that civilization—i.e., in this context, the cultivation of cereals and the use of domesticated animals—appeared in unrecorded antiquity in Arabia, and spread thence in a “triangular culture” to Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria) and Egypt.⁷⁰ Current knowledge of primitive Arabia is too slight to make this more than a presentable hypothesis.

More definite is the derivation of certain specific elements of Egyptian culture from Sumeria and Babylonia. We know that trade passed between Mesopotamia and Egypt—certainly via the isthmus at Suez, and probably by water from the ancient outlets of Egyptian rivers on the Red Sea.⁷¹ A look at the map explains why Egypt, throughout its known history, has belonged to Western Asia rather than to Africa; trade and culture could pass from Asia along the Mediterranean to the Nile, but shortly beyond that it was balked by the desert which, with the cataracts of the Nile, isolated Egypt from the remainder of Africa. Hence it is natural that we should find many Mesopotamian elements in the primitive culture of Egypt.

The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.⁷² The pictographic writing of the predynastic Egyptians seems to have come in from Sumeria.⁷³ The cylindrical seal, which is of unquestionably Mesopotamian origin, appears in the earliest period of known Egyptian history, and then disappears, as if an imported custom had been displaced by a native mode.⁷⁴ The potter’s wheel is not known in Egypt before the Fourth Dynasty—long after its appearance in Sumeria; presumably it came into Egypt from the Land between the Rivers along with the wheel and the chariot.⁷⁵ Early Egyptian and Babylonian mace-heads are completely identical in form.⁷⁶ A finely worked flint knife, found in predynastic Egyptian remains at Gebel-el-Arak, bears reliefs in Mesopotamian themes and style.⁷⁷ Copper was apparently developed in western Asia, and brought thence to Egypt.⁷⁸ Early Egyptian architecture resembles Mesopotamian in the use of the recessed panel as a decoration for brick walls.⁷⁹ Predynastic pottery, statuettes and decorative motives are in many cases identical, or unmistakably allied, with Mesopotamian products.⁸⁰ Among these early Egyptian remains are small figures of a goddess of evident Asiatic origin. At a time when Egyptian civilization seems to have only begun, the artists of Ur were making statuary and reliefs whose style and conventions demonstrate the antiquity of these arts in Sumeria.⁸¹*

Egypt could well afford to concede the priority of Sumeria. For whatever the Nile may have borrowed from the Tigris and the Euphrates, it soon flowered into a civilization specifically and uniquely its own; one of the richest and greatest, one of the most powerful and yet one of the most graceful, cultures in history. By its side Sumeria was but a crude beginning; and not even Greece or Rome would surpass it.

CHAPTER VIII

Egypt

I. THE GIFT OF THE NILE

1. In the Delta

Alexandria—The Nile—The Pyramids—The Sphinx

THIS is a perfect harbor. Outside the long breakwater the waves topple over one another roughly; within it the sea is a silver mirror. There, on the little island of Pharos, when Egypt was very old, Sostratus built his great lighthouse of white marble, five hundred feet high, as a beacon to all ancient mariners of the Mediterranean, and as one of the seven wonders of the world. Time and the nagging waters have washed it away, but a new lighthouse has taken its place, and guides the steamer through the rocks to the quays of Alexandria. Here that astonishing boy-statesman, Alexander, founded the subtle, polyglot metropolis that was to inherit the culture of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. In this harbor Caesar received without gladness the severed head of Pompey.

As the train glides through the city, glimpses come of unpaved alleys and streets, heat waves dancing in the air, workingmen naked to the waist, black-garbed women bearing burdens sturdily, white-robed and turbaned Moslems of regal dignity, and in the distance spacious squares and shining palaces, perhaps as fair as those that the Ptolemies built when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the world. Then suddenly it is open country, and the city recedes into the horizon of the fertile Delta—that green triangle which looks on the map like the leaves of a lofty palm-tree held up on the slender stalk of the Nile.

Once, no doubt, this Delta was a bay; patiently the broad stream filled it up, too slowly to be seen, with detritus carried down a thousand miles;* now from this little corner of mud, enclosed by the many mouths of the river, six million peasants grow enough cotton to export a hundred million dollars’ worth of it every year. There, bright and calm under the glaring sun, fringed with slim palms and grassy banks, is the most famous of all rivers. We cannot see the desert that lies so close beyond it, or the great empty wadis—river-beds—where once its fertile tributaries flowed; we cannot realize yet how precariously narrow a thing this Egypt is, owing everything to the river, and harassed on either side with hostile, shifting sand.

Now the train passes amid the alluvial plain. The land is half covered with water, and crossed everywhere with irrigation canals. In the ditches and the fields black fellaheen* labor, knowing no garment but a cloth about the loins. The river has had one of its annual inundations, which begin at the summer solstice and last for a hundred days; through that overflow the desert became fertile, and Egypt blossomed, in Herodotus’ phrase, as the “gift of the Nile.” It is clear why civilization found here one of its earliest homes; nowhere else was a river so generous in irrigation, and so controllable in its rise; only Mesopotamia could rival it. For thousands of years the peasants have watched this rise with anxious eagerness; to this day public criers announce its progress each morning in the streets of Cairo.² So the past, with the quiet continuity of this river, flows into the future, lightly touching the present on its way. Only historians make divisions; time does not.

But every gift must be paid for; and the peasant, though he valued the rising waters, knew that without control they could ruin as well as irrigate his fields. So from time beyond history he built these ditches that cross and recross the land; he caught the surplus in canals, and when the river fell he raised the water with buckets pivoted on long poles, singing, as he worked, the songs that the Nile has heard for five thousand years. For as these peasants are now, sombre and laughterless even in their singing, so they have been, in all likelihood, for fifty centuries.³ This water-raising apparatus is as old as the Pyramids; and a million of these fellaheen, despite the conquests of Arabic, still speak the language of the ancient monuments.⁴

Here in the Delta, fifty miles southeast of Alexandria, is the site of Naucratis, once filled with industrious, scheming Greeks; thirty miles farther east, the site of Saïs, where, in the centuries before the Persian and Greek conquests, the native civilization of Egypt had its last revival; and then, a hundred and twenty-nine miles southeast of Alexandria, is Cairo. A beautiful city, but not Egyptian; the conquering Moslems founded it in A.D. 968; then the bright spirit of France overcame the gloomy Arab and built here a Paris in the desert, exotic and unreal. One must pass through it by motorcar or leisurely fiacre to find old Egypt at the Pyramids.

How small they appear from the long road that approaches them; did we come so far to see so little? But then they grow larger, as if they were being lifted up into the air; round a turn in the road we surprise the edge of the desert; and there suddenly the Pyramids confront us, bare and solitary in the sand, gigantic and morose against an Italian sky. A motley crowd scrambles about their base—stout business men on blinking donkeys, stouter ladies secure in carts, young men prancing on horseback, young women sitting uncomfortably on camel-back, their silk knees glistening in the sun; and everywhere grasping Arabs. We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us.

Nearby, the Sphinx, half lion and half philosopher, grimly claws the sand, and glares unmoved at the transient visitor and the eternal plain. It is a savage monument, as if designed to frighten old lechers and make children retire early. The lion body passes into a human head with prognathous jaws and cruel eyes; the civilization that built it (ca. 2990 B.C.) had not quite forgotten barbarism. Once the sand covered it, and Herodotus, who saw so much that is not there, says not a word of it.

Nevertheless, what wealth these old Egyptians must have had, what power and skill, even in the infancy of history, to bring these vast stones six hundred miles, to raise some of them, weighing many tons, to a height of half a thousand feet, and to pay, or even to feed, the hundred thousand slaves who toiled for twenty years on these Pyramids! Herodotus has preserved for us an inscription that he found on one pyramid, recording the quantity of radishes, garlic and onions consumed by the workmen who built it; these things, too, had to have their immortality.* Despite these familiar friends we go away disappointed; there is something barbarically primitive—or barbarically modern—in this brute hunger for size. It is the memory and imagination of the beholder that, swollen with history, make these monuments great; in themselves they are a little ridiculous—vainglorious tombs in which the dead sought eternal life. Perhaps pictures have too much ennobled them: photography can catch everything but dirt, and enhances man-made objects with noble vistas of land and sky. The sunset at Gizeh is greater than the Pyramids.

2. Upstream

Memphis—The masterpiece of Queen Hatshepsut—The “Colossi of Memnon”—Luxor and Karnak—The grandeur of Egyptian civilization

From Cairo a little steamer moves up the river—i.e., southward—through six leisurely days to Karnak and Luxor. Twenty miles below Cairo it passes Memphis, the most ancient of Egypt’s capitals. Here, where the great Third and Fourth Dynasties lived, in a city of two million souls, nothing now greets the eye but a row of small pyramids and a grove of palms; for the rest there is only desert, infinite, villainous sand, slipping under the feet, stinging the eyes, filling the pores, covering everything, stretching from Morocco across Sinai, Arabia, Turkestan, Tibet to Mongolia: along that sandy belt across two continents civilization once built its seats and now is gone, driven away, as the ice receded, by increasing heat and decreasing rain. By the Nile, for a dozen miles on either side, runs a ribbon of fertile soil; from the Mediterranean to Nubia there is only this strip redeemed from the desert. This is the thread upon which hung the life of Egypt. And yet how brief seems the life-span of Greece, or the millennium of Rome, beside the long record from Menes to Cleopatra!

A week later the steamer is at Luxor. On this site, now covered with Arab hamlets or drifting sand, once stood the greatest of Egypt’s capitals, the richest city of the very ancient world, known to the Greeks as Thebes, and to its own people as Wesi and Ne. On the eastern slope of the Nile is the famous Winter Palace of Luxor, aflame with bougainvillea; across the river the sun is setting over the Tombs of the Kings into a sea of sand, and the sky is flaked with gaudy tints of purple and gold. Far in the west the pillars of Queen Hatshepsut’s noble temple gleam, looking for all the world like some classic colonnade.

In the morning lazy sailboats ferry the seeker across a river so quiet and unpretentious that no one would suspect that it had been flowing here for uncounted centuries. Then over mile after mile of desert, through dusty mountain passes and by historic graves, until the masterpiece of the great Queen rises still and white in the trembling heat. Here the artist decided to transform nature and her hills into a beauty greater than her own: into the very face of the granite cliff he built these columns, as stately as those that Ictinus made for Pericles; it is impossible, seeing these, to doubt that Greece took her architecture, perhaps through Crete, from this initiative race. And on the walls vast bas-reliefs, alive with motion and thought, tell the story of the first great woman in history, and not the least of queens.

On the road back sit two giants in stone, representing the most luxurious of Egypt’s monarchs, Amenhotep III, but mistakenly called the “Colossi of Memnon” by the Baedekers of Greece. Each is seventy feet high, weighs seven hundred tons, and is carved out of a single rock. On the base of one of them are the inscriptions left by Greek tourists who visited these ruins two thousand years ago; again the centuries fall out of reckoning, and those Greeks seem strangely contemporary with us in the presence of these ancient things. A mile to the north lie the stone remains of Rameses II, one of the most fascinating figures in history, beside whom Alexander is an immature trifle; alive for ninety-nine years, emperor for sixty-seven, father of one hundred and fifty children; here he is a statue, once fifty-six feet high, now fifty-six feet long, prostrate and ridiculous in the sand. Napoleon’s savants measured him zealously; they found his ear three and a half feet long, his foot five feet wide, his weight a thousand tons; for him Bonaparte should have used his later salutation of Goethe: “Voilà un homme!—behold a man!”

All around now, on the west bank of the Nile, is the City of the Dead. At every turn some burrowing Egyptologist has unearthed a royal tomb. The grave of Tutenkhamon is closed, locked even in the faces of those who thought that gold would open anything; but the tomb of Seti I is open, and there in the cool earth one may gaze at decorated ceilings and passages, and marvel at the wealth and skill that could build such sarcophagi and surround them with such art. In one of these tombs the excavators saw, on the sand, the footprints of the slaves who had carried the mummy to its place three thousand years before.⁶

But the best remains adorn the eastern side of the river. Here at Luxor the lordly Amenhotep III, with the spoils of Thutmose Ill’s victories, began to build his most pretentious edifice; death came upon him as he built; then, after the work had been neglected for a century, Rameses II finished it in regal style. At once the quality of Egyptian architecture floods the spirit: here are scope and power, not beauty merely, but a masculine sublimity. A wide court, now waste with sand, paved of old with marble; on three sides majestic colonnades matched by Karnak alone; on every hand carved stone in bas-relief, and royal statues proud even in desolation. Imagine eight long stems of the papyrus plant—nurse of letters and here the form of art; at the base of the fresh unopened flowers bind the stems with five firm bands that will give beauty strength; then picture the whole stately stalk in stone: this is the papyriform column of Luxor. Fancy a court of such columns, upholding massive entablatures and shade-giving porticoes; see the whole as the ravages of thirty centuries have left it; then estimate the men who, in what we once thought the childhood of civilization, could conceive and execute such monuments.

Through ancient ruins and modern squalor a rough footpath leads to what Egypt keeps as its final offering—the temples of Karnak. Half a hundred Pharaohs took part in building them, from the last dynasties of the Old Kingdom to the days of the Ptolemies; generation by generation the structures grew, until sixty acres were covered with the lordliest offerings that architecture ever made to the gods. An “Avenue of Sphinxes” leads to the place where Champollion, founder of Egyptology, stood in 1828 and wrote:

I went at last to the palace, or rather to the city of monuments—to Karnak. There all the magnificence of the Pharaohs appeared to me, all that men have imagined and executed on the grandest scale. . . . No people, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on a scale so sublime, so great, so grandiose, as the ancient Egyptians. They conceived like men a hundred feet high.⁷

To understand it would require maps and plans, and all an architect’s learning. A spacious enclosure of many courts one-third of a mile on each side; a population of once 86,000 statues;⁸ a main group of buildings, constituting the Temple of Amon, one thousand by three hundred feet; great pylons or gates between one court and the next; the perfect “Heraldic Pillars” of Thutmose III, broken off rudely at the top, but still of astonishingly delicate carving and design; the Festival Hall of the same formidable monarch, its fluted shafts here and there anticipating all the power of the Doric column in Greece; the little Temple of Ptah, with graceful pillars rivaling the living palms beside them; the Promenade, again the work of Thutmose’s builders, with bare and massive colonnades, symbol of Egypt’s Napoleon; above all, the Hypostyle Hall,* a very forest of one hundred and forty gigantic columns, crowded close to keep out the exhausting sun, flowering out at their tops into spreading palms of stone, and holding up, with impressive strength, a roof of mammoth slabs stretched in solid granite from capital to capital. Nearby two slender obelisks, monoliths complete in symmetry and grace, rise like pillars of light amid the ruins of statues and temples, and announce in their inscriptions the proud message of Queen Hatshepsut to the world. These obelisks, the carving says,

are of hard granite from the quarries of the South; their tops are of fine gold chosen from the best in all foreign lands. They can be seen from afar on the river; the splendor of their radiance fills the Two Lands, and when the solar disc appears between them it is truly as if he rose up into the horizon of the sky. . . . You who after long years shall see these monuments, who shall speak of what I have done, you will say, “We do not know, we do not know how they can have made a whole mountain of gold.” . . . To guild them I have given gold measured by the bushel, as though it were sacks of grain, . . . for I knew that Karnak is the celestial horizon of the earth.⁹

What a queen, and what kings! Perhaps this first great civilization was the finest of all, and we have but begun to uncover its glory? Near the Sacred Lake at Karnak men are digging, carrying away the soil patiently in little paired baskets slung over the shoulder on a pole; an Egyptologist is bending absorbed over hieroglyphics on two stones just rescued from the earth; he is one of a thousand such men, Carters and Breasteds and Masperos, Petries and Caparts and Weigalls, living simply here in the heat and dust, trying to read for us the riddle of the Sphinx, to snatch from the secretive soil the art and literature, the history and wisdom of Egypt. Every day the earth and the elements fight against them; superstition curses and hampers them; moisture and corrosion attack the very monuments they have exhumed; and the same Nile that gives food to Egypt creeps in its overflow into the ruins of Karnak, loosens the pillars, tumbles them down,* and leaves upon them, when it subsides, a deposit of saltpetre that eats like a leprosy into the stone.

Let us contemplate the glory of Egypt once more, in her history and her civilization, before her last monuments crumble into the sand.

II. THE MASTER BUILDERS

1. The Discovery of Egypt

Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

The recovery of Egypt is one of the most brilliant chapters in archeology. The Middle Ages knew of Egypt as a Roman colony and a Christian settlement; the Renaissance presumed that civilization had begun with Greece; even the Enlightenment, though it concerned itself intelligently with China and India, knew nothing of Egypt beyond the Pyramids. Egyptology was a by-product of Napoleonic imperialism. When the great Corsican led a French expedition to Egypt in 1798 he took with him a number of draughtsmen and engineers to explore and map the terrain, and made place also for certain scholars absurdly interested in Egypt for the sake of a better understanding of history. It was this corps of men who first revealed the temples of Luxor and Karnak to the modern world; and the elaborate Description de L’Égypte (1809-13) which they prepared for the French Academy was the first milestone in the scientific study of this forgotten civilization.¹⁰

For many years, however, they were unable to read the inscriptions surviving on the monuments. Typical of the scientific temperament was the patient devotion with which Champollion, one of these savants, applied himself to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics. He found at last an obelisk covered with such “sacred carvings” in Egyptian, but bearing at the base a Greek inscription which indicated that the writing concerned Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Guessing that two hieroglyphics often repeated, with a royal cartouche attached, were the names of these rulers, he made out tentatively (1822) eleven Egyptian letters; this was the first proof that Egypt had had an alphabet. Then he applied this alphabet to a great black stone slab that Napoleon’s troops had stumbled upon near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. This “Rosetta Stone”* contained an inscription in three languages: first in hieroglyphics, second in “demotic”—the popular script of the Egyptians—and third in Greek. With his knowledge of Greek, and the eleven letters made out from the obelisk, Champollion, after more than twenty years of labor, deciphered the whole inscription, discovered the entire Egyptian alphabet, and opened the way to the recovery of a lost world. It was one of the peaks in the history of history.†¹¹

2. Prehistoric Egypt

Paleolithic—Neolithic—The Badarians—Predynastic—Race

Since the radicals of one age are the reactionaries of the next, it was not to be expected that the men who created Egyptology should be the first to accept as authentic the remains of Egypt’s Old Stone Age; after forty les savants ne sont pas curieux. When the first flints were unearthed in the valley of the Nile, Sir Flinders Petrie, not usually hesitant with figures, classed them as the work of post-dynastic generations; and Maspero, whose lordly erudition did no hurt to his urbane and polished style, ascribed neolithic Egyptian pottery to the Middle Kingdom. Nevertheless, in 1895 De Morgan revealed an almost continuous gradation of paleolithic cultures-corresponding substantially with their succession in Europe—in the flint hand-axes, harpoons, arrow-heads and hammers exhumed all along the Nile.¹³ Imperceptibly the paleolithic remains graduate into neolithic at depths indicating an age 10,000-4000 B.C.¹⁴ The stone tools become more refined, and reach indeed a level of sharpness, finish and precision unequaled by any other neolithic culture known.¹⁵ Towards the end of the period metal work enters in the form of vases, chisels and pins of copper, and ornaments of silver and gold.¹⁶

Finally, as a transition to history, agriculture appears. In the year 1901, near the little town of Badari (half way between Cairo and Karnak), bodies were excavated amid implements indicating a date approximating to forty centuries before Christ. In the intestines of these bodies, preserved through six millenniums by the dry heat of the sand, were husks of unconsumed barley.¹⁷ Since barley does not grow wild in Egypt, it is presumed that the Badarians had learned to cultivate cereals. From that early age the inhabitants of the Nile valley began the work of irrigation, cleared the jungles and the swamps, won the river from the crocodile and the hippopotamus, and slowly laid the groundwork of civilization.

These and other remains give us some inkling of Egyptian life before the first of the historic dynasties. It was a culture midway between hunting and agriculture, and just beginning to replace stone with metal tools. The people made boats, ground corn, wove linen and carpets, had jewels and perfumes, barbers and domesticated animals, and delighted to draw pictures, chiefly of the prey they pursued.¹⁸ They painted upon their simple pottery figures of mourning women, representations of animals and men, and geometrical designs; and they carved such excellent products as the Gebel-el-Arak knife. They had pictographic writing, and Sumerian-like cylinder seals.¹⁹

No one knows whence these early Egyptians came. Learned guesses incline to the view that they were a cross between Nubian, Ethiopian and Libyan natives on one side and Semitic or Armenoid immigrants on the other;²⁰ even at that date there were no pure races on the earth. Probably the invaders or immigrants from Western Asia brought a higher culture with them,²¹ and their intermarriage with the vigorous native stocks provided that ethnic blend which is often the prelude to a new civilization. Slowly, from 4000 to 3000 B.C., these mingling groups became a people, and created the Egypt of history.

3. The Old Kingdom

The “nomes”—The first historic individual—“Cheops”—“Chephren”—The purpose of the Pyramids—Art of the tombs—Mummification

Already, by 4000 B.C., these peoples of the Nile had forged a form of government. The population along the river was divided into “nomes,”* in each of which the inhabitants were essentially of one stock, acknowledged the same totem, obeyed the same chief, and worshiped the same gods by the same rites. Throughout the history of ancient Egypt these nomes persisted, their “nomarchs” or rulers having more or less power and autonomy according to the weakness or strength of the reigning Pharaoh. As all developing structures tend toward an increasing interdependence of the parts, so in this case the growth of trade and the rising costliness of war forced the nomes to organize themselves into two kingdoms—one in the south, one in the north; a division probably reflecting the conflict between African natives and Asiatic immigrants. This dangerous accentuation of geographic and ethnic differences was resolved for a time when Menes, a half-legendary figure, brought the “Two Lands” under his united power, promulgated a body of laws given him by the god Thoth,²² established the first historic dynasty, built a new capital at Memphis, “taught the people” (in the words of an ancient Greek historian) “to use tables and couches, and . . . introduced luxury and an extravagant manner of life.”²³

The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a king but an artist and a scientist—Imhotep, physician, architect and chief adviser of King Zoser (ca. 3150 B.C.). He did so much for Egyptian medicine that later generations worshiped him as a god of knowledge, author of their sciences and their arts; and at the same time he appears to have founded the school of architecture which provided the next dynasty with the first great builders in history. It was under his administration, according to Egyptian tradition, that the first stone house was built; it was he who planned the oldest Egyptian structure extant—the Step-Pyramid of Sakkara, a terraced structure of stone which for centuries set the style in tombs; and apparently it was he who designed the funerary temple of Zoser, with its lovely lotus columns and its limestone paneled walls.²⁴ In these old remains at Sakkarah, at what is almost the beginning of historic Egyptian art, we find fluted shafts as fair as any that Greece would build,²⁵ reliefs full of realism and vitality,²⁶ green faïence—richly colored glazed earthenware—rivaling the products of medieval Italy,²⁷ and a powerful stone figure of King Zoser himself, obscured in its details by the blows of time, but still revealing an astonishingly subtle and sophisticated face.²⁸

We do not know what concourse of circumstance made the Fourth Dynasty the most important in Egyptian history before the Eighteenth. Perhaps it was the lucrative mining operations in the last reign of the Third, perhaps the ascendancy of Egyptian merchants in Mediterranean trade, perhaps the brutal energy of Khufu,* first Pharaoh of the new house. Herodotus has passed on to us the traditions of the Egyptian priests concerning this builder of the first of Gizeh’s pyramids:

Now they tell me that to the reign of Rhampsinitus there was a perfect distribution of justice and that all Egypt was in a high state of prosperity; but that after him Cheops, coming to reign over them, plunged into every kind of wickedness, for that, having shut up all the temples, . . . he ordered all the Egyptians to work for himself. Some, accordingly, were appointed to draw stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains down to the Nile, others he ordered to receive the stones when transported in vessels across the river. . . . And they worked to the number of a hundred thousand men at a time, each party during three months. The time during which the people were thus harassed by toil lasted ten years on the road which they constructed, and along which they drew the stones; a work, in my opinion, not much less than the Pyramid.²⁹

Of his successor and rival builder, Khafre,* we know something almost at first hand; for the diorite portrait which is among the treasures of the Cairo Museum pictures him, if not as he looked, certainly as we might conceive this Pharaoh of the second pyramid, who ruled Egypt for fifty-six years. On his head is the falcon, symbol of the royal power; but even without that sign we should know that he was every inch a king. Proud, direct, fearless, piercing eyes; a powerful nose and a frame of reserved and quiet strength; it is evident that nature had long since learned how to make men, and art had long since learned how to represent them.

Why did these men build pyramids? Their purpose was not architectural but religious; the pyramids were tombs, lineally descended from the most primitive of burial mounds. Apparently the Pharaoh believed, like any commoner among his people, that every living body was inhabited by a double, or ka, which need not die with the breath; and that the ka would survive all the more completely if the flesh were preserved against hunger, violence and decay. The pyramid, by its height,† its form and its position, sought stability as a means to deathlessness; and except for its square corners it took the natural form that any homogeneous group of solids would take if allowed to fall unimpeded to the earth. Again, it was to have permanence and strength; therefore stones were piled up here with mad patience as if they had grown by the wayside and had not been carried from quarries hundreds of miles away. In Khufu’s pyramid there are two and a half million blocks, some of them weighing one hundred and fifty tons,³⁰ all of them averaging two and a half tons; they cover half a million square feet, and rise 481 feet into the air. And the mass is solid; only a few blocks were omitted, to leave a secret passage way for the carcass of the King. A guide leads the trembling visitor on all fours into the cavernous mausoleum, up a hundred crouching steps to the very heart of the pyramid; there in the damp, still center, buried in darkness and secrecy, once rested the bones of Khufu and his queen. The marble sarcophagus of the Pharaoh is still in place, but broken and empty. Even these stones could not deter human thievery, nor all the curses of the gods.

Since the ka was conceived as the minute image of the body, it had to be fed, clothed and served after the death of the frame. Lavatories were provided in some royal tombs for the convenience of the departed soul; and a funerary text expresses some anxiety lest the ka, for want of food, should feed upon its own excreta.³¹ One suspects that Egyptian burial customs, if traced to their source, would lead to the primitive interment of a warrior’s weapons with his corpse, or to some institution like the Hindu suttee—the burial of a man’s wives and slaves with him that they may attend to his needs. This having proved irksome to the wives and slaves, painters and sculptors were engaged to draw pictures, carve bas-reliefs, and make statuettes resembling these aides; by a magic formula, usually inscribed upon them, the carved or painted objects would be quite as effective as the real ones. A man’s descendants were inclined to be lazy and economical, and even if he had left an endowment to cover the costs they were apt to neglect the rule that religion originally put upon them of supplying the dead with provender. Hence pictorial substitutes were in any case a wise precaution: they could provide the ka of the deceased with fertile fields, plump oxen, innumerable servants and busy artisans, at an attractively reduced rate. Having discovered this principle, the artist accomplished marvels with it. One tomb picture shows a field being ploughed, the next shows the grain being reaped or threshed, another the bread being baked; one shows the bull copulating with the cow, another the calf being born, another the grown cattle being slaughtered, another the meat served hot on the dish.³² A fine limestone bas-relief in the tomb of Prince Rahotep portrays the dead man enjoying the varied victuals on the table before him.³³ Never since has art done so much for men.

Finally the ka was assured long life not only by burying the cadaver in a sarcophagus of the hardest stone, but by treating it to the most painstaking mummification. So well was this done that to this day bits of hair and flesh cling to the royal skeletons. Herodotus vividly describes the Egyptian embalmer’s art:

First they draw out the brains through the nostrils with an iron hook, raking part of it out in this manner, the rest by the infusion of drugs. Then with a sharp stone they make an incision in the side, and take out all the bowels; and having cleansed the abdomen and rinsed it with palm wine, they next sprinkle it with pounded perfume. Then, having filled the belly with pure myrrh, cassia and other perfumes, they sew it up again; and when they have done this they steep it in natron,* leaving it under for seventy days; for a longer time than this it is not lawful to steep it. At the expiration of seventy days they wash the corpse, and wrap the whole body in bandages of waxen cloth, smearing it with gum, which the Egyptians commonly use instead of glue. After this the relations, having taken the body back again, make a wooden case in the shape of a man, and having made it they enclose the body; and then, having fastened it up, they store it in a sepulchral chamber, setting it upright against the wall. In this manner they prepare the bodies that are embalmed in the most expensive way.³⁴

“All the world fears Time,” says an Arab proverb, “but Time fears the Pyramids.”³⁵ However, the pyramid of Khufu has lost twenty feet of its height, and all its ancient marble casing is gone; perhaps Time is only leisurely with it. Beside it stands Khafre’s pyramid, a trifle smaller, but still capped with the granite casing that once covered it all. Humbly beyond this squats the pyramid of Khafre’s successor Menkaure,† covered not with granite but with shamefaced brick, as if to announce that when men raised it the zenith of the Old Kingdom had passed. The statues of Menkaure that have come down to us show him as a man more refined and less forceful than Khafre.‡ Civilization, like life, destroys what it has perfected. Already, it may be, the growth of comforts and luxuries, the progress of manners and morals, had made men lovers of peace and haters of war. Suddenly a new figure appeared, usurped Menkaure’s throne, and put an end to the pyramid-builders’ dynasty.

4. The Middle Kingdom

The Feudal Age—The Twelfth Dynasty—The Hyksos Domination

Kings were never so plentiful as in Egypt. History lumps them into dynasties—monarchs of one line or family; but even then they burden the memory intolerably.* One of these early Pharaohs, Pepi II, ruled Egypt for ninety-four years (2738-2644 B.C.)—the longest reign in history. When he died anarchy and dissolution ensued, the Pharaohs lost control, and feudal barons ruled the nomes independently: this alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order. After a Dark Age of four chaotic centuries a strong-willed Charlemagne arose, set things severely in order, changed the capital from Memphis to Thebes, and under the title of Amenemhet I inaugurated that Twelfth Dynasty during which all the arts, excepting perhaps architecture, reached a height of excellence never equaled in known Egypt before or again. Through an old inscription Amenemhet speaks to us:

I was one who cultivated grain and loved the harvest god;

The Nile greeted me and every valley;

None was hungry in my years, none thirsted then;

Men dwelt in peace through that which I wrought, and conversed of me.

His reward was a conspiracy among the Talleyrands and Fouchés whom he had raised to high office. He put it down with a mighty hand, but left for his son, Polonius-like, a scroll of bitter counsel—an admirable formula for despotism, but a heavy price to pay for royalty:

Hearken to that which I say to thee,

That thou mayest be king of the earth, . . .

That thou mayest increase good:

Harden thyself against all subordinates—

The people give heed to him who terrorizes them;

Approach them not alone.

Fill not thy heart with a brother,

Know not a friend; . . .

When thou sleepest, guard for thyself thine own heart;

For a man hath no friend in the day of evil.³⁶

This stern ruler, who seems to us so human across four thousand years, established a system of administration that held for half a millennium. Wealth grew again, and then art; Senusret I built a great canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, repelled Nubian invaders, and erected great temples at Heliopolis, Abydos, and Karnak; ten colossal seated figures of him have cheated time, and litter the Cairo Museum. Another Senusret—the Third—began the subjugation of Palestine, drove back the recurrent Nubians, and raised a stele or slab at the southern frontier, “not from any desire that ye should worship it, but that ye should fight for it.”³⁷ Amenemhet III, a great administrator, builder of canals and irrigation, put an end (perhaps too effectively) to the power of the barons, and replaced them with appointees of the king. Thirteen years after his death Egypt was plunged into disorder by a dispute among rival claimants to the throne, and the Middle Kingdom ended in two centuries of turmoil and disruption. Then the Hyksos, nomads from Asia, invaded disunited Egypt, set fire to the cities, razed the temples, squandered the accumulated wealth, destroyed much of the accumulated art, and for two hundred years subjected the Nile valley to the rule of the “Shepherd Kings.” Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders; at any moment the wall of defense might be broken down. So the Kassites raided Babylonia, the Gauls attacked Greece and Rome, the Huns overran Italy, the Mongols came down upon Peking.

Soon, however, the conquerors in their turn grew fat and prosperous, and lost control; the Egyptians rose in a war of liberation, expelled the Hyksos, and established that Eighteenth Dynasty which was to lift Egypt to greater wealth, power and glory than ever before.

5. The Empire

The great queen—Thutmose III—The zenith of Egypt

Perhaps the invasion had brought another rejuvenation by the infusion of fresh blood; but at the same time the new age marked the beginning of a thousand-year struggle betwen Egypt and Western Asia. Thutmose I not only consolidated the power of the new empire, but—on the ground that western Asia must be controlled to prevent further interruptions—invaded Syria, subjugated it from the coast to Carchemish, put it under guard and tribute, and returned to Thebes laden with spoils and the glory that always comes from the killing of men. At the end of his thirty-year reign he raised his daughter Hatshepsut to partnership with him on the throne. For a time her husband and step-brother ruled as Thutmose II, and dying, named as his successor Thutmose III, son of Thutmose I by a concubine.³⁸ But Hatshepsut set this high-destined youngster aside, assumed full royal powers, and proved herself a king in everything but gender.

Even this exception was not conceded by her. Since sacred tradition required that every Egyptian ruler should be a son of the great god Amon, Hatshepsut arranged to be made at once male and divine. A biography was invented for her by which Amon had descended upon Hatshepsut’s mother Ahmasi in a flood of perfume and light; his attentions had been gratefully received; and on his departure he had announced that Ahmasi would give birth to a daughter in whom all the valor and strength of the god would be made manifest on earth.³⁹ To satisfy the prejudices of her people, and perhaps the secret desire of her heart, the great Queen had herself represented on the monuments as a bearded and breastless warrior; and though the inscriptions referred to her with the feminine pronoun, they did not hesitate to speak of her as “Son of the Sun” and “Lord of the Two Lands.” When she appeared in public she dressed in male garb, and wore a beard.⁴⁰

She had a right to determine her own sex, for she became one of the most successful and beneficent of Egypt’s many rulers. She maintained internal order without undue tyranny, and external peace without loss. She organized a great expedition to Punt (presumably the eastern coast of Africa), giving new markets to her merchants and new delicacies to her people. She helped to beautify Karnak raised there two majestic obelisks, built at Der-el-Bahri the stately temple which her father had designed, and repaired some of the damage that had been done to older temples by the Hyksos kings. “I have restored that which was in ruins,” one of her proud inscriptions tells us; “I have raised up that which was unfinished since the Asiatics were in the midst of the Northland, overthrowing that which had been made.”⁴¹ Finally she built for herself a secret and ornate tomb among the sand-swept mountains on the western side of the Nile, in what came to be called “The Valley of the Kings’ Tombs”; her successors followed her example, until some sixty royal sepulchres had been cut into the hills, and the city of the dead began to rival living Thebes in population. The “West End” in Egyptian cities was the abode of dead aristocrats; to “go west” meant to die.

For twenty-two years the Queen ruled in wisdom and peace; Thutmose III followed with a reign of many wars. Syria took advantage of Hatshepsut’s death to revolt; it did not seem likely to the Syrians that Thutmose, a lad of twenty-two, would be able to maintain the empire created by his father. But Thutmose set off in the very year of his accession, marched his army through Kantara and Gaza at twenty miles a day, and confronted the rebel forces at Har-Megiddo (i.e., Mt. Megiddo), a little town so strategically placed between the rival Lebanon ranges on the road from Egypt to the Euphrates that it has been the Ar-mageddon of countless wars from that day to General Allenby’s. In the same pass where in 1918 the British defeated the Turks, Thutmose III, 3397 years before, defeated the Syrians and their allies. Then Thutmose marched victorious through western Asia, subduing, taxing and levying tribute, and returned to Thebes in triumph six months after his departure.*⁴²

This was the first of fifteen campaigns in which the irresistible Thutmose made Egypt master of the Mediterranean world. Not only did he conquer, but he organized; everywhere he left doughty garrisons and capable governors. The first man in known history to recognize the importance of sea power, he built a fleet that kept the Near East effectively in leash. The spoils that he seized became the foundation of Egyptian art in the period of the Empire; the tribute that he drained from Syria gave his people an epicurean ease, and created a new class of artists who filled all Egypt with precious things. We may vaguely estimate the wealth of the new imperial government when we learn that on one occasion the treasury was able to measure out nine thousand pounds of gold and silver alloy.⁴³ Trade flourished in Thebes as never before; the temples groaned with offerings; and at Karnak the lordly Promenade and Festival Hall rose to the greater glory of god and king. Then the King retired from the battlefield, designed exquisite vases, and gave himself to internal administration. His vizier or prime minister said of him, as tired secretaries were to say of Napoleon: “Lo, His Majesty was one who knew what happened; there was nothing of which he was ignorant; he was the god of knowledge in everything; there was no matter that he did not carry out.”^43a He passed away after a rule of thirty-two (some say fifty-four) years, having made Egyptian leadership in the Mediterranean world complete.

After him another conqueror, Amenhotep II, subdued again certain idolators of liberty in Syria, and returned to Thebes with seven captive kings, still alive, hanging head downward from the prow of the imperial galley; six of them he sacrificed to Amon with his own hand.⁴⁴ Then another Thutmose, who does not count; and in 1412 Amenhotep III began a long reign in which the accumulated wealth of a century of mastery brought Egypt to the acme of her splendor. A fine bust in the British Museum shows him as a man at once of refinement and of strength, able to hold firmly together the empire bequeathed to him, and yet living in an atmosphere of comfort and elegance that might have been envied by Petronius or the Medici. Only the exhuming of Tutenkhamon’s relics could make us credit the traditions and records of Amenhotep’s riches and luxury. In his reign Thebes was as majestic as any city in history. Her streets crowded with merchants, her markets filled with the goods of the world, her buildings “surpassing in magnificence all those of ancient or modern capitals,”⁴⁵ her imposing palaces receiving tribute from an endless chain of vassal states, her massive temples “enriched all over with gold”⁴⁶ and adorned with every art, her spacious villas and costly chateaux, her shaded promenades and artificial lakes providing the scene for sumptuous displays of fashion that anticipated Imperial Rome⁴⁷—such was Egypt’s capital in the days of her glory, in the reign before her fall.

III. THE CIVILIZATION OF EGYPT

1. Agriculture

Behind these kings and queens were pawns; behind these temples, palaces and pyramids were the workers of the cities and the peasants of the fields.* Herodotus describes them optimistically as he found them about 450 B.C.

They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labor than any other people, . . . for they have not the toil of breaking up the furrow with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work which all other men must labor at to obtain a crop of corn; but when the river has come of its own accord and irrigated their fields, and having irrigated them has subsided, then each man sows his own land and turns his swine into it; and when the seed has been trodden into it by the swine he waits for harvest time; then . . . he gathers it in.⁴⁹

As the swine trod in the seed, so apes were tamed and taught to pluck fruit from the trees.⁵⁰ And the same Nile that irrigated the fields deposited upon them, in its inundation, thousands of fish in shallow pools; even the same net with which the peasant fished during the day was used around his head at night as a double protection against mosquitoes.⁵¹ Nevertheless it was not he who profited by the bounty of the river. Every acre of the soil belonged to the Pharaoh, and other men could use it only by his kind indulgence; every tiller of the earth had to pay him an annual tax of ten⁵² or twenty⁵³ per cent in kind. Large tracts were owned by the feudal barons or other wealthy men; the size of some of these estates may be judged from the circumstance that one of them had fifteen hundred cows.⁵⁴ Cereals, fish and meat were the chief items of diet. One fragment tells the school-boy what he is permitted to eat; it includes thirty-three forms of flesh, forty-eight baked meats, and twenty-four varieties of drink.⁵⁵ The rich washed down their meals with wine, the poor with barley beer.⁵⁶

The lot of the peasant was hard. The “free” farmer was subject only to the middleman and the tax-collector, who dealt with him on the most time-honored of economic principles, taking “all that the traffic would bear” out of the produce of the land. Here is how a complacent contemporary scribe conceived the life of the men who fed ancient Egypt:

Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer when the tenth of his grain is levied? Worms have destroyed half the wheat, and the hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds pilfer; and if the farmer loses sight for an instant of what remains on the ground, it is carried off by robbers; moreover, the thongs which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died at the plough. It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the Keepers of the Doors of the (King’s) Granary with cudgels, and Negroes with ribs of palm-leaves, crying, “Come now, come!” There is none, and they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground, bind him, drag him to the canal, and fling him in head first; his wife is bound with him, his children are put into chains. The neighbors in the meantime leave him and fly to save their grain.⁵⁷

It is a characteristic bit of literary exaggeration; but the author might have added that the peasant was subject at any time to the corvée, doing forced labor for the King, dredging the canals, building roads, tilling the royal lands, or dragging great stones and obelisks for pyramids, temples and palaces. Probably a majority of the laborers in the field were moderately content, accepting their poverty patiently. Many of them were slaves, captured in the wars or bonded for debt; sometimes slave-raids were organized, and women and children from abroad were sold to the highest bidder at home. An old relief in the Leyden Museum pictures a long procession of Asiatic captives passing gloomily into the land of bondage: one sees them still alive on that vivid stone, their hands tied behind their backs or their heads, or thrust through rude handcuffs of wood; their faces empty with the apathy that has known the last despair.

2. Industry

Miners—Manufactures—Workers—Engineers—Transport—Postal service—Commerce and finance—Scribes

Slowly, as the peasants toiled, an economic surplus grew, and food was laid aside for workers in industry and trade. Having no minerals, Egypt sought them in Arabia and Nubia. The great distances offered no temptation to private initiative, and for many centuries mining was a government monopoly.⁵⁸ Copper was mined in small quantities,⁵⁹ iron was imported from the Hittites, gold mines were found along the eastern coast, in Nubia, and in every vassal treasury. Diodorus Siculus (56 B.C.) describes Egyptian miners following with lamp and pick the veins of gold in the earth, children carrying up the heavy ore, stone mortars pounding it to bits, old men and women washing the dirt away. We cannot tell to what extent nationalistic exaggeration distorts the famous passage:

The kings of Egypt collect condemned prisoners, prisoners of war and others who, beset by false accusations, have been in a fit of anger thrown into prison. These—sometimes alone, sometimes with their entire family—they send to the gold mines, partly to exact a just vengeance for crimes committed by the condemned, partly to secure for themselves a big revenue through their toil. . . . As these workers can take no care’ of their bodies, and have not even a garment to hide their nakedness, there is no one who, seeing these luckless people, would not pity them because of the excess of their misery, for there is no forgiveness or relaxation at all for the sick, or the maimed, or the old, or for woman’s weakness; but all with blows are compelled to stick to their labor until, worn out, they die in their servitude. Thus the poor wretches even account the future more dreadful than the present because of the excess of their punishment, and look to death as more desirable than life.⁶⁰

In its earliest dynasties Egypt learned the art of fusing copper with tin to make bronze: first, bronze weapons—swords, helmets and shields; then bronze tools—wheels, rollers, levers, pulleys, windlasses, wedges, lathes, screws, drills that bored the toughest diorite stone, saws that cut the massive slabs of the sarcophagi. Egyptian workers made brick, cement and plaster of Paris; they glazed pottery, blew glass, and glorified both with color. They were masters in the carving of wood; they made everything from boats and carriages, chairs and beds, to handsome coffins that almost invited men to die. Out of animal skins they made clothing, quivers, shields and seats; all the arts of the tanner are pictured on the walls of the tombs; and the curved knives represented there in the tanner’s hand are used by cobblers to this day.⁶¹ From the papyrus plant Egyptian artisans made ropes, mats, sandals and paper. Other workmen developed the arts of enameling and varnishing, and applied chemistry to industry. Still others wove tissues of the subtlest weave in the history of the textile art; specimens of linen woven four thousand years ago show today, despite time’s corrosion, “a weave so fine that it requires a magnifying glass to distinguish it from silk; the best work of the modern machine-loom is coarse in comparison with this fabric of the ancient Egyptian hand-loom.”⁶² “If,” says Peschel, “we compare the technical inventory of the Egyptians with our own, it is evident that before the invention of the steam-engine we scarcely excelled them in anything.”⁶³

The workers were mostly freemen, partly slaves. In general every trade was a caste, as in modern India, and sons were expected to follow and take over the occupations of their fathers.⁶⁴* The great wars brought in thousands of captives, making possible the large estates and the triumphs of engineering. Rameses III presented 113,000 slaves to the temples during the course of his reign.⁶⁶ The free artisans were usually organized for the specific undertaking by a “chief workman” or overseer, who sold their labor as a group and paid them individually. A chalk tablet in the British Museum contains a chief workman’s record of forty-three workers, listing their absences and their causes—“ill,” or “sacrificing to the god,” or just plain “lazy.” Strikes were frequent. Once, their pay being long overdue, the workmen besieged the overseer and threatened him. “We have been driven here by hunger and thirst,” they told him; “we have no clothes, we have no oil, we have no food. Write to our lord the Pharaoh on the subject, and write to the governor” (of the nome) “who is over us, that they may give us something for our sustenance.”⁶⁷ A Greek tradition reports a great revolt in Egypt, in which the slaves captured a province, and held it so long that time, which sanctions everything, gave them legal ownership of it; but of this revolt there is no record in Egyptian inscriptions.⁶⁸ It is surprising that a civilization so ruthless in its exploitation of labor should have known—or recorded—so few revolutions.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution; only our time has excelled it, and we may be mistaken. Senusret III, for example, built† a wall twenty-seven miles long to gather into Lake Moeris the waters of the Fayum basin, thereby reclaiming 25,000 acres of marsh land for cultivation, and providing a vast reservoir for irrigation.⁶⁹ Great canals were constructed, some from the Nile to the Red Sea; the caisson was used for digging,⁷⁰ and obelisks weighing a thousand tons were transported over great distances. If we may credit Herodotus, or judge from later undertakings of the same kind represented in the reliefs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, these immense stones were drawn on greased beams by thousands of slaves, and raised to the desired level on inclined approaches beginning far away.⁷¹ Machinery was rare because muscle was cheap. See, in one relief, eight hundred rowers in twenty-seven boats drawing a barge laden with two obelisks;⁷² this is the Eden to which our romantic machine-wreckers would return. Ships a hundred feet long by half a hundred feet wide plied the Nile and the Red Sea, and finally sailed the Mediterranean. On land goods were transported by human muscle, later by donkeys, later by the horse, which probably the Hyksos brought to Egypt; the camel did not appear till Ptolemaic days.⁷³ The poor man walked, or paddled his simple boat; the rich man rode in sedan-chairs carried by slaves, or later in chariots clumsily made with the weight placed entirely in front of the axle.⁷⁴

There was a regular postal service; an ancient papyrus says, “Write to me by the letter-carrier.”⁷⁵ Communication, however, was difficult; roads were few and bad, except for the military highway through Gaza to the Euphrates;⁷⁶ and the serpentine form of the Nile, which was the main highroad of Egypt, doubled the distance from town to town. Trade was comparatively primitive; most of it was by barter in village bazaars. Foreign commerce grew slowly, restricted severely by the most up-to-date tariff walls; the various kingdoms of the Near East believed strongly in the “protective principle,” for customs dues were a mainstay of their royal treasuries. Nevertheless Egypt grew rich by importing raw materials and exporting finished products; Syrian, Cretan and Cypriote merchants crowded the markets of Egypt, and Phoenician galleys sailed up the Nile to the busy wharves of Thebes.⁷⁷

Coinage had not yet developed; payments, even of the highest salaries, were made in goods—corn, bread, yeast, beer, etc. Taxes were collected in kind, and the Pharaoh’s treasuries were not a mint of money, but storehouses of a thousand products from the fields and shops. After the influx of precious metals that followed the conquests of Thutmose III, merchants began to pay for goods with rings or ingots of gold, measured by weight at every transaction; but no coins of definite value guaranteed by the state arose to facilitate exchange. Credit, however, was highly developed; written transfers frequently took the place of barter or payment; scribes were busy everywhere accelerating business with legal documents of exchange, accounting and finance.

Every visitor to the Louvre has seen the statue of the Egyptian scribe, squatting on his haunches, almost completely nude, dressed with a pen behind the ear as reserve for the one he holds in his hand. He keeps record of work done and goods paid, of prices and costs, of profits and loss; he counts the cattle as they move to the slaughter, or corn as it is measured out in sale; he draws up contracts and wills, and makes out his master’s income-tax; verily there is nothing new under the sun. He is sedulously attentive and mechanically industrious; he has just enough intelligence not to be dangerous. His life is monotonous, but he consoles himself by writing essays on the hardships of the manual worker’s existence, and the princely dignity of those whose food is paper and whose blood is ink.

3. Government

The bureaucrats—Law—The vizier—The pharaoh

With these scribes as a clerical bureaucracy the Pharaoh and the provincial nobles maintained law and order in the state. Ancient slabs show such clerks taking the census, and examining income-tax returns. Through Nilometers that measured the rise of the river, the scribe-officials forecast the size of the harvest, and estimated the government’s future revenue; they allotted appropriations in advance to governmental departments, supervised industry and trade, and in some measure achieved, almost at the outset of history, a planned economy regulated by the state.⁷⁸

Civil and criminal legislation were highly developed, and already in the Fifth Dynasty the law of private property and bequest was intricate and precise.⁷⁹ As in our own days, there was absolute equality before the law—whenever the contesting parties had equal resources and influence. The oldest legal document in the world is a brief, in the British Museum, presenting to the court a complex case in inheritance. Judges required cases to be pled and answered, reargued and rebutted, not in oratory but in writing—which compares favorably with our windy litigation. Perjury was punished with death.⁸⁰ There were regular courts, rising from local judgment-seats in the nomes to supreme courts at Memphis, Thebes, or Heliopolis.⁸¹ Torture was used occasionally as a midwife to truth;⁸² beating with a rod was a frequent punishment, mutilation by cutting off nose or ears, hand or tongue, was sometimes resorted to,⁸³ or exile to the mines, or death by strangling, empaling, beheading, or burning at the stake; the extreme penalty was to be embalmed alive, to be eaten slowly by an inescapable coating of corrosive natron.⁸⁴ Criminals of high rank were saved the shame of public execution by being permitted to kill themselves, as in samurai Japan.⁸⁵ We find no signs of any system of police; even the standing army—always small because of Egypt’s protected isolation between deserts and seas—was seldom used for internal discipline. Security of life and property, and the continuity of law and government, rested almost entirely on the prestige of the Pharaoh, maintained by the schools and the church. No other nation except China has ever dared to depend so largely upon psychological discipline.

It was a well-organized government, with a better record of duration than any other in history. At the head of the administration was the Vizier, who served at once as prime minister, chief justice, and head of the treasury; he was the court of last resort under the Pharaoh himself. A tomb relief shows us the Vizier leaving his house early in the morning to hear the petitions of the poor, “to hear,” as the inscription reads, “what the people say in their demands, and to make no distinction between small and great.”⁸⁶ A remarkable papyrus roll, which comes down to us from the days of the Empire, purports to be the form of address (perhaps it is but a literary invention) with which the Pharaoh installed a new Vizier:

Look to the office of the Vizier; be watchful over all that is done therein. Behold, it is the established support of the whole land. . . . The Vizierate is not sweet; it is bitter. . . . Behold, it is not to show respect-of-persons to princes and councillors; it is not to make for himself slaves of any people. . . . Behold, when a petitioner comes from Upper or Lower Egypt . . . see thou to it that everything is done in accordance with law, that everything is done according to the custom thereof, (giving) to (every man) his right. . . . It is an abomination of the god to show partiality. . . . Look upon him who is known to thee like him who is unknown to thee; and him who is near the King like him who is far from (his House). Behold, a prince who does this, he shall endure here in this place. . . . The dread of a prince is that he does justice. . . . (Behold the regulation) that is laid upon thee.⁸⁷

The Pharaoh himself was the supreme court; any case might under certain circumstances be brought to him, if the plaintiff was careless of expense. Ancient carvings show us the “Great House” from which he ruled, and in which the offices of the government were gathered; from this Great House, which the Egyptians called Pero and which the Jews translated Pharaoh, came the title of the emperor. Here he carried on an arduous routine of executive work, sometimes with a schedule as rigorous as Chandragupta’s, Louis XIV’s or Napoleon’s.⁸⁸ When he traveled the nobles met him at the feudal frontiers, escorted and entertained him, and gave him presents proportionate to their expectations; one lord, says a proud inscription, gave to Amenhotep II “carriages of silver and gold, statues of ivory and ebony . . . jewels, weapons, and works of art,” 680 shields, 140 bronze daggers, and many vases of precious metal.⁸⁹ The Pharaoh reciprocated by taking one of the baron’s sons to live with him at court—a subtle way of exacting a hostage of fidelity. The oldest of the courtiers constituted a Council of Elders called Saru, or The Great Ones, who served as an advisory cabinet to the king.⁹⁰ Such counsel was in a sense superfluous, for the Pharaoh, with the help of the priests, assumed divine descent, powers and wisdom; this alliance with the gods was the secret of his prestige. Consequently he was greeted with forms of address always flattering, sometimes astonishing, as when, in The Story of Sinuhe, a good citizen hails him: “O long-living King, may the Golden One” (Hathor the goddess) “give life to thy nose.”⁹¹

As became so godlike a person, the Pharaoh was waited upon by a variety of aides, including generals, launderers, bleachers, guardians of the imperial wardrobe, and other men of high degree. Twenty officials collaborated to take care of his toilet: barbers who were permitted only to shave him and cut his hair, hairdressers who adjusted the royal cowl and diadem to his head, manicurists who cut and polished his nails, perfumers who deodorized his body, blackened his eyelids with kohl, and reddened his cheeks and lips with rouge.⁹² One tomb inscription describes its occupant as “Overseer of the Cosmetic Box, Overseer of the Cosmetic Pencil, Sandal-Bearer to the King, doing in the matter of the King’s sandals to the satisfaction of his Law.”⁹³ So pampered, he tended to degenerate, and sometimes brightened his boredom by manning the imperial barge with young women clad only in network of a large mesh. The luxury of Amenhotep III prepared for the debacle of Ikhnaton.

4. Morals

Royal incest—The harem—Marriage—The position of woman—The matriarchate in Egypt—Sexual morality

The government of the Pharaohs resembled that of Napoleon, even to the incest. Very often the king married his own sister—occasionally his own daughter—to preserve the purity of the royal blood. It is difficult to say whether this weakened the stock. Certainly Egypt did not think so, after several thousand years of experiment; the institution of sister-marriage spread among the people, and as late as the second century after Christ two-thirds of the citizens of Arsinoë were found to be practising the custom.⁹⁴ The words brother and sister, in Egyptian poetry, have the same significance as lover and beloved among ourselves.⁹⁵ In addition to his sisters the Pharaoh had an abundant harem, recruited not only from captive women but from the daughters of the nobles and the gifts of foreign potentates; so Amenhotep III received from a prince of Naharina his eldest daughter and three hundred select maidens.⁹⁶ Some of the nobility imitated this tiresome extravagance on a small scale, adjusting their morals to their resources.

For the most part the common people, like persons of moderate income everywhere, contented themselves with monogamy. Family life was apparently as well ordered, as wholesome in moral tone and influence, as in the highest civilizations of our time. Divorce was rare until the decadent dynasties. The husband could dismiss his wife without compensation if he detected her in adultery; if he divorced her for other reasons he was required to turn over to her a substantial share of the family property. The fidelity of the husband—so far as we can fathom such arcana—was as painstaking as in any later culture, and the position of woman was more advanced than in most countries today. “No people, ancient or modern,” said Max Müller, “has given women so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.”⁹⁷ The monuments picture them eating and drinking in public, going about their affairs in the streets unattended and unharmed, and freely engaging in industry and trade. Greek travelers, accustomed to confine their Xanthippes narrowly, were amazed at this liberty; they jibed at the henpecked husbands of Egypt, and Diodorus Siculus, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, reported that along the Nile obedience of the husband to the wife was required in the marriage bond⁹⁸—a stipulation not necessary in America. Women held and bequeathed property in their own names; one of the most ancient documents in history is the Third Dynasty will in which the lady Neb-sent transmits her lands to her children.⁹⁹ Hatshepsut and Cleopatra rose to be queens, and ruled and ruined like kings.

Sometimes a cynical note is heard in the literature. One ancient moralist warns his readers:

Beware of a woman from abroad, who is not known in her city. Look not upon her when she comes, and know her not. She is like the vortex of deep waters, whose whirling is unfathomable. The woman whose husband is far away, she writes to thee every day. If there is no witness with her she arises and spreads her net. Oh, deadly crime if one hearkens!¹⁰⁰

But the more characteristically Egyptian tone sounds in Ptah-hotep’s instructions to his son:

If thou art successful, and hast furnished thy house, and lovest the wife of thy bosom, then fill her stomach and clothe her back. . . . Make glad her heart during the time thou hast her, for she is a field profitable to its owner. . . . If thou oppose her it will mean thy ruin.¹⁰¹

And the Boulak Papyrus admonishes the child with touching wisdom:

Thou shalt never forget thy mother. . . . For she carried thee long beneath her breast as a heavy burden; and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder, and gave thee her breast to thy mouth. She nurtured thee, and took no offense from thy uncleanliness. And when thou didst enter school, and wast instructed in the writings, daily she stood by the master with bread and beer from the house.¹⁰²

It is likely that this high status of woman arose from the mildly matriarchal character of Egyptian society. Not only was woman full mistress in the house, but all estates descended in the female line; “even in late times,” says Petrie, “the husband made over all his property and future earnings to his wife in his marriage settlement.”¹⁰³ Men married their sisters not because familiarity had bred romance, but because they wished to enjoy the family inheritance, which passed down from mother to daughter, and they did not care to see this wealth give aid and comfort to strangers.¹⁰⁴ The powers of the wife underwent a slow diminution in the course of time, perhaps through contact with the patriarchal customs of the Hyksos, and through the transit of Egypt from agricultural isolation and peace to imperialism and war; under the Ptolemies the influence of the Greeks was so great that freedom of divorce, claimed in earlier times by the wife, became the exclusive privilege of the husband. Even then, however, the change was accepted only by the upper classes; the Egyptian commoner adhered to matriarchal ways.¹⁰⁵ Possibly because of the mastery of woman over her own affairs, infanticide was rare; Diodorus thought it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child born to them was reared, and tells us that parents guilty of infanticide were required by law to hold the dead child in their arms for three days and nights.¹⁰⁶ Families were large, and children swarmed in both hovels and palaces; the well-to-do were hard put to it to keep count of their offspring.¹⁰⁷

Even in courtship the woman usually took the initiative. The love poems and letters that have come down to us are generally addressed by the lady to the man; she begs for assignations, she presses her suit directly, she formally proposes marriage.¹⁰⁸ “Oh my beautiful friend,” says one letter, “my desire is to become, as thy wife, the mistress of all thy possessions.”¹⁰⁹ Hence modesty, as distinct from fidelity, was not prominent among the Egyptians; they spoke of sexual affairs with a directness alien to our late morality, adorned their very temples with pictures and bas-reliefs of startling anatomical candor, and supplied their dead with obscene literature to amuse them in the grave.¹¹⁰ Blood ran warm along the Nile: girls were nubile at ten, and premarital morals were free and easy; one courtesan, in Ptolemaic days, was reputed to have built a pyramid with her savings; even sodomy had its clientele.¹¹¹ Dancing-girls, in the manner of Japan, were accepted into the best male society as providers of entertainment and physical edification; they dressed in diaphanous robes, or contented themselves with anklets, bracelets and rings.¹¹² Evidences occur of religious prostitution on a small scale; as late as the Roman occupation the most beautiful girl among the noble families of Thebes was chosen to be consecrated to Amon. When she was too old to satisfy the god she received an honorable discharge, married, and moved in the highest circles.¹¹³ It was a civilization with different prejudices from our own.

5. Manners

Character—Games—Appearance—Cosmetics—Costume—Jewelry

If we try to visualize the Egyptian character we find it difficult to distinguish between the ethics of the literature and the actual practices of life. Very frequently noble sentiments occur; a poet, for example, counsels his countrymen:

Give bread to him who has no field,

And create for thyself a good name for ever more;¹¹⁴

and some of the elders give very laudable advice to their children. A papyrus in the British Museum, known to scholars as “The Wisdom of Amenemope” (ca. 950 B.C.), prepares a student for public office with admonitions that probably influenced the author or authors of the “Proverbs of Solomon.”

Be not greedy for a cubit of land,

And trespass not on the boundary of the widow. . . .

Plough the fields that thou mayest find thy needs,

And receive thy bread from thine own threshing floor.

Better is a bushel which God giveth to thee

Than five thousand gained by transgression. . . .

Better is poverty in the hand of God

Than riches in the storehouse;

And better are loaves when the heart is joyous

Than riches in unhappiness. . . .¹¹⁵

Such pious literature did not prevent the normal operation of human greed. Plato described the Athenians as loving knowledge, the Egyptians as loving wealth; perhaps he was too patriotic. In general the Egyptians were the Americans of antiquity: enamored of size, given to gigantic engineering and majestic building, industrious and accumulative, practical even in the midst of many ultramundane superstitions. They were the arch-conservatives of history; the more they changed, the more they remained the same; through forty centuries their artists copied the old conventions religiously. They appear to us, from their monuments, to have been a matter-of-fact people, not given to non-theological nonsense. They had no sentimental regard for human life, and killed with the clear conscience of nature; Egyptian soldiers cut off the right hand, or the phallus, of a slain enemy, and brought it to the proper scribe that it might be put into the record to their credit.¹¹⁶ In the later dynasties the people, long accustomed to internal peace and to none but distant wars, lost all military habits and qualities, until at last a few Roman soldiers sufficed to master all Egypt.¹¹⁷

The accident that we know them chiefly from the remains in their tombs or the inscriptions on their temples has misled us into exaggerating their solemnity. We perceive from some of their sculptures and reliefs, and from their burlesque stories of the gods,¹¹⁸ that they had a jolly turn for humor. They played many public and private games, such as checkers and dice;¹¹⁹ they gave many modern toys to their children, like marbles, bouncing balls, tenpins and tops; they enjoyed wrestling contests, boxing matches and bull-fights.¹²⁰ At feasts and recreations they were anointed by attendants, were wreathed with flowers, feted with wines, and presented with gifts.

From the painting and the statuary we picture them as a physically vigorous people, muscular, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, full-lipped, and flat-footed from going unshod. The upper classes are represented as fashionably slender, imperiously tall, with oval face, sloping forehead, regular features, a long, straight nose, and magnificent eyes. Their skin was white at birth (indicating an Asiatic rather than an African origin), but rapidly darkened under the Egyptian sun;¹²¹ their artists idealized them in painting the men red, the women yellow; perhaps these colors were merely cosmetic styles. The man of the people, however, is pictured as short and squat, like the “Sheik-el-Beled,” formed by heavy toil and an unbalanced ration; his features are rough, his nose blunt and wide; he is intelligent but coarse. Perhaps, as in so many other instances, the people and their rulers were of different races: the rulers of Asiatic, the people of African, derivation. The hair was dark, sometimes curly, but never woolly. Women bobbed their hair in the most modern mode; men shaved lips and chin, but consoled themselves with magnificent wigs. Often, in order to wear these more comfortably, they shaved the head; even the queen consort (e.g., Ikhnaton’s mother Tiy) cut off all her hair to wear more easily the royal wig and crown. It was a matter of rigid etiquette that the king should have the biggest wig.¹²²

According to their means they repaired the handiwork of nature with subtle cosmetic art. Faces were rouged, lips were painted, nails were colored, hair and limbs were oiled; even in the sculptures the Egyptian women have painted eyes. Those who could afford it had seven creams and two kinds of rouge put into their tombs when they died. The remains abound in toilet sets, mirrors, razors, hair-curlers, hair-pins, combs, cosmetic boxes, dishes and spoons—made of wood, ivory, alabaster or bronze, and designed in delightful and appropriate forms. Eye-paint still survives in some of the tubes. The kohl that women use today for painting the eyebrows and the face is a lineal descendant of the oil used by the Egyptians; it has come down to us through the Arabs, whose word for it, al-kohl, has given us our word alcohol. Perfumes of all sorts were used on the body and the clothes, and homes were made fragrant with incense and myrrh.¹²³

Their clothing ran through every gradation from primitive nudity to the gorgeous dress of Empire days. Children of both sexes went about, till their teens, naked except for ear-rings and necklaces; the girls, however, showed a beseeming modesty by wearing a string of beads around the middle.¹²⁴ Servants and peasants limited their everyday wardrobe to a loin-cloth. Under the Old Kingdom free men and women went naked to the navel, and covered themselves from waist to knees with a short, tight skirt of white linen.¹²⁵ Since shame is a child of custom rather than of nature, these simple garments contented the conscience as completely as Victorian petticoats and corsets, or the evening dress of the contemporary American male; “our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time.” Even the priests, in the first dynasties, wore nothing but loin-cloths, as we see from the statue of Ranofer.¹²⁶ When wealth increased, clothing increased; the Middle Kingdom added a second and larger skirt over the first, and the Empire added a covering for the breast, with now and then a cape. Coachmen and grooms took on formidable costumes, and ran through the streets in full livery to clear a way for the chariots of their masters. Women, in the prosperous dynasties, abandoned the tight skirt for a loose robe that passed over the shoulder and was joined in a clasp under the right breast. Flounces, embroideries and a thousand frills appeared, and fashion entered like a serpent to disturb the paradise of primitive nudity.¹²⁷

Both sexes loved ornament, and covered neck, breast, arms, wrists and ankles with jewelry. As the nation fattened on the tribute of Asia and the commerce of the Mediterranean world, jewelry ceased to be restricted to the aristocracy, and became a passion with all classes. Every scribe and merchant had his seal of silver or gold; every man had a ring, every woman had an ornamental chain. These chains, as we see them in the museums today, are of infinite variety: some of them two to three inches, some of them five feet, in length; some thick and heavy, some “as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace.”¹²⁸ About the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty ear-rings became de rigueur; every one had to have the ears pierced for them, not only girls and women, but boys and men.¹²⁹ Men as well as women decorated their persons with bracelets and rings, pendants and beads of costly stone. The women of ancient Egypt could learn very little from us in the matter of cosmetics and jewelry if they were reincarnated among us today.

6. Letters

Education—Schools of government—Paper and ink—Stages in the development of writing—Forms of Egyptian writing

The priests imparted rudimentary instruction to the children of the well-to-do in schools attached to the temples, as in the Roman Catholic parishes of our age.¹³⁰ One high-priest, who was what we should term Minister or Secretary of Education, calls himself “Chief of the Royal Stable of Instruction.”¹³¹ In the ruins of a school which was apparently part of the Ramesseum a large number of shells has been found, still bearing the lessons of the ancient pedagogue. The teacher’s function was to produce scribes for the clerical work of the state. To stimulate his pupils he wrote eloquent essays on the advantages of education. “Give thy heart to learning, and love her like a mother,” says one edifying papyrus, “for there is nothing so precious as learning.” “Behold,” says another, “there is no profession that is not governed; it is only the learned man who rules himself.” It is a misfortune to be a soldier, writes an early bookworm; it is a weariness to till the earth; the only happiness is “to turn the heart to books during the daytime and to read during the night.”¹³²

Copy-books survive from the days of the Empire with the corrections of the masters still adorning the margins; the abundance of errors would console the modern schoolboy.¹³³ The chief method of instruction was the dictation or copying of texts, which were written upon potsherds or limestone flakes.¹³⁴ The subjects were largely commercial, for the Egyptians were the first and greatest utilitarians; but the chief topic of pedagogic discourse was virtue, and the chief problem, as ever, was discipline. “Do not spend thy time in wishing, or thou wilt come to a bad end,” we read in one of the copy-books. “Let thy mouth read the book in thy hand; take advice from those who know more than thou dost”—this last is probably one of the oldest phrases in any language. Discipline was vigorous, and based upon the simplest principles. “The youth has a back,” says a euphemistic manuscript, “and attends when he is beaten, . . . for the ears of the young are placed on the back.” A pupil writes to his former teacher: “Thou didst beat my back, and thy instructions went into my ear.” That this animal-training did not always succeed appears from a papyrus in which a teacher laments that his former pupils love books much less than beer.¹³⁵

Nevertheless, a large number of the temple students were graduated from the hands of the priest to high schools attached to the offices of the state treasury. There, in the first known School of Government, the young scribes were instructed in public administration. On graduating they were apprenticed to officials, who taught them through plenty of work. Perhaps it was a better way of securing and training public servants than our modern selection of them by popularity and subserviency, and the noise of the hustings. In this manner Egypt and Babylonia developed, more or less simultaneously, the earliest school-systems in history;¹³⁶ not till the nineteenth century of our era was the public instruction of the young to be so well organized again.

In the higher grades the student was allowed to use paper—one of the main items of Egyptian trade, and one of the permanent gifts of Egypt to the world. The stem of the papyrus plant was cut into strips, other strips were placed crosswise upon these, the sheet was pressed, and paper, the very stuff (and nonsense) of civilization, was made.¹³⁷ How well they made it may be judged from the fact that manuscripts written by them five thousand years ago are still intact and legible. Sheets were combined into books by gumming the right edge of one sheet to the left edge of the next; in this way rolls were produced which were sometimes forty yards in length; they were seldom longer, for there were no verbose historians in Egypt. Ink, black and indestructible, was made by mixing water with soot and vegetable gums on a wooden palette; the pen was a simple reed, fashioned at the tip into a tiny brush.¹³⁸

With these modern instruments the Egyptians wrote the most ancient of literatures. Their language had probably come in from Asia; the oldest specimens of it show many Semitic affinities.¹³⁹ The earliest writing was apparently pictographic—an object was represented by drawing a picture of it: e.g., the word for house (Egyptian per) was indicated by a small rectangle with an opening on one of the long sides. As some ideas were too abstract to be literally pictured, pictography passed into ideography: certain pictures were by custom and convention used to represent not the objects pictured but the ideas suggested by them; so the forepart of a lion meant supremacy (as in the Sphinx), a wasp meant royalty, and a tadpole stood for thousands. As a further development along this line, abstract ideas, which had at first resisted representation, were indicated by picturing objects whose names happened to resemble the spoken words that corresponded to the ideas; so the picture of a lute came to mean not only lute, but good, because the Egyptian word-sound for lute—nefer—resembled the word-sound for good—nofer. Queer rebus combinations grew out of these homonyms—words of like sound but different meanings. Since the verb to be was expressed in the spoken language by the sound khopiru, the scribe, being puzzled to find a picture for so intangible a conception, split the word into parts, kho-pi-ru, expressed these by picturing in succession a sieve (called in the spoken language khau), a mat (pi), and a mouth (ru); use and wont, which sanctify so many absurdities, soon made this strange assortment of characters suggest the idea of being. In this way the Egyptian arrived at the syllable, the syllabic sign, and the syllabary—i.e., a collection of syllabic signs; and by dividing difficult words into syllables, finding homonyms for these, and drawing in combination the objects suggested by these syllabic sounds, he was able, in the course of time, to make the hieroglyphic signs convey almost any idea.

Only one step remained—to invent letters. The sign for a house meant at first the word for house—per; then it meant the sound per, or p-r with any vowel in between, as a syllable in any word. Then the picture was shortened, and used to represent the sound po, pa, pu, pe or pi in any word; and since vowels were never written, this was equivalent to having a character for P. By a like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian dot) came to mean do, da, etc., finally D; the sign for mouth (ro or ru) came to mean R; the sign for snake (zt) became Z; the sign for lake (shy) became Sh. . . . The result was an alphabet of twenty-four consonants, which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to all quarters of the Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome, as one of the most precious parts of our Oriental heritage.¹⁴⁰ Hieroglyphics are as old as the earliest dynasties; alphabetic characters appear first in inscriptions left by the Egyptians in the mines of the Sinai peninsula, variously dated at 2500 and 1500 B.C.¹⁴¹*

Whether wisely or not, the Egyptians never adopted a completely alphabetic writing; like modern stenographers they mingled pictographs, ideographs and syllabic signs with their letters to the very end of their civilization. This has made it difficult for scholars to read Egyptian, but it is quite conceivable that such a medley of longhand and shorthand facilitated the business of writing for those Egyptians who could spare the time to learn it. Since English speech is no honorable guide to English spelling, it is probably as difficult for a contemporary lad to learn the devious ways of English orthography as it was for the Egyptian scribe to memorize by use the five hundred hieroglyphs, their secondary syllabic meanings, and their tertiary alphabetic uses. In the course of time a more rapid and sketchy form of writing was developed for manuscripts, as distinguished from the careful “sacred carvings” of the monuments. Since this corruption of hieroglyphic was first made by the priests and the temple scribes, it was called by the Greeks hieratic; but it soon passed into common use for public, commercial and private documents. A still more abbreviated and careless form of this script was developed by the common people, and therefore came to be known as demotic. On the monuments, however, the Egyptian insisted on having his lordly and lovely hieroglyphic—perhaps the most picturesque form of writing ever made.

7. Literature

Texts and libraries—The Egyptian Sinbad—The Story of Sinuhe—Fiction—An amorous fragment—Love poems—History—A literary revolution

Most of the literature that survives from ancient Egypt is written in hieratic script. Little of it remains, and we are forced to estimate it from the fragments that do it only the blind justice of chance; perhaps time destroyed the Shakespeares of Egypt, and preserved only the poets laureate. A great official of the Fourth Dynasty is called on his tomb “Scribe of the House of Books”;¹⁴² we cannot tell whether this primeval library was a repository of literature, or only a dusty storehouse of public records and documents. The oldest extant Egyptian literature consists of the “Pyramid Texts”—pious matter engraved on the walls in five pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.*¹⁴³ Libraries have come down to us from as far back as 2000 B.C.—papyri rolled and packed in jars, labeled, and ranged on shelves;¹⁴⁵ in one such jar was found the oldest form of the story of Sinbad the Sailor, or, as we might rather call it, Robinson Crusoe.

“The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor” is a simple autobiographical fragment, full of life and feeling. “How glad is he,” says this ancient mariner, in a line reminiscent of Dante, “that relateth what he hath experienced when the calamity hath passed!”

I will relate to thee something that was experienced by me myself, when I had set out for the mines of the Sovereign and had gone down to the sea in a ship of 180 feet in length and 60 feet in breadth; and therein were 120 sailors of the pick of Egypt. They scanned the sky, they scanned the earth, and their hearts were more . . . than those of lions. They foretold a storm or ever it came, and a tempest when as yet it was not.

A storm burst while we were yet at sea. . . . We flew before the wind and it made . . . a wave eight cubits high. . . .

Then the ship perished, and of them that were in it not one survived. And I was cast onto an island by a wave of the sea, and I spent three days alone with mine heart as my companion. I slept under the shelter of a tree, and embraced the shade. Then I stretched forth my feet in order to find out what I could put into my mouth. I found figs and vines there, and all manner of fine leeks. . . . There were fish there and fowl, and there was nothing that was not in it. . . . When I had made me a fire-drill I kindled a fire and made a burnt-offering for the gods.¹⁴⁶

Another tale recounts the adventures of Sinuhe, a public official who flees from Egypt at the death of Amenemhet I, wanders from country to country of the Near East, and, despite prosperity and honors there, suffers unbearably from lonesomeness for his native land. At last he gives up riches, and makes his way through many hardships back to Egypt.

O God, whosoever thou art, that didst ordain this flight, bring me again to the House (i.e., the Pharaoh). Peradventure thou wilt suffer me to see the place wherein mine heart dwelleth. What is a greater matter than that my corpse should be buried in the land wherein I was born? Come to mine aid! May good befall, may God show me mercy!

In the sequel we find him home again, weary and dusty with many miles of desert travel, and fearful lest the Pharaoh reprove him for his long absence from a land which, like all others, looked upon itself as the only civilized country in the world. But the Pharaoh forgives him, and extends to him every cosmetic courtesy:

I was placed in the house of a king’s son, in which there was noble equipment, and a bath was therein. . . . Years were made to pass away from my body; I was shaved (?) and my hair was combed (?). A load (of dirt?) was given over to the desert, and the (filthy) clothes to the sand-farers. And I was arrayed in finest linen, and anointed with the best oil.¹⁴⁷

Short stories are diverse and plentiful in the fragments that have come down to us of Egyptian literature. There are marvelous tales of ghosts, miracles, and other fascinating concoctions, as credible as the detective stories that satisfy modern statesmen; there are high-sounding romances of princes and princesses, kings and queens, including the oldest known form of the tale of Cinderella, her exquisite foot, her wandering slipper, and her royal-hymeneal dénouement;¹⁴⁸ there are fables of animals illustrating by their conduct the foibles and passions of humanity, and pointing morals sagely¹⁴⁹—a kind of premonitory plagiarism from Æsop and La Fontaine. Typical of the Egyptian mingling of natural and supernatural is the tale of Anupu and Bitiu, older and younger brothers, who live happily on their farm until Anupu’s wife falls in love with Bitiu, is repulsed by him, and revenges herself by accusing him, to his brother, of having offered her violence. Gods and crocodiles come to Bitiu’s aid against Anupu; but Bitiu, disgusted with mankind, mutilates himself to prove his innocence, retires Timon-like to the woods, and places his heart unreachably high on the topmost flower of a tree. The gods, pitying his loneliness, create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her hair. Drifting down the stream, the lock is found by the Pharaoh, who, intoxicated by its scent, commands his henchmen to find the owner. She is found and brought to him, and he marries her. Jealous of Bitiu he sends men to cut down the tree on which Bitiu has placed his heart. The tree is cut down, and as the flower touches the earth Bitiu dies.¹⁵⁰ How little the taste of our ancestors differed from our own!

The early literature of the Egyptians is largely religious; and the oldest Egyptian poems are the hymns of the Pyramid Texts. Their form is also the most ancient poetic form known to us—that “parallelism of members,” or repetition of the thought in different phrase, which the Hebrew poets adopted from the Egyptians and Babylonians, and immortalized in the Psalms.¹⁵¹ As the Old passes into the Middle Kingdom, the literature tends to become secular and “profane.” We catch some glimpse of a lost body of amorous literature in a fragment preserved to us through the laziness of a Middle Kingdom scribe who did not complete his task of wiping clear an old papyrus, but left legible some twenty-five lines that tell of a simple shepherd’s encounter with a goddess. “This goddess,” says the story, “met with him as he wended his way to the pool, and she had stripped off her clothes and disarrayed her hair.” The shepherd reports the matter cautiously:

“Behold ye, when I went down to the swamp. . . . I saw a woman therein, and she looked not like a mortal being. My hair stood on end when I saw her tresses, because her color was so bright. Never will I do what she said; awe of her is in my body.”¹⁵²

The love songs abound in number and beauty, but as they celebrate chiefly the amours of brothers and sisters they will shock or amuse the modern ear. One collection is called “The Beautiful Joyous Songs of thy sister whom thy heart loves, who walks in the fields.” An ostracon or shell dating back to the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty plays a modern theme on the ancient chords of desire:

The love of my beloved leaps on the bank of the stream.

A crocodile lies in the shadows;

Yet I go down into the water, and breast the wave.

My courage is high on the stream,

And the water is as land to my feet.

It is her love that makes me strong.

She is a book of spells to me.

When I behold my beloved coming my heart is glad,

My arms are spread apart to embrace her;

My heart rejoices forever . . . since my beloved came.

When I embrace her I am as one who is in Incense Land,

As one who carries perfumes.

When I kiss her, her lips are opened,

And I am made merry without beer.

Would that I were her Negress slave who is in attendance on her;

So should I behold the hue of all her limbs.¹⁵³

The lines have been arbitrarily divided here; we cannot tell from the external form of the original that it is verse. The Egyptians knew that music and feeling are the twin essences of poetry; if these were present, the outward shape did not matter. Often, however, the rhythm was accentuated, as we have seen, by “parallelism of members.” Sometimes the poet used the device of beginning every sentence or stanza with the same word; sometimes he played like a punster with like sounds meaning unlike or incongruous things; and it is clear from the texts that the trick of alliteration is as old as the Pyramids.¹⁵⁴ These simple forms were enough; with them the Egyptian poet could express almost every shade of that “romantic” love which Nietzsche supposed was an invention of the Troubadours. The Harris Papyrus shows that such sentiments could be expressed by a woman as well as by a man:

I am thy first sister,

And thou art to me as the garden

Which I have planted with flowers

And all sweet-smelling herbs.

I directed a canal into it,

That thou mightest dip thy hand into it

When the north wind blows cool.

The beautiful place where we take a walk,

When thy hand rests within mine,

With thoughtful mind and joyous heart

Because we walk together.

It is intoxicating to me to hear thy voice,

And my life depends upon hearing thee.

Whenever I see thee

It is better to me than food or drink.¹⁵⁵

All in all it is astonishing how varied the fragments are. Formal letters, legal documents, historical narratives, magic formulas, laborious hymns, books of devotion, songs of love and war, romantic novelettes, moral exhortations, philosophical treatises—everything is represented here except epic and drama, and even of these one might by stretching a point find instances. The story of Rameses II’s dashing victories, engraved patiently in verse upon brick after brick of the great pylon at Luxor, is epic at least in length and dulness. In another inscription Rameses IV boasts that in a play he had defended Osiris from Set, and had recalled Osiris to life.¹⁵⁶ Our knowledge does not allow us to amplify this hint.

Historiography, in Egypt, is as old as history; even the kings of the predynastic period kept historical records proudly.¹⁵⁷ Official historians accompanied the Pharaohs on their expeditions, never saw their defeats, and recorded, or invented, the details of their victories; already the writing of history had become a cosmetic art. As far back as 2500 B.C. Egyptian scholars made lists of their kings, named the years from them, and chronicled the outstanding events of each year and reign; by the time of Thutmose III these documents became full-fledged histories, eloquent with patriotic emotion.¹⁵⁸ Egyptian philosophers of the Middle Kingdom thought both man and history old and effete, and mourned the lusty youth of their race; Khekheperre-Sonbu, a savant of the reign of Senusret II, about 2150 B.C., complained that all things had long since been said, and nothing remained for literature except repetition. “Would,” he cried unhappily, “that I had words that are unknown, utterances and sayings in new language, that hath not yet passed away, and without that which hath been said repeatedly—not an utterance that hath grown stale, what the ancestors have already said.”¹⁵⁹

Distance blurs for us the variety and changefulness of Egyptian literature, as it blurs the individual differences of unfamiliar peoples. Nevertheless, in the course of its long development Egyptian letters passed through movements and moods as varied as those that have disturbed the history of European literature. As in Europe, so in Egypt the language of everyday speech diverged gradually, at last almost completely, from that in which the books of the Old Kingdom had been written. For a long time authors continued to compose in the ancient tongue; scholars acquired it in school, and students were compelled to translate the “classics” with the help of grammars and vocabularies, and with the occasional assistance of “interlinears.” In the fourteenth century B.C. Egyptian authors rebelled against this bondage to tradition, and like Dante and Chaucer dared to write in the language of the people; Ikhnaton’s famous Hymn to the Sun is itself composed in the popular speech. The new literature was realistic, youthful, buoyant; it took delight in flouting the old forms and describing the new life. In time this language also became literary and formal, refined and precise, rigid and impeccable with conventions of word and phrase; once again the language of letters separated from the language of speech, and scholasticism flourished; the schools of Saïte Egypt spent half their time studying and translating the “classics” of Ikhnaton’s day.¹⁶⁰ Similar transformations of the native tongue went on under the Greeks, under the Romans, under the Arabs; another is going on today. Panta rei—all things flow; only scholars never change.

8. Science

Origins of Egyptian science—Mathematics—Astronomy and the calendar—Anatomy and physiology—Medicine, surgery and hygiene

The scholars of Egypt were mostly priests, enjoying, far from the turmoil of life, the comfort and security of the temples; and it was these priests who, despite all their superstitions, laid the foundations of Egyptian science. According to their own legends the sciences had been invented some 18,000 B.C. by Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, during his three-thousand-year-long reign on earth; and the most ancient books in each science were among the twenty thousand volumes composed by this learned deity.*¹⁶¹ Our knowledge does not permit us to improve substantially upon this theory of the origins of science in Egypt.

At the very outset of recorded Egyptian history we find mathematics highly developed; the design and construction of the Pyramids involved a precision of measurement impossible without considerable mathematical lore. The dependence of Egyptian life upon the fluctuations of the Nile led to careful records and calculations of the rise and recession of the river; surveyors and scribes were continually remeasuring the land whose boundaries had been obliterated by the inundation, and this measuring of the land was evidently the origin of geometry.¹⁶³ Nearly all the ancients agreed in ascribing the invention of this science to the Egyptians.¹⁶⁴ Josephus, however, thought that Abraham had brought arithmetic from Chaldea (i.e., Mesopotamia) to Egypt;¹⁶⁵ and it is not impossible that this and other arts came to Egypt from “Ur of the Chaldees,” or some other center of western Asia.

The figures used were cumbersome—one stroke for 1, two strokes for 2, . . . nine strokes for 9, with a new sign for 10. Two 10 signs stood for 20, three 10 signs for 30, . . . nine for 90, with a new sign for 100. Two 100 signs stood for 200, three 100 signs for 300, . . . nine for 900, with a new sign for 1000. The sign for 1,000,000 was a picture of a man striking his hands above his head, as if to express amazement that such a number should exist.¹⁶⁶ The Egyptians fell just short of the decimal system; they had no zero, and never reached the idea of expressing all numbers with ten digits: e.g., they used twenty-seven signs to write 999.¹⁶⁷ They had fractions, but always with the numerator 1; to express ¾ they wrote ½ + ¼. Multiplication and division tables are as old as the Pyramids. The oldest mathematical treatise known is the Ahmes Papyrus, dating back to 2000-1700 B.C.; but this in turn refers to mathematical writings five hundred years more ancient than itself. It illustrates by examples the computation of the capacity of a barn or the area of a field, and passes to algebraic equations of the first degree.¹⁶⁸ Egyptian geometry measured not only the area of squares, circles and cubes, but also the cubic content of cylinders and spheres; and it arrived at 3.16 as the value of π.¹⁶⁹ We enjoy the honor of having advanced from 3.16 to 3.1416 in four thousand years.

Of Egyptian physics and chemistry we know nothing, and almost as little of Egyptian astronomy. The star-gazers of the temples seem to have conceived the earth as a rectangular box, with mountains at the corners upholding the sky.¹⁷⁰ They made no note of eclipses, and were in general less advanced than their Mesopotamian contemporaries. Nevertheless they knew enough to predict the day on which the Nile would rise, and to orient their temples toward that point on the horizon where the sun would appear on the morning of the summer solstice.¹⁷¹ Perhaps they knew more than they cared to publish among a people whose superstitions were so precious to their rulers; the priests regarded their astronomical studies as an esoteric and mysterious science, which they were reluctant to disclose to the common world.¹⁷² For century after century they kept track of the position and movements of the planets, until their records stretched back for thousands of years. They distinguished between planets and fixed stars, noted in their catalogues stars of the fifth magnitude (practically invisible to the unaided eye), and charted what they thought were the astral influences of the heavens on the fortunes of men. From these observations they built the calendar which was to be another of Egypt’s greatest gifts to mankind.

They began by dividing the year into three seasons of four months each: first, the rise, overflow and recession of the Nile; second, the period of cultivation; and third, the period of harvesting. To each of these months they assigned thirty days, as being the most convenient approximation to the lunar month of twenty-nine and a half days; their word for month, like ours, was derived from their symbol for the moon.* At the end of the twelfth month they added five days to bring the year into harmony with the river and the sun.¹⁷⁴ As the beginning of their year they chose the day on which the Nile usually reached its height, and on which, originally, the great star Sirius (which they called Sothis) rose simultaneously with the sun. Since their calendar allowed only 365, instead of 365¼ days to a year, this “heliacal rising” of Sirius (i.e., its appearance just before sunrise, after having been invisible for a number of days) came a day later every four years; and in this way the Egyptian calendar diverged by six hours annually from the actual calendar of the sky. The Egyptians never corrected this error. Many years later (46 B.C.) the Greek astronomers of Alexandria, by direction of Julius Caesar, improved this calendar by adding an extra day every fourth year; this was the “Julian Calendar.” Under Pope Gregory XIII (1582) a more accurate correction was made by omitting this extra day (February 29th) in century years not divisible by 400; this is the “Gregorian Calendar” that we use today. Our calendar is essentially the creation of the ancient Near East.†¹⁷⁵

Despite the opportunities offered by embalming, the Egyptians made relatively poor progress in the study of the human body. They thought that the blood-vessels carried air, water, and excretory fluids, and they believed the heart and bowels to be the seat of the mind; perhaps if we knew what they meant by these terms we should find them not so divergent from our own ephemeral certainties. They described with general accuracy the larger bones and viscera, and recognized the function of the heart as the driving power of the organism and the center of the circulatory system: “its vessels,” says the Ebers Papyrus,¹⁷⁶ “lead to all the members; whether the doctor lays his finger on the forehead, on the back of the head, on the hands, . . . or on the feet, everywhere he meets with the heart.” From this to Leonardo and Harvey was but a step—which took three thousand years.

The glory of Egyptian science was medicine. Like almost everything else in the cultural life of Egypt, it began with the priests, and dripped with evidences of its magical origins. Among the people amulets were more popular than pills as preventive or curative of disease; disease was to them a possession by devils, and was to be treated with incantations. A cold for instance, could be exorcised by such magic words as: “Depart, cold, son of a cold, thou who breakest the bones, destroyest the skull, makest ill the seven openings of the head! . . . Go out on the floor, stink, stink, stink!”¹⁷⁷—a cure probably as effective as contemporary remedies for this ancient disease. From such depths we rise in Egypt to great physicians, surgeons and specialists, who acknowledged an ethical code that passed down into the famous Hippocratic oath.¹⁷⁸ Some of them specialized in obstetrics or gynecology, some treated only gastric disorders, some were oculists so internationally famous that Cyrus sent for one of them to come to Persia.¹⁷⁹ The general practitioner was left to gather the crumbs and heal the poor; in addition to which he was expected to provide cosmetics, hair-dyes, skin-culture, limb-beautification, and flea-exterminators.¹⁸⁰

Several papyri devoted to medicine have come down to us. The most valuable of them, named from the Edwin Smith who discovered it, is a roll fifteen feet long, dating about 1600 B.C., and going back for its sources to much earlier works; even in its extant form it is the oldest scientific document known to history. It describes forty-eight cases in clinical surgery, from cranial fractures to injuries of the spine. Each case is treated in logical order, under the heads of provisional diagnosis, examination, semeiology, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and glosses on the terms used. The author notes, with a clarity unrivaled till the eighteenth century of our era, that control of the lower limbs is localized in the “brain”—a word which here appears for the first time in literature.¹⁸¹

The Egyptians enjoyed a great variety of diseases, though they had to die of them without knowing their Greek names. The mummies and papyri tell of spinal tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis, gall-stones, small-pox, infantile paralysis, anemia, rheumatic arthritis, epilepsy, gout, mastoiditis, appendicitis, and such marvelous affections as spondylitis deformans and achondroplasia. There are no signs of syphilis or cancer; but pyorrhea and dental caries, absent in the oldest mummies, become frequent in the later ones, indicating the progress of civilization. The atrophy and fusion of the bones of the small toe, often ascribed to the modern shoe, was common in ancient Egypt, where nearly all ages and ranks went barefoot.¹⁸²

Against these diseases the Egyptian doctors were armed with an abundant pharmacopoeia. The Ebers Papyrus lists seven hundred remedies for everything from snake-bite to puerperal fever. The Kahun Papyrus (ca. 1850 B.C.) prescribes suppositories apparently used for contraception.^182a The tomb of an Eleventh Dynasty queen revealed a medicine chest containing vases, spoons, dried drugs, and roots. Prescriptions hovered between medicine and magic, and relied for their effectiveness in great part on the repulsiveness of the concoction. Lizard’s blood, swine’s ears and teeth, putrid meat and fat, a tortoise’s brains, an old book boiled in oil, the milk of a lying-in woman, the water of a chaste woman, the excreta of men, donkeys, dogs, lions, cats and lice—all these are found in the prescriptions. Baldness was treated by rubbing the head with animal fat. Some of these cures passed from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Romans, and from the Romans to us; we still swallow trustfully the strange mixtures that were brewed four thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile.¹⁸³

The Egyptians tried to promote health by public sanitation,* by circumcision of males,†¹⁸⁵ and by teaching the people the frequent use of the enema. Diodorus Siculus¹⁸⁷ tells us:

In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every day, and sometimes at intervals of three or four days. For they say that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous, and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are engendered.‡

Pliny believed that this habit of taking enemas was learned by the Egyptians from observing the ibis, a bird that counteracts the constipating character of its food by using its long bill as a rectal syringe.¹⁸⁸ Herodotus reports that the Egyptians “purge themselves every month, three days successively, seeking to preserve health by emetics and enemas; for they suppose that all diseases to which men are subject proceed from the food they use.” And this first historian of civilization ranks the Egyptians as, “next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world.¹⁸⁹

9. Art

Architecture—Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Empire and Saïte sculpture—Bas-relief—Painting—Minor arts—Music—The artists

The greatest element in this civilization was its art. Here, almost at the threshold of history, we find an art powerful and mature, superior to that of any modern nation, and equaled only by that of Greece. At first the luxury of isolation and peace, and then, under Thutmose III and Rameses II, the spoils of oppression and war, gave to Egypt the opportunity and the means for massive architecture, masculine statuary, and a hundred minor arts that so early touched perfection. The whole theory of progress hesitates before Egyptian art.

Architecture* was the noblest of the ancient arts, because it combined in imposing form mass and duration, beauty and use. It began humbly in the adornment of tombs and the external decoration of homes. Dwellings were mostly of mud, with here and there some pretty woodwork (a Japanese lattice, a well-carved portal), and a roof strengthened with the tough and pliable trunks of the palm. Around the house, normally, was a wall enclosing a court; from the court steps led to the roof; from this the tenants passed down into the rooms. The well-to-do had private gardens, carefully landscaped; the cities provided public gardens for the poor, and hardly a home but had its ornament of flowers. Inside the house the walls were hung with colored mattings, and the floors, if the master could afford it, were covered with rugs. People sat on these rugs rather than on chairs; the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom squatted for their meals at tables six inches high, in the fashion of the Japanese; and ate with their fingers, like Shakespeare. Under the Empire, when slaves were cheap, the upper classes sat on high cushioned chairs, and had their servants hand them course after course.¹⁹⁰

Stone for building was too costly for homes; it was a luxury reserved for priests and kings. Even the nobles, ambitious though they were, left the greatest wealth and the best building materials to the temples; in consequence the palaces that overlooked almost every mile of the river in the days of Amenhotep III crumbled into oblivion, while the abodes of the gods and the tombs of the dead remained. By the Twelfth Dynasty the pyramid had ceased to be the fashionable form of sepulture. Khnumhotep (ca. 2180 B.C.) chose at Beni-Hasan the quieter form of a colonnade built into the mountainside; and this theme, once established, played a thousand variations among the hills on the western slope of the Nile. From the time of the Pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Denderah—i.e., for some three thousand years—there rose out of the sands of Egypt such a succession of architectural achievements as no civilization has ever surpassed.

At Karnak and Luxor a riot of columns raised by Thutmose I and III, Amenhotep III, Seti I, Rameses II and other monarchs from the Twelfth to the Twenty-second Dynasty; at Medinet-Habu (ca. 1300 B.C.) a vast but less distinguished edifice, on whose columns an Arab village rested for centuries; at Abydos the Temple of Seti I, dark and sombre in its massive ruins; at Elephantine the little Temple of Khnum (ca. 1400 B.C.), “positively Greek in its precision and elegance”;¹⁹¹ at Der-el-Bahri the stately colonnades of Queen Hatshepsut; near it the Ramesseum, another forest of colossal columns and statues reared by the architects and slaves of Rameses II; at Philæ the lovely Temple of Isis (ca. 240 B.C.) desolate and abandoned now that the damming of the Nile at Assuan has submerged the bases of its perfect columns—these are sample fragments of the many monuments that still adorn the valley of the Nile, and attest even in their ruins the strength and courage of the race that reared them. Here, perhaps, is an excess of pillars, a crowding of columns against the tyranny of the sun, a Far-Eastern aversion to symmetry, a lack of unity, a barbaric-modern adoration of size. But here, too, are grandeur, sublimity, majesty and power; here are the arch and the vault,¹⁹² used sparingly because not needed, but ready to pass on their principles to Greece and Rome and modern Europe; here are decorative designs never surpassed;¹⁹³ here are papyriform columns, lotiform columns, “proto-Doric” columns,¹⁹⁴ Caryatid columns,¹⁹⁵ Hathor capitals, palm capitals, clerestories, and magnificent architraves full of the strength and stability that are the very soul of architecture’s powerful appeal.* The Egyptians were the greatest builders in history.

Some would add that they were also the greatest sculptors. Here at the outset is the Sphinx, conveying by its symbolism the leonine quality of some masterful Pharaoh—perhaps Khafre-Chephren; it has not only size, as some have thought, but character. The cannon-shot of the Mamelukes have broken the nose and shorn the beard, but nevertheless those gigantic features portray with impressive skill the force and dignity, the calm and sceptical maturity, of a natural king. Across those motionless features a subtle smile has hovered for five thousand years, as if already the unknown artist or monarch had understood all that men would ever understand about men. It is a Mona Lisa in stone.

There is nothing finer in the history of sculpture than the diorite statue of Khafre in the Cairo Museum; as ancient to Praxiteles as Praxiteles to us, it nevertheless comes down across fifty centuries almost unhurt by time’s rough usages; cut in the most intractable of stones, it passes on to us completely the strength and authority, the wilfulness and courage, the sensitivity and intelligence of the (artist or the) King. Near it, and even older, Pharaoh Zoser sits pouting in limestone; farther on, the guide with lighted match reveals the transparency of an alabaster Menkaure.

Quite as perfect in artistry as these portraits of royalty are the figures of the Sheik-el-Beled and the Scribe. The Scribe has come down to us in many forms, all of uncertain antiquity; the most illustrious is the squatting Scribe of the Louvre.* The Sheik is no sheik but only an overseer of labor, armed with the staff of authority, and stepping forward as if in supervision or command. His name, apparently, was Kaapiru; but the Arab workmen who rescued him from his tomb at Sakkara were struck with his resemblance to the Sheik-el-Beled (i.e., Mayor-of-the-Village) under whom they lived; and this title which their good humor gave him is now inseparable from his fame. He is carved only in mortal wood, but time has not seriously reduced his portly figure or his chubby legs; his waistline has all the amplitude of the comfortable bourgeois in every civilization; his rotund face beams with the content of a man who knows his place and glories in it. The bald head and carelessly loosened robe display the realism of an art already old enough to rebel against idealization; but here, too, is a fine simplicity, a complete humanity, expressed without bitterness, and with the ease and grace of a practised and confident hand. “If,” says Maspero, “some exhibition of the world’s masterpieces were to be inaugurated, I should choose this work to uphold the honor of Egyptian art”¹⁹⁶—or would that honor rest more securely on the head of Khafre?

These are the chefs-d’œuvres of Old Kingdom statuary. But lesser masterpieces abound: the seated portraits of Rahotep and his wife Nofrit, the powerful figure of Ranofer the priest, the copper statues of King Phiops and his son, a falcon-head in gold, the humorous figures of the Beer-Brewer and the Dwarf Knemhotep—all but one in the Cairo Museum, all without exception instinct with character. It is true that the earlier pieces are coarse and crude; that by a strange convention, running throughout Egyptian art, figures are shown with the body and eyes facing forward, but the hands and feet in profile;* that not much attention was given to the body, which was left in most cases stereotyped and unreal—all female bodies young, all royal bodies strong; and that individualization, though masterly, was generally reserved for the head. But with all the stiffness and sameness that priestly conventions and control forced upon statuary, paintings and reliefs, these works were fully redeemed by the power and depth of the conception, the vigor and precision of the execution, the character, line and finish of the product. Never was sculpture more alive: the Sheik exudes authority, the woman grinding grain gives every sense and muscle to her work, the Scribe is on the very verge of writing. And the thousand little puppets placed in the tombs to carry on essential industries for the dead were moulded with a like vivacity, so that we can almost believe, with the pious Egyptian, that the deceased could not be unhappy while these ministrants were there.

Not for many centuries did Egyptian sculpture equal again the achievements of the early dynasties. Because most of the statuary was made for the temples or the tombs, the priests determined to a great degree what forms the artist should follow; and the natural conservatism of religion crept into art, slowly stifling sculpture into a conventional, stylistic degeneration. Under the powerful monarchs of the Twelfth Dynasty the secular spirit reasserted itself, and art recaptured something of its old vigor and more than its old skill. A head of Amenemhet III in black diorite¹⁹⁷ suggests at once the recovery of character and the recovery of art; here is the quiet hardness of an able king, carved with the competence of a master. A colossal statue of Senusret III is crowned with a head and face equal in conception and execution to any portrait in the history of sculpture; and the ruined torso of Senusret I, in the Cairo Museum, ranks with the torso of Hercules in the Louvre. Animal figures abound in the Egyptian sculpture of every age, and are always full of humor and life: here is a mouse chewing a nut, an ape devotedly strumming a harp, a porcupine with every spine on the qui vive. Then came the Shepherd Kings, and for three hundred years Egyptian art almost ceased to be.

In the age of Hatshepsut, the Thutmoses, the Amenhoteps and the Rameses, art underwent a second resurrection along the Nile. Wealth poured in from subject Syria, passed into the temples and the courts, and trickled through them to nourish every art. Colossi of Thutmose III and Rameses II began to challenge the sky; statuary crowded every corner of the temples; masterpieces were flung forth with unprecedented abundance by a race exhilarated with what they thought was world supremacy. The fine granite bust of the great Queen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York; the basalt statue of Thutmose III in the Cairo Museum; the lion sphinx of Amenhotep III in the British Museum; the limestone seated Ikhnaton in the Louvre; the granite statue of Rameses II in Turin;* the perfect crouching figure of the same incredible monarch making an offering to the gods;¹⁹⁹ the meditative cow of Der-el-Bahri, which Maspero considered “equal, if not superior, to the best achievements of Greece and Rome in this genre”;²⁰⁰ the two lions of Amenhotep III, which Ruskin ranked as the best animal statuary surviving from antiquity;²⁰¹ the colossi cut into the rocks at Abu Simbel by the sculptors of Rameses II; the amazing remains found among the ruins of the artist Thutmose’s studio at Tell-el-Amarna—a plaster model of Ikhnaton’s head, full of the mysticism and poetry of that tragic king, the lovely limestone bust of Ikhnaton’s Queen, Nofretete, and the even finer sandstone head of the same fair lady:²⁰² these scattered examples may illustrate the sculptural accomplishments of this abounding Empire age. Amid all these lofty masterpieces humor continues to find place; Egyptian sculptors frolic with jolly caricatures of men and animals, and even the kings and queens, in Ikhnaton’s iconoclastic age, are made to smile and play.

After Rameses II this magnificence passed rapidly away. For many centuries after him art contented itself with repeating traditional works and forms. Under the Saïte kings it sought to rejuvenate itself by returning to the simplicity and sincerity of the Old Kingdom masters. Sculptors attacked bravely the hardest stones—basalt, breccia, serpentine, diorite—and carved them into such realistic portraits as that of Montumihait,²⁰³ and the green basalt head of a bald unknown, now looking out blackly upon the walls of the State Museum at Berlin. In bronze they cast the lovely figure of the lady Tekoschet.²⁰⁴ Again they delighted in catching the actual features and movements of men and beasts; they moulded laughable figures of quaint animals, slaves and gods; and they formed in bronze a cat and a goat’s head which are among the trophies of Berlin.²⁰⁵ Then the Persians came down like a wolf on the fold, conquered Egypt, desecrated its temples, broke its spirit, and put an end to its art.

These—architecture and sculpture*—are the major Egyptian arts; but if abundance counted, bas-relief would have to be added to them. No other people so tirelessly carved its history or legends upon its walls. At first we are shocked by the dull similarity of these glyptic narratives, the crowded confusion, the absence of proportion and perspective—or the ungainly attempt to achieve this by representing the far above the near; we are surprised to see how tall the Pharaoh is, and how small are his enemies; and, as in the sculpture, we find it hard to adjust our pictorial habits to eyes and breasts that face us boldly, while noses, chins and feet turn coldly away. But then we find ourselves caught by the perfect line and grace of the falcon and serpent carved on King Wenephes’ tomb,²⁰⁶ by the limestone reliefs of King Zoser on the Step-Pyramid at Sakkara, by the wood-relief of Prince Hesiré from his grave in the same locality,²⁰⁷ and by the wounded Libyan on a Fifth Dynasty tomb at Abusir²⁰⁸—a patient study of muscles taut in pain. At last we bear with equanimity the long reliefs that tell how Thutmose III and Rameses II carried all before them; we recognize the perfection of flowing line in the reliefs carved for Seti I at Abydos and Karnak; and we follow with interest the picturesque engravings wherein the sculptors of Hatshepsut tell on the walls of Der-el-Bahri the story of the expedition sent by her to the mysterious land of Punt (Somaliland?). We see the long ships with full-spread sail and serried oars heading south amid waters alive with octopi, crustacea and other toilers of the sea; we watch the fleet arriving on the shores of Punt, welcomed by a startled but fascinated people and king; we see the sailors carrying on board a thousand loads of native delicacies; we read the jest of the Punt workman—“Be careful of your feet, you over there; look out!” Then we accompany the heavy-laden vessels as they return northward filled (the inscription tells us) “with the marvels of the land of Punt, all the odoriferous trees of the lands of the gods, incense, ebony, ivory, gold, woods of divers kinds, cosmetics for the eyes, monkeys, dogs, panther skins, . . . never have like things been brought back for any king from the beginning of the world.” The ships come through the great canal between the Red Sea and the Nile; we see the expedition landing at the docks of Thebes, depositing its varied cargo at the very feet of the Queen. And lastly we are shown, as if after the lapse of time, all these imported goods beautifying Egypt: on every side ornaments of gold and ebony, boxes of perfumes and unguents, elephants’ tusks and animals’ hides; while the trees brought back from Punt are flourishing so well on the soil of Thebes that under their branches oxen enjoy the shade. It is one of the supreme reliefs in the history of art.²⁰⁹*

Bas-relief is a liaison between sculpture and painting. In Egypt, except during the reign of the Ptolemies and under the influence of Greece, painting never rose to the status of an independent art; it remained an accessory to architecture, sculpture and relief—the painter filled in the outlines carved by the cutting tool. But though subordinate, it was ubiquitous; most statues were painted, all surfaces were colored. It is an art perilously subject to time, and lacking the persistence of statuary and building. Very little remains to us of Old Kingdom painting beyond a remarkable picture of six geese from a tomb at Medum;²¹⁰ but from this alone we are justified in believing that already in the early dynasties this art, too, had come near to perfection. In the Middle Kingdom we find distemper painting† of a delightful decorative effect in the tombs of Ameni and Khnumhotep at Beni-Hasan, and such excellent examples of the art as the “Gazelles and the Peasants,”²¹¹ and the “Cat Watching the Prey”;²¹² here again the artist has caught the main point—that his creations must move and live. Under the Empire the tombs became a riot of painting. The Egyptian artist had now developed every color in the rainbow, and was anxious to display his skill. On the walls and ceilings of homes, temples, palaces and graves he tried to portray refreshingly the life of the sunny fields—birds in flight through the air, fishes swimming in the sea, beasts of the jungle in their native haunts. Floors were painted to look like transparent pools, and ceilings sought to rival the jewelry of the sky. Around these pictures were borders of geometric or floral design, ranging from a quiet simplicity to the most fascinating complexity.²¹³ The “Dancing Girl,”²¹⁴ so full of originality and esprit, the “Bird Hunt in a Boat,”²¹⁵ the slim, naked beauty in ochre, mingling with other musicians in the Tomb of Nakht at Thebes²¹⁶—these are stray samples of the painted population of the graves. Here, as in the bas-reliefs, the line is good and the composition poor; the participants in an action, whom we should portray as intermingled, are represented separately in succession;²¹⁷ superposition is again preferred to perspective; the stiff formalism and conventions of Egyptian sculpture are the order of the day, and do not reveal that enlivening humor and realism which distinguish the later statuary. But through these pictures runs a freshness of conception, a flow of line and execution, a fidelity to the life and movement of natural things, and a joyous exuberance of color and ornament, which make them a delight to the eye and the spirit. With all its shortcomings Egyptian painting would never be surpassed by any Oriental civilization until the middle dynasties of China.

The minor arts were the major art of Egypt. The same skill and energy that had built Karnak and the Pyramids, and had crowded the temples with a populace of stone, devoted itself also to the internal beautification of the home, the adornment of the body, and the development of all the graces of life. Weavers made rugs, tapestries and cushions rich in color and incredibly fine in texture; the designs which they created passed down into Syria, and are used there to this day.²¹⁸ The relics of Tutenkhamon’s tomb have revealed the astonishing luxury of Egyptian furniture, the exquisite finish of every piece and part, chairs covered gaudily with silver and gold, beds of sumptuous workmanship and design, jewel-boxes and perfume-baskets of minute artistry, and vases that only China would excel. Tables bore costly vessels of silver, gold and bronze, crystal goblets, and sparkling bowls of diorite so finely ground that the light shone through their stone walls. The alabaster vessels of Tutenkhamon, and the perfect lotus cups and drinking bowls unearthed amid the ruins of Amenhotep Ill’s villa at Thebes, indicate to what a high level the ceramic art was raised. Finally the jewelers of the Middle Kingdom and the Empire brought forth a profusion of precious ornaments seldom surpassed in design and workmanship. Necklaces, crowns, rings, bracelets, mirrors, pectorals, chains, medallions; gold and silver, carnelian and felspar, lapis lazuli and amethyst—everything is here. The rich Egyptians took the same pleasure as the Japanese in the beauty of the little things that surrounded them; every square of ivory on their jewel-boxes had to be carved in relief and refined in precise detail. They dressed simply, but they lived completely. And when their day’s work was done they refreshed themselves with music softly played on lutes, harps, sistrums, flutes and lyres.* Temples and palaces had orchestras and choirs, and on the Pharaoh’s staff was a “superintendent of singing” who organized players and musicians for the entertainment of the king. There is no trace of a musical notation in Egypt, but this may be merely a lacuna in the remains. Snefrunofr and Re’mery-Ptah were the Carusos and De Reszkes of their day, and across the centuries we hear their boast that they “fulfil every wish of the king by their beautiful singing.”²¹⁹

It is exceptional that their names survive, for in most cases the artists whose labors preserved the features or memory of princes, priests and kings had no means of transmitting their own names to posterity. We hear of Imhotep, the almost mythical architect of Zoser’s reign; of Ineni, who designed great buildings like Der-el-Bahri for Thutmose I; of Puymre and Hapuseneb and Senmut, who carried on the architectural enterprises of Queen Hatshepsut,† of the artist Thutmose, in whose studio so many masterpieces have been found; and of Bek, the proud sculptor who tells us, in Gautier’s strain, that he has saved Ikhnaton from oblivion.²²¹ Amenhotep III had as his chief architect another Amenhotep, son of Hapu; the Pharaoh placed almost limitless wealth at the disposal of his talents, and this favored artist became so famous that later Egypt worshiped him as a god. For the most part, however, the artist worked in obscurity and poverty, and was ranked no higher than other artisans or handicraftsmen by the priests and potentates who engaged him.

Egyptian religion coöperated with Egyptian wealth to inspire and foster art, and coöperated with Egypt’s loss of empire and affluence to ruin it. Religion offered motives, ideas and the inspiration; but it imposed conventions and restraints which bound art so completely to the church that when sincere religion died among the artists, the arts that had lived on it died too. This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

10. Philosophy

The “Instructions of Ptah-hotep”—The “Admonitions of Ipuwer”—The “Dialogue of a Misanthrope”—The Egyptian Ecclesiastes

Historians of philosophy have been wont to begin their story with the Greeks. The Hindus, who believe that they invented philosophy, and the Chinese, who believe that they perfected it, smile at our provincialism. It may be that we are all mistaken; for among the most ancient fragments left to us by the Egyptians are writings that belong, however loosely and untechnically, under the rubric of moral philosophy. The wisdom of the Egyptians was a proverb with the Greeks, who felt themselves children beside this ancient race.²²²

The oldest work of philosophy known to us is the “Instructions of Ptah-hotep,” which apparently goes back to 2880 B.C.—2300 years before Confucius, Socrates and Buddha.²²³ Ptah-hotep was Governor of Memphis, and Prime Minister to the King, under the Fifth Dynasty. Retiring from office, he decided to leave to his son a manual of everlasting wisdom. It was transcribed as an antique classic by some scholars prior to the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Vizier begins:

O Prince my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descendeth upon me; feebleness cometh and childishness is renewed; he that is old lieth down in misery every day. The eyes are small, the ears are deaf. Energy is diminished, the heart hath no rest. . . . Command thy servant, therefore, to make over my princely authority to my son. Let me speak unto him the words of them that hearken to the counsel of the men of old time, those that once heard the gods. I pray thee, let this thing be done.

His Gracious Majesty grants the permission, advising him, however, to “discourse without causing weariness”—advice not yet superfluous for philosophers. Whereupon Ptah-hotep instructs his son:

Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the ignorant man as with the sage. For no limit can be set to skill, neither is there any craftsman that possesseth full advantages. Fair speech is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens among the pebbles. . . . Live, therefore, in the house of kindliness, and men shall come and give gifts of themselves. . . . Beware of making enmity by thy words. . . . Overstep not the truth, neither repeat that which any man, be he prince or peasant, saith in opening the heart; it is abhorrent to the soul. . . .

If thou wouldst be a wise man, beget a son for the pleasing of the god. If he make straight his course after thine example, if he arrange thine affairs in due order, do all unto him that is good. . . . If he be heedless and trespass thy rules of conduct, and is violent; if every speech that cometh from his mouth is a vile word; then beat thou him, that his talk may be fitting. . . . Precious to a man is the virtue of his son, and good character is a thing remembered. . . .

Wheresover thou goest, beware of consorting with women. . . . If thou wouldst be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife that is in thine arms. . . . Silence is more profitable to thee than abundance of speech. Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an expert that speaketh in council. It is a foolish thing to speak on every kind of work. . . .

If thou be powerful make thyself to be honored for knowledge and for gentleness. . . . Beware of interruption, and of answering words with heat; put it from thee; control thyself.

And Ptah-hotep concludes with Horatian pride:

Nor shall any word that hath here been set down cease out of this land forever, but shall be made a pattern whereby princes shall speak well. My words shall instruct a man how he shall speak; . . . yea, he shall become as one skilful in obeying, excellent in speaking. Good fortune shall befall him; . . . he shall be gracious until the end of his life; he shall be contented always.²²⁴

This note of good cheer does not persist in Egyptian thought; age comes upon it quickly, and sours it. Another sage, Ipuwer, bemoans the disorder, violence, famine and decay that attended the passing of the Old Kingdom; he tells of sceptics who “would make offerings if” they “knew where the god is”; he comments upon increasing suicide, and adds, like another Schopenhauer: “Would that there might be an end of men, that there might be no conception, no birth. If the land would but cease from noise, and strife be no more”—it is clear that Ipuwer was tired and old. In the end he dreams of a philosopher-king who will redeem men from chaos and injustice:

He brings cooling to the flame (of the social conflagration?). It is said he is the shepherd of all men. There is no evil in his heart. When his herds are few he passes the day to gather them together, their hearts being fevered. Would that he had discerned their character in the first generation. Then would he have smitten evil. He would have stretched forth his arm against it. He would have smitten the seed thereof and their inheritance. . . . Where is he today? Doth he sleep perchance? Behold, his might is not seen.²²⁵

This already is the voice of the prophets; the lines are cast into strophic form, like the prophetic writings of the Jews; and Breasted properly acclaims these “Admonitions” as “the earliest emergence of a social idealism which among the Hebrews we call ‘Messianism.’”²²⁶ Another scroll from the Middle Kingdom denounces the corruption of the age in words that almost every generation hears:

To whom do I speak today?

Brothers are evil,

Friends of today are not of love.

To whom do I speak today?

Hearts are thievish,

Every man seizes his neighbor’s goods.

To whom do I speak today?

The gentle man perishes,

The bold-faced goes everywhere. . . .

To whom do I speak today?

When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct

He stirs all men to mirth, although his iniquity is wicked. . . .

And then this Egyptian Swinburne pours out a lovely eulogy of death:

Death is before me today

Like the recovery of a sick man,

Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today

Like the odor of myrrh,

Like sitting under the sail on a windy day.

Death is before me today

Like the odor of lotus-flowers,

Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.

Death is before me today

Like the course of a freshet,

Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house. . . .

Death is before me today

As a man longs to see his home

When he had spent years of captivity.²²⁷

Saddest of all is a poem engraved upon a slab now in the Leyden Museum, and dating back to 2200 B.C. Carpe diem, it sings—snatch the day!

I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef,

Words greatly celebrated as their utterances.

Behold the places thereof!—

Their walls are dismantled,

Their places are no more,

As if they had never been.

None cometh from thence

That he may tell us how they fare; . . .

That he may content our hearts

Until we too depart

To the place whither they have gone.

Encourage thy heart to forget it,

Making it pleasant for thee to follow thy desire

While thou livest.

Put myrrh upon thy head,

And garments upon thee of fine linen,

Imbued with marvelous luxuries,

The genuine things of the gods.

Increase yet more thy delights,

And let not thy heart languish.

Follow thy desire and thy good,

Fashion thy affairs on earth

After the mandates of thine own heart,

Till that day of lamentation come to thee

When the silent-hearted (dead) hears not their lamentation,

Nor he that is in the tomb attends the mourning.

Celebrate the glad day;

Be not weary therein.

Lo, no man taketh his goods with him;

Yea, none returneth again that is gone thither.²²⁸

This pessimism and scepticism were the result, it may be, of the broken spirit of a nation humiliated and subjected by the Hyksos invaders; they bear the same relation to Egypt that Stoicism and Epicureanism bear to a defeated and enslaved Greece.* In part such literature represents one of those interludes, like our own moral interregnum, in which thought has for a time overcome belief, and men no longer know how or why they should live. Such periods do not endure; hope soon wins the victory over thought; the intellect is put down to its customary menial place, and religion is born again, giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to life and work. We need not suppose that such poems expressed the views of any large number of Egyptians; behind and around the small but vital minority that pondered the problems of life and death in secular and naturalistic terms were millions of simple men and women who remained faithful to the gods, and never doubted that right would triumph, that every earthly pain and grief would be atoned for bountifully in a haven of happiness and peace.

11. Religion

Sky gods—The sun god—Plant gods—Animal gods—Sex gods—Human gods—Osiris—Isis and Horus—Minor deities—The priests—Immortality—The “Book of the Dead”—The “Negative Confession”—Magic—Corruption

For beneath and above everything in Egypt was religion. We find it there in every stage and form from totemism to theology; we see its influence in literature, in government, in art, in everything except morality. And it is not only varied, it is tropically abundant; only in Rome and India shall we find so plentiful a pantheon. We cannot understand the Egyptian—or man—until we study his gods.

In the beginning, said the Egyptian, was the sky; and to the end this and the Nile remained his chief divinities. All these marvelous heavenly bodies were not mere bodies, they were the external forms of mighty spirits, gods whose wills—not always concordant—ordained their complex and varied movements.²²⁹ The sky itself was a vault, across whose vastness a great cow stood, who was the goddess Hathor; the earth lay beneath her feet, and her belly was clad in the beauty of ten thousand stars. Or (for the gods and myths differed from nome to nome) the sky was the god Sibu, lying tenderly upon the earth, which was the goddess Nuit; from their gigantic copulation all things had been born.²³⁰ Constellations and stars might be gods: for example, Sahu and Sopdit (Orion and Sirius) were tremendous deities; Sahu ate gods three times a day regularly. Occasionally some such monster ate the moon, but only for a moment; soon the prayers of men and the anger of the other gods forced the greedy sow to vomit it up again.²³¹ In this manner the Egyptian populace explained an eclipse of the moon.

The moon was a god, perhaps the oldest of all that were worshiped in Egypt; but in the official theology the greatest of the gods was the sun. Sometimes it was worshiped as the supreme deity Ra or Re, the bright father who fertilized Mother Earth with rays of penetrating heat and light; sometimes it was a divine calf, born anew at every dawn, sailing the sky slowly in a celestial boat, and descending into the west, at evening, like an old man tottering to his grave. Or the sun was the god Horus, taking the graceful form of a falcon, flying majestically across the heavens day after day as if in supervision of his realm, and becoming one of the recurrent symbols of Egyptian religion and royalty. Always Ra, or the sun, was the Creator: at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, he had flooded it with his energizing rays, and all living things—vegetable, animal and human—had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and been scattered over the world. The earliest men and women, being direct children of Ra, had been perfect and happy; by degrees their descendants had taken to evil ways, and had forfeited this perfection and happiness; whereupon Ra, dissatisfied with his creatures, had destroyed a large part of the human race. Learned Egyptians questioned this popular belief, and asserted on the contrary (like certain Sumerian scholars), that the first men had been like brutes, without articulate speech or any of the arts of life.²³² All in all it was an intelligent mythology, expressing piously man’s gratitude to earth and sun.

So exuberant was this piety that the Egyptians worshiped not merely the source, but almost every form, of life. Many plants were sacred to them: the palm-tree that shaded them amid the desert, the spring that gave them drink in the oasis, the grove where they could meet and rest, the sycamore flourishing miraculously in the sand; these were, with excellent reason, holy things, and to the end of his civilization the simple Egyptian brought them offerings of cucumbers, grapes and figs.²³³ Even the lowly vegetable found its devotees; and Taine amused himself by showing how the onion that so displeased Bossuet had been a divinity on the banks of the Nile.²³⁴

More popular were the animal gods; they were so numerous that they filled the Egyptian pantheon like a chattering menagerie. In one nome or another, in one period or another, Egyptians worshiped the bull, the crocodile, the hawk, the cow, the goose, the goat, the ram, the cat, the dog, the chicken, the swallow, the jackal, the serpent, and allowed some of these creatures to roam in the temples with the same freedom that is accorded to the sacred cow in India today.²³⁵ When the gods became human they still retained animal doubles and symbols: Amon was represented as a goose or a ram, Ra as a grasshopper or a bull, Osiris as a bull or a ram, Sebek as a crocodile, Horus as a hawk or falcon, Hathor as a cow, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, as a baboon.²³⁶ Sometimes women were offered to certain of these animals as sexual mates; the bull in particular, as the incarnation of Osiris, received this honor; and at Mendes, says Plutarch, the most beautiful women were offered in coitus to the divine goat.²³⁷ From beginning to end this totemism remained as an essential and native element in Egyptian religion; human gods came to Egypt much later, and probably as gifts from western Asia.²³⁸

The goat and the bull were especially sacred to the Egyptians as representing sexual creative power; they were not merely symbols of Osiris, but incarnations of him.²³⁹ Often Osiris was depicted with large and prominent organs, as a mark of his supreme power; and models of him in this form, or with a triple phallus, were borne in religious processions by the Egyptians; on certain occasions the women carried such phallic images, and operated them mechanically with strings.²⁴⁰* Signs of sex worship appear not only in the many cases in which figures are depicted, on temple reliefs, with erect organs, but in the frequent appearance, in Egyptian symbolism, of the crux ansata—a cross with a handle, as a sign of sexual union and vigorous life.²⁴¹

At last the gods became human—or rather, men became gods. Like the deities of Greece, the personal gods of Egypt were merely superior men and women, made in heroic mould, but composed of bone and muscle, flesh and blood; they hungered and ate, thirsted and drank, loved and mated, hated and killed, grew old and died.²⁴² There was Osiris, for example, god of the beneficent Nile, whose death and resurrection were celebrated yearly as symbolizing the fall and rise of the river, and perhaps the decay and growth of the soil. Every Egyptian of the later dynasties could tell the story of how Set (or Sit), the wicked god of desiccation, who shriveled up harvests with his burning breath, was angered at Osiris (the Nile) for extending (with his overflow) the fertility of the earth, slew him, and reigned in dry majesty over Osiris’ kingdom (i.e., the river once failed to rise), until Horus, brave son of Isis, overcame Set and banished him; whereafter Osiris, brought back to life by the warmth of Isis’ love, ruled benevolently over Egypt, suppressed cannibalism, established civilization, and then ascended to heaven to reign there endlessly as a god.²⁴³ It was a profound myth; for history, like Oriental religion, is dualistic—a record of the conflict between creation and destruction, fertility and desiccation, rejuvenation and exhaustion, good and evil, life and death.

Profound, too, was the myth of Isis, the Great Mother. She was not only the loyal sister and wife of Osiris; in a sense she was greater than he, for—like woman in general—she had conquered death through love. Nor was she merely the black soil of the Delta, fertilized by the touch of Osiris-Nile, and making all Egypt rich with her fecundity. She was, above all, the symbol of that mysterious creative power which had produced the earth and every living thing, and of that maternal tenderness whereby, at whatever cost to the mother, the young new life is nurtured to maturity. She represented in Egypt—as Kali, Ishtar and Cybele represented in Asia, Demeter in Greece, and Ceres in Rome—the original priority and independence of the female principle in creation and in inheritance, and the originative leadership of woman in tilling the earth; for it was Isis (said the myth) who had discovered wheat and barley growing wild in Egypt, and had revealed them to Osiris (man).²⁴⁴ The Egyptians worshiped her with especial fondness and piety, and raised up jeweled images to her as the Mother of God; her tonsured priests praised her in sonorous matins and vespers; and in midwinter of each year, coincident with the annual rebirth of the sun towards the end of our December, the temples of her divine child, Horus (god of the sun), showed her, in holy effigy, nursing in a stable the babe that she had miraculously conceived. These poetic-philosophic legends and symbols profoundly affected Christian ritual and theology. Early Christians sometimes worshiped before the statues of Isis suckling the infant Horus, seeing in them another form of the ancient and noble myth by which woman (i.e., the female principle), creating all things, becomes at last the Mother of God.²⁴⁵

These—Ra (or, as he was called in the South, Amon), Osiris, Isis and Horus—were the greater gods of Egypt. In later days Ra, Amon and another god, Ptah, were combined as three embodiments or aspects of one supreme and triune deity.²⁴⁶ There were countless lesser divinities: Anubis the jackal, Shu, Tefnut, Nephthys, Ket, Nut; . . . but we must not make these pages a museum of dead gods. Even Pharaoh was a god, always the son of Amon-Ra, ruling not merely by divine right but by divine birth, as a deity transiently tolerating the earth as his home. On his head was the falcon, symbol of Horus and totem of the tribe; from his forehead rose the urœus or serpent, symbol of wisdom and life, and communicating magic virtues to the crown.²⁴⁷ The king was chief-priest of the faith, and led the great processions and ceremonies that celebrated the festivals of the gods. It was through this assumption of divine lineage and powers that he was able to rule so long with so little force.

Hence the priests of Egypt were the necessary props of the throne, and the secret police of the social order. Given a faith of such complexity, a class had to arise adept in magic and ritual, whose skill would make it indispensable in approaching the gods. In effect, though not in law, the office of priest passed down from father to son, and a class grew up which, through the piety of the people and the politic generosity of the kings, became in time richer and stronger than the feudal aristocracy or the royal family itself. The sacrifices offered to the gods supplied the priests with food and drink; the temple buildings gave them spacious homes; the revenues of temple lands and services furnished them with ample incomes; and their exemption from forced labor, military service, and ordinary taxation, left them in an enviable position of prestige and power. They deserved not a little of this power, for they accumulated and preserved the learning of Egypt, educated the youth, and disciplined themselves with rigor and zeal. Herodotus describes them almost with awe:

They are of all men the most excessively attentive to the worship of the gods, and observe the following ceremonies. . . . They wear linen garments, constantly fresh-washed. . . . They are circumcised for the sake of cleanliness, thinking it better to be clean than handsome. They shave their whole body every third day, that neither lice nor any other impurity may be found upon them. . . . They wash themselves in cold water twice every day and twice every night.²⁴⁸

What distinguished this religion above everything else was its emphasis on immortality. If Osiris, the Nile, and all vegetation, might rise again, so might man. The amazing preservation of the dead body in the dry soil of Egypt lent some encouragement to this belief, which was to dominate Egyptian faith for thousands of years, and to pass from it, by its own resurrection, into Christianity.²⁴⁹ The body, Egypt believed, was inhabited by a small replica of itself called the ka, and also by a soul that dwelt in the body like a bird flitting among trees. All of these—body, ka and soul—survived the appearance of death; they could escape mortality for a time in proportion as the flesh was preserved from decay; but if they came to Osiris clean of all sin they would be permitted to live forever in the “Happy Field of Food”—those heavenly gardens where there would always be abundance and security: judge the harassed penury that spoke in this consoling dream. These Elysian Fields, however, could be reached only through the services of a ferryman, an Egyptian prototype of Charon; and this old gentleman would receive into his boat only such men and women as had done no evil in their lives. Or Osiris would question the dead, weighing each candidate’s heart in the scale against a feather to test his truthfulness. Those who failed in this final examination would be condemned to lie forever in their tombs, hungering and thirsting, fed upon by hideous crocodiles, and never coming forth to see the sun.

According to the priests there were clever ways of passing these tests; and they offered to reveal these ways for a consideration. One was to fit up the tomb with food, drink and servants to nourish and help the dead. Another was to fill the tomb with talismans pleasing to the gods: fish, vultures, snakes, above all, the scarab—a beetle which, because it reproduced itself apparently with fertilization, typified the resurrected soul; if these were properly blessed by a priest they would frighten away every assailant, and annihilate every evil. A still better way was to buy the Book of the Dead,* scrolls for which the priests had written prayers, formulas and charms calculated to appease, even to deceive, Osiris. When, after a hundred vicissitudes and perils, the dead soul at last reached Osiris, it was to address the great Judge in some such manner as this:

O Thou who speedest Time’s advancing wing,

Thou dweller in all mysteries of life,

Thou guardian of every word I speak—

Behold, Thou art ashamed of me, thy son;

Thy heart is full of sorrow and of shame,

For that my sins were grievous in the world,

And proud my wickedness and my transgression.

Oh, be at peace with me, oh, be at peace,

And break the barriers that loom between us!

Let all my sins be washed away and fall

Forgotten to the right and left of thee!

Yea, do away with all my wickedness,

And put away the shame that fills thy heart,

That Thou and I henceforth may be at peace.²⁵¹

Or the soul was to declare its innocence of all major sins, in a “Negative Confession” that represents for us one of the earliest and noblest expressions of the moral sense in man:

Hail to Thee, Great God, Lord of Truth and Justice! I have come before Thee, my Master; I have been brought to see thy beauties. . . . I bring unto you Truth. . . . I have not committed iniquity against men. I have not oppressed the poor. . . . I have not laid labor upon any free man beyond that which he wrought for himself. . . . I have not defaulted, I have not committed that which is an abomination to the gods. I have not caused the slave to be ill-treated of his master. I have not starved any man, I have not made any to weep, I have not assassinated any man, . . . I have not committed treason against any. I have not in aught diminished the supplies of the temple; I have not spoiled the show-bread of the gods. . . . I have done no carnal act within the sacred enclosure of the temple. I have not blasphemed. . . . I have not falsified the balance. I have not taken away milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have . . . not taken with nets the birds of the gods . . . I am pure. I am pure. I am pure.²⁵²

For the most part, however, Egyptian religion had little to say about morality; the priests were busier selling charms, mumbling incantations, and performing magic rites than inculcating ethical precepts. Even the Book of the Dead teaches the faithful that charms blessed by the clergy will overcome all the obstacles that the deceased soul may encounter on its way to salvation; and the emphasis is rather on reciting the prayers than on living the good life. Says one roll: “If this can be known by the deceased he shall come forth by day”—i.e., rise to eternal life. Amulets and incantations were designed and sold to cover a multitude of sins and secure the entrance of the Devil himself into Paradise. At every step the pious Egyptian had to mutter strange formulas to avert evil and attract the good. Hear, for example, an anxious mother trying to drive out “demons” from her child:

Run out, thou who comest in darkness, who enterest in stealth. . . . Comest thou to kiss this child? I will not let thee kiss him. . . . Comest thou to take him away? I will not let thee take him away from me. I have made his protection against thee out of Efet-herb, which makes pain; out of onions, which harm thee; out of honey, which is sweet to the living and bitter to the dead; out of the evil parts of the Ebdu fish; out of the backbone of the perch.²⁵³

The gods themselves used magic and charms against one another. The literature of Egypt is full of magicians—of wizards who dry up lakes with a word, or cause severed limbs to jump back into place, or raise the dead.²⁵⁴ The king had magicians to help or guide him; and he himself was believed to have a magical power to make the rain fall, or the river rise.²⁵⁵ Life was full of talismans, spells, divinations; every door had to have a god to frighten away evil spirits or fortuitous strokes of bad luck. Children born on the twenty-third of the month of Thoth would surely die soon; those born on the twentieth of Choiakh would go blind.²⁵⁶ “Each day and month,” says Herodotus, “is assigned to some particular god; and according to the day on which each person is born, they determine what will befall him, how he will die, and what kind of person he will be.”²⁵⁷ In the end the connection between morality and religion tended to be forgotten; the road to eternal bliss led not through a good life, but through magic, ritual, and generosity to the priests. Let a great Egyptologist express the matter:

The dangers of the hereafter were now greatly multiplied, and for every critical situation the priest was able to furnish the dead with an effective charm which would infallibly cure him. Besides many charms which enabled the dead to reach the world of the hereafter, there were those which prevented him from losing his mouth, his head, his heart; others which enabled him to remember his name, to breathe, eat, drink, avoid eating his own foulness, to prevent his drinking-water from turning into flame, to turn darkness into light, to ward off all serpents and other hostile monsters, and many others. . . . Thus the earliest moral development which we can trace in the ancient East was suddenly arrested, or at least checked, by the detestable devices of a corrupt priesthood eager for gain.²⁵⁸

Such was the state of religion in Egypt when Ikhnaton, poet and heretic, came to the throne, and inaugurated the religious revolution that destroyed the Empire of Egypt.

IV. THE HERETIC KING

The character of Ikhnaton—The new religion—A hymn to the sun—Monotheism—The new dogma—The new art—Reaction—Nofretete—Break-up of the Empire—Death of Ikhnaton

In the year 1380 B.C. Amenhotep III, who had succeeded Thutmose III, died after a life of wordly luxury and display, and was followed by his son Amenhotep IV, destined to be known as Ikhnaton. A profoundly revealing portrait-bust of him, discovered at Tell-el-Amarna, shows a profile of incredible delicacy, a face feminine in softness and poetic in its sensitivity. Large eyelids like a dreamer’s, a long, misshapen skull, a frame slender and weak: here was a Shelley called to be a king.

He had hardly come to power when he began to revolt against the religion of Amon, and the practices of Amon’s priests. In the great temple at Karnak there was now a large harem, supposedly the concubines of Amon, but in reality serving to amuse the clergy.^258a The young emperor, whose private life was a model of fidelity, did not approve of this sacred harlotry; the blood of the ram slaughtered in sacrifice to Amon stank in his nostrils; and the traffic of the priests in magic and charms, and their use of the oracle of Amon to support religious obscurantism and political corruption²⁵⁹ disgusted him to the point of violent protest. “More evil are the words of the priests,” he said, “than those which I heard until the year IV” (of his reign); “more evil are they than those which King Amenhotep III heard.”²⁶⁰ His youthful spirit rebelled against the sordidness into which the religion of his people had fallen; he abominated the indecent wealth and lavish ritual of the temples, and the growing hold of a mercenary hierarchy on the nation’s life. With a poet’s audacity he threw compromise to the winds, and announced bravely that all these gods and ceremonies were a vulgar idolatry, that there was but one god—Aton.

Like Akbar in India thirty centuries later, Ikhnaton saw divinity above all in the sun, in the source of all earthly life and light. We cannot tell whether he had adopted his theory from Syria, and whether Aton was merely a form of Adonis. Of whatever origin, the new god filled the king’s soul with delight; he changed his own name from Amenhotep, which contained the name of Amon, to Ikhnaton, meaning “Aton is satisfied”; and helping himself with old hymns, and certain monotheistic poems published in the preceding reign,* he composed passionate songs to Aton, of which this, the longest and the best, is the fairest surviving remnant of Egyptian literature:

Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of the sky,

O living Aton, Beginning of life.

When thou risest in the eastern horizon,

Thou fillest every land with thy beauty.

Thou art beautiful, great, glittering, high above every land,

Thy rays, they encompass the land, even all that thou hast made.

Thou art Re, and thou carriest them all away captive;

Thou bindest them by thy love.

Though thou art far away, thy rays are upon earth;

Though thou art on high, thy footprints are the day.

When thou settest in the western horizon of the sky,

The earth is in darkness like the dead;

They sleep in their chambers,

Their heads are wrapped up,

Their nostrils are stopped,

And none seeth the other,

All their things are stolen

Which are under their heads,

And they know it not.

Every lion cometh forth from his den,

All serpents they sting. . . .

The world is in silence,

He that made them resteth in his horizon.

Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon.

When thou shinest as Aton by day

Thou drivest away the darkness.

When thou sendest forth thy rays,

The Two Lands are in daily festivity,

Awake and standing upon their feet

When thou hast raised them up.

Their limbs bathed, they take their clothing,

Their arms uplifted in adoration to thy dawning.

In all the world they do their work.

All cattle rest upon their pasturage,

The trees and the plants flourish,

The birds flutter in their marshes,

Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee.

All the sheep dance upon their feet,

All winged things fly,

They live when thou hast shone upon them.

The barks sail upstream and downstream.

Every highway is open because thou dawnest.

The fish in the river leap up before thee.

Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea.

Creator of the germ in woman,

Maker of seed in man,

Giving life to the son in the body of his mother,

Soothing him that he may not weep,

Nurse even in the womb,

Giver of breath to animate every one that he maketh!

When he cometh forth from the body . . . on the day of his birth,

Thou openest his mouth in speech,

Thou suppliest his necessities.

When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the egg,

Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive.

When thou hast brought him together

To the point of bursting the egg,

He cometh forth from the egg,

To chirp with all his might.

He goeth about upon his two feet

When he hath come forth therefrom.

How manifold are thy works!

They are hidden from before us,

O sole god, whose powers no other possesseth.

Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart

While thou wast alone:

Men, all cattle large and small,

All that are upon the earth,

That go about upon their feet;

All that are on high,

That fly with their wings.

The foreign countries, Syria and Kush,

The land of Egypt;

Thou settest every man into his place,

Thou suppliest their necessities. . . .

Thou makest the Nile in the nether world,

Thou bringest it as thou desirest,

To preserve alive the people. . . .

How excellent are thy designs,

O Lord of eternity!

There is a Nile in the sky for the strangers

And for the cattle of every country that go upon their feet. . . .

Thy rays nourish every garden;

When thou risest they live,

They grow by thee.

Thou makest the seasons

In order to create all thy work:

Winter to bring them coolness,

And heat that they may taste thee.

Thou didst make the distant sky to rise therein,

In order to behold all that thou hast made,

Thou alone, shining in the form as living Aton,

Dawning, glittering, going afar and returning.

Thou makest millions of forms

Through thyself alone;

Cities, towns and tribes,

Highways and rivers.

All eyes see thee before them,

For thou art Aton of the day over the earth. . .

Thou art in my heart,

There is no other that knoweth thee

Save thy son Ikhnaton.

Thou hast made him wise

In thy designs and in thy might.

The world is in thy hand,

Even as thou hast made them.

When thou hast risen they live,

When thou settest they die;

For thou art length of life of thyself,

Men live through thee,

While their eyes are upon thy beauty

Until thou settest.

All labor is put away

When thou settest in the west. . . .

Thou didst establish the world,

And raised them up for thy son. . . .

Ikhnaton, whose life is long;

And for the chief royal wife, his beloved,

Mistress of the Two Lands,

Nefer-nefru-aton, Nofretete,

Living and flourishing for ever and ever.²⁶³

This is not only one of the great poems of history, it is the first outstanding expression of monotheism—seven hundred years before Isaiah.* Perhaps, as Breasted²⁶⁵ suggests, this conception of one sole god was a reflex of the unification of the Mediterranean world under Egypt by Thutmose III. Ikhnaton conceives his god as belonging to all nations equally, and even names other countries before his own as in Aton’s care; this was an astounding advance upon the old tribal deities. Note the vitalistic conception: Aton is to be found not in battles and victories but in flowers and trees, in all forms of life and growth; Aton is the joy that causes the young sheep to “dance upon their legs,” and the birds to “flutter in their marshes.” Nor is the god a person limited to human form; the real divinity is the creative and nourishing heat of the sun; the flaming glory of the rising or setting orb is but an emblem of that ultimate power. Nevertheless, because of its omnipresent, fertilizing beneficence, the sun becomes to Ikhnaton also the “Lord of love,” the tender nurse that “creates the man-child in woman,” and “fills the Two Lands of Egypt with love.” So at last Aton grows by symbolism into a solicitous father, compassionate and tender; not, like Yahveh, a Lord of Hosts, but a god of gentleness and peace.²⁶⁶

It is one of the tragedies of history that Ikhnaton, having achieved his elevating vision of universal unity, was not satisfied to let the noble quality of his new religion slowly win the hearts of men. He was unable to think of his truth in relative terms; the thought came to him that other forms of belief and worship were indecent and intolerable. Suddenly he gave orders that the names of all gods but Aton should be erased and chiseled from every public inscription in Egypt; he mutilated his father’s name from a hundred monuments to cut from it the word Amon; he declared all creeds but his own illegal, and commanded that all the old temples should be closed. He abandoned Thebes as unclean, and built for himself a beautiful new capital at Akhetaton—“City of the Horizon of Aton.”

Rapidly Thebes decayed as the offices and emoluments of government were taken from it, and Akhetaton became a rich metropolis, busy with fresh building and a Renaissance of arts liberated from the priestly bondage of tradition. The joyous spirit expressed in the new religion passed over into its art. At Tell-el-Amarna, a modern village on the site of Akhetaton, Sir William Flinders Petrie unearthed a beautiful pavement, adorned with birds, fishes and other animals painted with the most delicate grace.²⁶⁷ Ikhnaton forbade the artists to make images of Aton, on the lofty ground that the true god has no form;²⁶⁸ for the rest he left art free, merely asking his favorite artists, Bek, Auta and Nutmose, to describe things as they saw them, and to forget the conventions of the priests. They took him at his word, and represented him as a youth of gentle, almost timid, face, and strangely dolichocephalic head. Taking their lead from his vitalistic conception of deity, they painted every form of plant and animal life with loving detail, and with a perfection hardly surpassed in any other place or time.²⁶⁹ For a while art, which in every generation knows the pangs of hunger and obscurity, flourished in abundance and happiness.

Had Ikhnaton been a mature mind he would have realized that the change which he had proposed from a superstitious polytheism deeply rooted in the needs and habits of the people to a naturalistic monotheism that subjected imagination to intelligence, was too profound to be effected in a little time; he would have made haste slowly, and softened the transition with intermediate steps. But he was a poet rather than a philosopher; like Shelley announcing the demise of Yahveh to the bishops of Oxford, he grasped for the Absolute, and brought the whole structure of Egypt down upon his head.

At one blow he had dispossessed and alienated a wealthy and powerful priesthood, and had forbidden the worship of deities made dear by long tradition and belief. When he had Amon hacked out from his father’s name it seemed to his people a blasphemous impiety; nothing could be more vital to them than the honoring of the ancestral dead. He had underestimated the strength and pertinacity of the priests, and he had exaggerated the capacity of the people to understand a natural religion. Behind the scenes the priests plotted and prepared; and in the seclusion of their homes the populace continued to worship their ancient and innumerable gods. A hundred crafts that had depended upon the temples muttered in secret against the heretic. Even in his palace his ministers and generals hated him, and prayed for his death, for was he not allowing the Empire to fall to pieces in his hands?

Meanwhile the young poet lived in simplicity and trust. He had seven daughters, but no son; and though by law he might have sought an heir by his secondary wives, he would not, but preferred to remain faithful to Nofretete. A little ornament has come down to us that shows him embracing the Queen; he allowed artists to depict him riding in a chariot through the streets, engaged in pleasantries with his wife and children; on ceremonial occasions the Queen sat beside him and held his hand, while their daughters frolicked at the foot of the throne. He spoke of his wife as “Mistress of his Happiness, at hearing whose voice the King rejoices”; and for an oath he used the phrase, “As my heart is happy in the Queen and her children.”²⁷⁰ It was a tender interlude in Egypt’s epic of power.

Into this simple happiness came alarming messages from Syria.* The dependencies of Egypt in the Near East were being invaded by Hittites and other neighboring tribes; the governors appointed by Egypt pleaded for immediate reinforcements. Ikhnaton hesitated; he was not quite sure that the right of conquest warranted him in keeping these states in subjection to Egypt; and he was loath to send Egyptians to die on distant fields for so uncertain a cause. When the dependencies saw that they were dealing with a saint, they deposed their Egyptian governors, quietly stopped all payment of tribute, and became to all effects free. Almost in a moment Egypt ceased to be a vast Empire, and shrank back into a little state. Soon the Egyptian treasury, which had for a century depended upon foreign tribute as its mainstay, was empty; domestic taxation had fallen to a minimum, and the working of the gold mines had stopped. Internal administration was in chaos. Ikhnaton found himself penniless and friendless in a world that had seemed all his own. Every colony was in revolt, and every power in Egypt was arrayed against him, waiting for his fall.