"Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum."
We require him to change his style with every change of subject, to copy the gesture, the accent, and even the faults of his model; to be Chinese in China, Greek in Greece, and Tuscan when he takes us to Siena or Florence. But we have indicated an ideal which is not often reached. Every one of us has his preferences and natural affinities, every artist his own methods and personal modes of thought. One will be conspicuous for his interpretation of the nobility and purity of the antique, another for his treatment of oriental art or of the elegance of our eighteenth century. But the mere enunciation of the principle is of value, for a great effect follows the praise which those who treat their model with scrupulous and intelligent respect are sure to obtain, and the blame to which they who are less conscientious expose themselves.
Fidelity in interpretation is, in fact, the honesty of the draughtsman; it may become, if carried to a great height, his honour, and even his glory. So far as we are concerned, we demand it from all those who are associated with us in this task; and, so far as existing methods will allow, we shall see that we obtain it. Unless our illustrations had that merit they would obscure the text instead of making it more comprehensible. Our readers would search in vain for the features and characteristics to which we might call their attention, and many of our remarks and theories would become difficult to understand. We should be in the same position as an incompetent barrister who has made a bad choice of witnesses; witnesses who, when in the box, prove either to know nothing or to know only facts which tell against the party who has called them.
Our aim in choosing our illustrations will be to place before our readers good reproductions of most of the objects which are discussed in our text. We shall, of course, be unable to figure everything that is of interest, but we can at least ensure that those figures which we give shall each be interesting in some particular or another. So far as possible, we shall select for illustration such objects as have not previously been reproduced, or have been ill reproduced, or have been figured in works which are difficult of access. We shall sometimes, of course, find it necessary to reproduce some famous statue or some building which is familiar to most people; but even then we shall endeavour to give renewed interest to their beauties by displaying them under some fresh aspect and by increased care in the delineation of their forms. Views in perspective, of which we shall make frequent use, give the general aspect of buildings with much greater truth and completeness than a mere plan, or a picturesque sketch of ruinous remains, or even than an elevation.
Most of the more important perspectives and restorations due to the learned pencil of M. Chipiez will be given in plates separate from the text, as well as the most curious or significant of the works in sculpture or painting to which we shall have to refer. Some of these plates will be coloured. But the majority of our illustrations will consist of engravings upon zinc and wood, which will not, we hope, fall short of their more elaborate companions in honesty and fidelity.
From the earliest Egyptian dynasties and from fabled Chaldæa to imperial Rome, from the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel to the Coliseum, from the Statue of Chephren and the bas-reliefs of Shalmaneser III, to the busts of the Cæsars, from the painted decorations of the tomb of Ti, and the enamelled bricks of Nineveh to the wall-paintings of Pompeii, we shall review in due succession all the forms which the great nations of antiquity made use of to express their beliefs, to give shape to their ideas, to satisfy their instincts for luxury and their taste for beauty, to lodge their gods and their kings, and to transmit their own likenesses to posterity.
We propose to trace and explain the origin of, and to describe, without æsthetic dissertations or excessive use of technical terms, those processes which imply the practice of art; the creation and descent of forms; the continual changes, sometimes slight and sometimes great, which they underwent in passing from one people to another, until, among the Greeks, they arrived at the most happy and complete perfection which the world has seen. We hope, too, by the judicious choice and careful execution of our figures, to give a fair idea of this course of development even to those artists who have neither time nor patience to follow our criticisms and descriptions.
I conceived the plan of this history, of which the first instalment is now submitted to the public, at the time when M. Wallon, who is secretary to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, entrusted me with the inauguration, at the Sorbonne, of the teaching of classic archæology. But before it could be realized two conditions had to be fulfilled. I had to find an associate in the work, a companion who would help me in the necessary labour and study, and I found him among my auditors in those first lectures at the Sorbonne. I had also to find a publisher who would understand the wants of the public and of the critics in such a matter. In this, too, I have succeeded, and I am free to undertake a work which is, I hope, destined to carry far beyond the narrow limits of a Parisian lecture room, the methods and principal results of a science, which, having made good its claims to the gratitude of mankind, is progressing with a step which becomes daily more assured. The task is an arduous one, and the continual discoveries which are reported from nearly every quarter of the ancient world, make it heavier every day. As for my colleague and myself, we have resigned ourselves in advance to seeing omissions and defects pointed out even by the most benevolent critics, but we are convinced that in spite of such imperfections as it may contain, our work will do good service, and will cause one of the aspects of ancient civilization to be better understood. This conviction will sustain us through the labours which, perhaps with some temerity, we have taken upon us. How far shall we be allowed to conduct our history? That we cannot tell, but we may venture to promise that it shall be the chief occupation and the dearest study of all that remains to us of life and strength.
We have been in some doubt as to whether we should append a special bibliography to each section of this work, but after mature reflection we have decided against it. We shall, of course, consider the art of each of the races of antiquity in less detail than if we had undertaken a monograph upon Egyptian, upon Assyrian, or upon Phœnician art; but yet it is our ambition to neglect no source of information which is likely to be really valuable. From many of the books and papers which we shall have to consult we may reproduce nothing but their titles, but we hope that no important work will escape us altogether, and in every case we shall give references which may be easily verified. Under these circumstances a formal list of works would be a mere repetition of our notes and would only have the effect of giving a useless bulk to our volumes.
Whenever our drawings have not been taken directly from the originals we have been careful to indicate the source from which we obtained them, and we have made a point of borrowing only from authors of undoubted authority. Those illustrations which bear neither an artist's name nor the title of a book have been engraved from photographs. As for the perspectives and restorations supplied by M. Chipiez, they are in every case founded upon the study and comparison of all accessible documents; but it would take too long to indicate in each of these drawings how much has been borrowed from special publications and how much has been founded upon photographic evidence. M. Chipiez has sometimes employed the ordinary perspective, sometimes that which is called axonometric perspective. The difference will be at once perceived.
Egyptologists may, perhaps, find mistakes in the hieroglyphs which occur in our illustrations. These hieroglyphs have been as a rule exactly transcribed, but we do not pretend to offer a collection of texts; we have only reproduced these characters on account of their decorative value, and because without them we could not have the general appearance of this or that monument. It will thus be seen that our object is not affected by a mistake or two in such matters.
We may here express our gratitude to all those who have interested themselves in our enterprise and who have helped us to make our work complete. Our dear and lamented Mariette had promised us his most earnest help. During the winter that we passed in Egypt, while he still enjoyed some remains of strength and voice, we obtained from his conversation and his letters some precious pieces of information. We have cited the works of M. Maspero on almost every page, and yet we have learnt more from his conversation than from his writings. Before his departure for Egypt—whither he went to succeed Mariette—M. Maspero was our perpetual counsellor and referee; whenever we were embarrassed we appealed to his well ordered, accurate, and unbiased knowledge. We are also deeply indebted to M. Pierret, the learned conservateur of the Louvre; not only has he done everything to facilitate the work of our draughtsmen in the great museum, he has also helped us frequently with his advice and his accumulated knowledge. M. Arthur Rhôné has lent us a plan of the temple of the Sphinx, and M. Ernest Desjardins a view of the interior of that building.
The artists who have visited Egypt have helped us as cordially as the learned men who have deciphered its inscriptions. M. Gerome opened his portfolios and allowed us to take three of those drawings, which express with such truthful precision the character of Egyptian landscape from them. M. Hector Leroux was as generous as M. Gerome, and if we have taken but one illustration from his sketch-books it is because the arrangements for this volume were complete before we had the chance of looking through them. M. Brune has allowed us to reproduce his plans of Karnak and Medinet-Abou.
We have had occasion, in the work itself, to express our acknowledgments to MM. J. Bourgoin, G. Bénédite, and Saint-Elme Gautier, who have drawn for us the principal monuments of the Boulak and Louvre Museums. For the architecture we must name M. A. Guérin, a pupil of M. Chipiez, who prepared the drawings under the direction of his master, and M. Tomaszkievicz, whose light and skilful point has so well engraved them. If the process of engraving upon zinc has given results which, as we hope, will satisfy our readers, much of the honour belongs to the untiring care of M. Comte, whose process has been employed; all these plates have been reviewed and retouched by him with minute care. The steel engravings are by MM. Ramus, Hibon, Guillaumot père and Sulpis. In order that the polychromatic decoration of the Egyptians should be rendered with truth and precision in its refined tones and complicated line, we begged M. Sulpis to make use of a process which had almost fallen into disuse from its difficulty and want of rapidity; we mean that which is called aquatint. Our plates II, XIII, and XIV will perhaps convince our readers that its results are superior to those of chromo-lithography, which is now so widely employed.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertaking to group the great nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper order, in attempting to assign to each its due share in the continuous and unremitting labour of progress until the birth of Christianity, we have no alternative but to commence with the country of the Pharaohs.
In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points of view. We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the religious conceptions which succeeded one another during that period, or we may give our attention rather to the literature, the arts and the sciences, to those inventions which in time have done so much to emancipate mankind from natural trammels and to make him master of his destiny. One writer will confine himself to a description of manners, and social and political institutions; another to the enumeration and explanation of the various changes brought on by internal revolutions, by wars and conquests; to what Bossuet calls "la suite des empires." Finally, he who has the highest ambition of all will attempt to unite all these various features into a single picture, so as to show, as a whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward movements of its genius in the continual search for "the best." But in any case the commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has preserved the earliest attempts of man towards outward expression; it is in Egypt that those monuments exist which contain the first permanent manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic[36] forms; and it is in Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the earliest materials for study.
But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious conditions under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented so many imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the circumstances and the race characteristics under which this early civilization was developed.
The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus; he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."[37] The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent; the soil was raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by the slow accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his support...."[38]
Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion, involving wide-spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and rapidity.
Fig. 1.—During the Inundation of the Nile.
Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth.
Fig. 2. —Hoeing; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 381 bis. [40]
Fig. 3.—Ploughing; from the Necropolis of Memphis.
(Description de l'Égypte, ant. V., pl. 17.)
Thus the first tribes established themselves in the country under singularly favourable conditions; thanks to the timely help of the river they found themselves assured of an easy existence.[41] We know how often the lives of those tribes who live by fishing and the chase are oppressed by care; there are some days when game is not to be found, and they die of hunger. Those who live a pastoral life are also exposed to cruel hardships from the destruction of their flocks and herds by those epidemics against which even modern science sometimes struggles in vain. As for agricultural populations, they are everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather; seasons which are either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in those distant times local famines were far more fatal than in these days, when facility of transport and elaborate commercial connections ensure that where the demand is, thither the supply will be taken. In Egypt the success of the crops varied with the height of the Nile, but they never failed altogether. In bad years the peasant may have had the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he always had a few onions or a few ears of maize to preserve him from starvation.[42]
Fig. 4.—Harvest scene; from a tomb at Gizeh. (Champollion, pl. 417.)
The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security for life. Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers, that condition was created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere. In the valley of the Nile man found himself able, for the first time, to calculate upon the forces of nature and to turn them to his certain profit. It is easy then to understand that Egypt saw the birth of the most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose to study.
Fig. 5.—The Bastinado; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 390.)
Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the country. The tribes who settled there in centuries so remote that they are beyond tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden as it were in a narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by deserts, partly by an impassable sea. It would perhaps be well to give some idea of the natural features of their country before commencing our study of their art. The terms, Lower-, Middle-, and Upper-Egypt, the Delta, and Ethiopia will continually recur in these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities; it is important therefore that our readers should know exactly what is meant by each of these time-honoured designations; it is necessary that they should at least be able to find upon the map those cities which by their respective periods of supremacy represent the successive epochs of Egyptian history.
"Egypt is that country which, stretching from north to south, occupies the north-east angle of Africa, or Libya as the ancients called it. It is joined to Asia by the isthmus of Suez. It is bounded on the east by that isthmus and the Red Sea; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia of the Greeks, which is traversed by the Nile before its entrance into Egypt at the cataracts of Syene; on the west by the desert sprinkled here and there with a few oases, and on the north by the Mediterranean. The desert stretches as far north on the west of the country as the Red Sea does on the east.
"It penetrates moreover far into the interior of Egypt itself. Strictly speaking Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of Africa over which the waters of the Nile flow during the inundation, to which may be added those districts to which the water is carried by irrigation. All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass. No water is to be found there beyond a few wells, all more or less exposed to exhaustion in an ever-parching atmosphere. In Upper Egypt rain is an extremely rare phenomenon. Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the actual valley of the Nile. Up to the point where the river divides into several arms, that is to say for more than three-quarters of the whole length of Egypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of more than four or five leagues. In a few districts it is even narrower than this. For almost its whole length it is shut in between two mountain chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan chain. These mountains, especially towards the south, sometimes close in and form defiles. On the other hand, in Middle Egypt the Libyan chain falls back and becomes lower, allowing the passage of the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the Greek writers called Lake Mœris exist. Egypt, which was little more than a glen higher up, here widens out to a more imposing size. A little below Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that of Damietta, to the north and north-east.... The ancients knew five others which, since their time, have either been obliterated or at least have become non-navigable.... All these branches took their names from towns situated near their mouths. A large number of less important watercourses threaded their way through Lower Egypt; but as the earth there is marshy, their channels have shifted greatly from age to age and still go on changing. The Nile forms several lagunes near the sea, shut in by long tongues of earth and sand, and communicating with the Mediterranean by openings here and there. The space comprised between the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek delta (Δ)."[43]
At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the sandy plateau which is now crowned by the Great Pyramid; the Nile flowed into the sea at that time slightly to the north of the site upon which Memphis was afterwards built. With the slow passage of time the particles of earth which it brought down from the mountains of Abyssinia were deposited as mud banks upon the coast, and gradually filling up the gulf, created instead wide marshy plains intersected by lakes. Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the successive watercourses. The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already, at the earliest historic period, carried the mouths of the Nile far beyond the normal line of the neighbouring coasts. The Egyptian priests—whose words have been preserved for us by Herodotus—had a true idea as to how this vast plain had been created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand square kilometres and is continually being added to; but they were strangely deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Ména, the first of all kings, found almost all Egypt under the waters. The sea, they said, penetrated in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass.[44] The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it may have shown pretty much its present form when the Egyptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile.[45]
As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a question so purely ethnographical. It is now generally allowed that they were connected with the white races of Europe and Western Asia; the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion. If we take away individual peculiarities these monuments furnish us with the following common type of the race even in the most remote epochs:—
"The average Egyptian was tall, thin, active. He had large and powerful shoulders,[46] a muscular chest, sinewy arms terminating in long and nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin muscular legs. His knees and calves were nervous and muscular, as is generally the case with a pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit of going barefoot. The head, often too large and powerful for the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression. His forehead was square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an habitually soft and sorrowful expression. These features are to be found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in all the later epochs. Even to the present day the peasants, or fellahs, have almost everywhere preserved the physiognomy of their ancestors, although the upper classes have lost it by repeated intermarriage with strangers."[47]
When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Memphis the famous wooden statue of a man standing and holding in his hand the baton of authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature and attitude of one of themselves, of the rustic dignitary who managed the corvées and apportioned the taxation. An astonished fellah cried out: "The Sheikh-el-Beled!" His companions took up the cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since.[48]
Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors. By many of its roots, by its system of pronouns, by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state. From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common.
There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phœnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races.
Fig. 6.—Statue from the Ancient Empire
in calcareous stone.
(Boulak.[49]) Drawn by G. Bénédite.
This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM. Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by M. Maspero.[50] But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor explain. M. Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he would refer most of the idioms of Northern Africa.[51] A comparison of the languages is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin.
Fig. 7.—The Sheikh-el-Beled. (Boulak.) Drawn by J. Bourgoin.
The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by the Isthmus of Suez. Perhaps they found established on the banks of the Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African continent.[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards without mixing with them, and set themselves resolutely to the work of improvement. Egypt must then have presented a very different sight from its richness and fertility of to-day. The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; in other districts it remained so long that it changed the soil into swamp. The Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of the Mediterranean, was simply a huge morass dotted here and there with sandy islands and waving with papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way; upon both banks the desert swallowed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly inundations. From the crowding vegetation of a tropical marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step. Little by little the new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to carry them to the farthest corners of the valley, and Egypt gradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best adapted countries in the world for the development of a great civilization.[53]
How many generations did it require to create the country and the nation? We cannot tell. But we may affirm that a commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of small independent states, each of which had its own laws and its own form of worship. These districts remained almost unchanged in number and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world. Their union under one sceptre formed the kingdom of the Pharaohs, the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not therefore disappear; the small independent states became provinces and were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called nomes.
Fig. 8.—Hunting in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in the tomb of Ti.
Besides this division into districts, the Egyptians had one other, and only one—the division into Lower Egypt, or the North Country (Tomera, or To-meh), and into Upper Egypt, or the South Country (To-res). Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract. This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the memory of a period before the time of Menes, during which Egypt was divided into two separate kingdoms—that of the North and that of the South, a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the course of events. This state of things was of sufficiently long duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt, and upon that which we may call its blazonry, or heraldic imagery. The sovereigns who united the whole territory under one sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Lower Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdom. That of Upper Egypt is known to egyptologists as the White crown, because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason. Combined with one another they form the complete regal head-dress ordinarily called the pschent. In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the papyrus; Southern by the lotus.
Fig. 9.—Shadouf; machine for irrigating the land above the level of the canals.
During the Ptolemaic epoch a new administrative division into Upper, Middle, and Lower Egypt was established. The Middle Egypt of the Greek geographers began at the southern point of the Delta, and extended to a little south of Hermopolis. Although this latter division was not established until after the centuries which saw the birth of those monuments with which we shall have to deal, we shall make frequent use of it, as it will facilitate and render more definite our topographical explanations. For the contemporaries of the Pharaohs both Memphis and Thebes belong to Upper Egypt, and if we adopted their method of speech we should be under the continual necessity of stopping the narration to define geographical positions; but with the tri-partite division we may speak of Beni-Hassan as in Middle, and Abydos as in Upper Egypt, and thus give a sufficient idea of their relative positions.
Fig. 10.—The White Crown. Fig. 11.—The Red Crown. Fig. 12.—The Pschent.
In enumerating and analysing the remains of Egyptian art, we shall classify them chronologically as well as locally. The monuments of the plastic arts will be arranged into groups determined by the periods of their occurrence, as well as by their geographical distribution. We must refer our readers to the works of M. Maspero and others for the lists of kings and dynasties, and for the chief events of each reign, but it will be convenient for us to give here a summary of the principal epochs in Egyptian history. Each of those epochs corresponds to an artistic period with a special character and individuality of its own. The following paragraphs taken from the history of M. Maspero give all the necessary information in a brief form.
"In the last years of the prehistoric period, the sacerdotal class had obtained a supremacy over the other classes of the nation. A man called Menes (Menha or Ména in the Egyptian texts) destroyed this supremacy and founded the Egyptian monarchy.
"This monarchy existed for at least four thousand years, under thirty consecutive dynasties, from the reign of Menes to that of Nectanebo (340 years before our era). This interval of time, the longest of which political history takes note, is usually divided into three parts: the Ancient Empire, from the first to the eleventh dynasty; the Middle Empire, from the eleventh dynasty to the invasion of the Hyksos or Shepherds; the New Empire from the shepherd kings to the Persian conquest. This division is inconvenient in one respect; it takes too little account of the sequence of historical events.
"There were indeed, three great revolutions in the historical development of Egypt. At the beginning of its long succession of human dynasties (the Egyptians, like other peoples, placed a number of dynasties of divine rulers before their first human king) the political centre of the country was at Memphis; Memphis was the capital and the burying-place of the kings; Memphis imposed sovereigns upon the rest of the country and was the chief market for Egyptian commerce and industry. With the commencement of the sixth dynasty, the centre of gravity began to shift southwards. During the ninth and tenth dynasties it rested at Heracleopolis, in Middle Egypt, and in the time of the eleventh dynasty, it fixed itself at Thebes. From that period onwards Thebes was the capital of the country and furnished the sovereign. From the eleventh to the twenty-first all the Egyptian dynasties were Theban with the single exception of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty. At the time of the shepherd invasion, the Thebaïd became the citadel of Egyptian nationality, and its princes, after centuries of war against the intruders, finally succeeded in freeing the whole valley of the Nile for the benefit of the eighteenth dynasty, which opened the era of great foreign wars.
"Under the nineteenth dynasty an inverse movement to that of the first period carried the political centre of the country back towards the north. With the twenty-first Tanite dynasty, Thebes ceased to be the capital, and the cities of the Delta, Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all Sais, rose into equal or superior importance. From that time the political life of the country concentrated itself in the maritime districts. The nomes of the Thebaïd, ruined by the Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence; and Thebes itself fell into ruin and became nothing more than a rendezvous for curious travellers.
"I propose, therefore, to divide Egyptian history into three periods, each corresponding to the political supremacy of one town or province over the whole of Egypt:—
"First Period, Memphite (the first ten dynasties). The supremacy of Memphis and of the sovereigns furnished by her.
"Second Period, Theban (from the eleventh to the twentieth dynasties inclusive). Supremacy of Thebes and the Theban kings. This period is divided into two sub-periods by the Shepherd dynasties.
"a. The old Theban empire, from the eleventh to the sixteenth dynasties.
"b. The new Theban empire, from the sixteenth to the twentieth dynasties.
"Third Period, Sait (from the twenty-first to the thirtieth dynasties, inclusive). Supremacy of Sais and the other cities of the Delta. This period is divided into two by the Persian invasion:—
"First Sait period, from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth dynasties.
"Second Sait period, from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth dynasties."[54]
Mariette places the accession of Ména or Menes at about the fiftieth century before our era, while Bunsen and other Egyptologists bring forward his date to 3,600 or 3,500 B.C. as they believe some of the dynasties of Manetho to have been contemporary with each other. Neither Mariette nor Maspero deny that Egypt, in the course of its long existence, was often partitioned between princes who reigned in Upper and Lower Egypt respectively; but, guided by circumstances which need not be described here, they incline to believe that Manetho confined himself to enumerating those dynasties which were looked upon as the legitimate ones. The work of elimination which has been attempted by certain modern savants, must have been undertaken, to a certain extent, in Egypt itself; and some of the collateral dynasties must have been effaced and passed over in silence, because the monuments still remaining preserve the names of reigning families which are ignored by history.
Whatever may be thought of this initial date, Egypt remains, as has been so well said by M. Renan, "a lighthouse in the profound darkness of remote antiquity." Its period of greatest power was long anterior to the earliest traditions of the Greek race; the reign of Thothmes III., who, according to a contemporary expression, "drew his frontiers where he pleased," is placed by common consent in the seventeenth century, B.C. The Egyptian empire then comprised Abyssinia, the Soudan, Nubia, Syria, Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, Khurdistan, and Armenia. Founded by the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, this greatness was maintained by those of the nineteenth. To this dynasty belonged Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, who flourished in the fifteenth century. It was the superiority of its civilization, even more than the valour of its princes and soldiers, which made Egypt supreme over Western Asia.
This supremacy declined during the twenty-first and twenty-second dynasties, but, at the same time, Egyptian chronology becomes more certain as opportunities of comparison with the facts of Hebrew history increase. The date of 980, within a year or two, may be given with confidence as that of the accession of Sheshonk I., the contemporary of Solomon and Rehoboam. From that date onwards, the constant struggles between Egypt and its neighbours, especially with Assyria, multiply our opportunities for synchronic comparison. In the seventh century the country was opened to the Greeks, the real creators of history, who brought with them their inquiring spirit and their love for exactitude. After the accession of Psemethek I., the founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in 656, our historical materials are abundant. For that we must thank the Greek travellers who penetrated everywhere, taking notes which they afterwards amplified into narratives. It is a singular thing, that even as late as the Ptolemies, when the power of the Macedonian monarchy was fully developed, the Egyptians never seem to have felt the want of what we call an era, of some definite point from which they could measure the course of time and the progress of the centuries. "They were satisfied with calculating by the years of the reigning sovereign, and even those calculations had no certain point of departure. Sometimes they counted from the commencement of the year which had witnessed the death of his predecessor, sometimes from the day of his own coronation. The most careful calculations will therefore fail to enable modern science to restore to the Egyptians that which, in fact, they never possessed."[55]
Even thus summarily stated, these historical indications are enough to show how little foundation there is for the opinion which was held by the ancient Greeks, and too long accepted by modern historians. It was, they said, from Ethiopia that Egyptian civilization had come. A colony of Ethiopian priests from the island of Meroè in Upper Nubia, had introduced their religion, their written characters, their art and their civil institutions into the country. The exact opposite of this is the truth. "It was the Egyptians who advanced up the banks of the Nile to found cities, fortresses, and temples in Ethiopia; it was the Egyptians who carried their civilization into the midst of savage negro tribes. The error was caused by the fact that at one epoch in the history of Egypt the Ethiopians played an important part.
"If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia, we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the remains comparatively modern; but, strangely enough, the study of all these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They show ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the degeneracy only of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally mediocre."[56]
We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered formula; we may say that as we mount towards the springs of the Nile, we descend the current of time. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and Meroè than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa, from the south to the north; but the stream of civilization flowed in the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling into the sea; in that district near the modern capital, over which stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids.
During the long sequence of centuries which we have divided into three great periods, the national centre of gravity was more than once displaced. The capital was at one time in Middle Egypt, at another in Upper, and at a third period in Lower Egypt, in accordance with its political necessities. At one period the nation had nothing to fear from external enemies, at others it had to turn a bold front to Asia or Ethiopia. At various times Egypt had to submit to her foreign foes; to the shepherd invaders, to the kings of Assyria and Persia, to the princes of Ethiopia, and finally to Alexander, to whom she lost her independence never again to recover it. And yet it appears that the character and social condition of the race never underwent any great change. At the time of the pyramid-builders, Egypt was the most absolute monarchy that ever existed, and so she remained till her final conquest.
"Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the valley of the Nile, the king was the living manifestation and incarnation of God: child of the sun (Se Râ), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the gods flowed in his veins and assured to him the sovereign power."[57] He was the priest above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt, required no doubt a large sacerdotal class, each member of which had his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in which he took part; but the king alone, at least in the principal temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the divinity was kept; he alone saw the god face to face, and spoke to him in the name of his people.[58] The pre-eminent dignity of this priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of scribes and various functionaries, whose titles may still be read upon the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military officers; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by the gods with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Râ among the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became gods, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series of gods to whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he had anything to ask; hence the monuments upon which we find living Pharaohs offering worship to their predecessors.[59]