The respective fortunes of the monuments of Upper Egypt and of the Delta have been very different.

In the Delta there was a large number of populous and wealthy cities. Five of them—Tanis, Bubastis, Sais, Mendes, and Sebennytus—were of sufficient importance to have given rise to dynasties; and, therefore, each had, in turn, become the capital. So many great cities were probably never before arrayed on so small an area. The duster of flourishing commercial and manufacturing towns in the Low Countries, offers the nearest approach to it in modern times. These, however, were supported primarily by manufactures and trade, while those of the Delta were supported primarily by agriculture. The base of the Delta along the air line, from Canopus to Pelusium, was not 140 miles, while its two sides, from its apex to those cities, were only about 100 miles in length.

Every one of these numerous cities of the Delta had its grand temple—some more than one. Many were, even for Egypt, of unusual extent and massiveness. They were generally built of the finest granite. At Tanis there was a temple of this kind. It had been erected by the great Rameses. In one respect, at all events, more had been done for it than for any other temple in Egypt, for it was enriched by at least ten obelisks. In its construction granite had been largely used. As Rameses built with sandstone at Karnak, Luxor, and Thebes, which were different quarters of his great capital, and where he must have wished to make the chief display of his magnificence, why was he not content with it in the Delta? We here find him using a far more costly material, and one which he had to fetch from a greater distance than the sandstone quarries of Silsiléh. The only imaginable reason is, that he desired to build for eternity, and that he was afraid that the sandstone he was employing in Upper Egypt might, in a long series of years, feel the effects of the damp in the Delta, at all events to such an extent as that the sculptures might suffer. The sandstone is remarkably hard and compact, and he was satisfied with it in the dry climate of Upper Egypt; but he had misgivings as to its power of resistance to the climate of Lower Egypt; and therefore, that he might not incur any avoidable risk, he went, in the Delta, to the additional expense of employing granite from Assouan.

And now a word or two about the city itself. This Tanis had from very early days, as we now know, been conspicuously connected with the history of Egypt. The importance of the place had been recognized in the days of the old primæval Monarchy, for we find in it traces of Sesortesen III., a mighty Pharaoh of the XIIth Dynasty, and whose name is found at the other extremity of the land on the Theban temples. Its position it was that gave it this importance, for it was on the flank of all invaders from the North or East; and, too, on the very spot where there were more facilities for establishing a stronghold than anywhere else in Egypt. Being on the Tanitic branch of the Nile, and not far from its mouth, it could receive supplies and reinforcements both by the river, and by sea; and being behind the Pelusiac branch, it could make that its first line of defence against an enemy coming across the desert, who as he would be without boats, and would find no materials for constructing them in such a district, would have but a very slight chance of effecting the passage of the river. As the city was also placed in the low district which now forms Lake Menzaléh, it, doubtless, was in the power of its defenders at any time to lay the surrounding country under water. The forces collected in this strong position, would, if themselves strong enough, be able to attack an invader, while yet in the desert; or, if this were thought more advisable, to fall either on his flank or rear, as he advanced along the Pelusiac branch.

In the Hebrew Scriptures the place is called ‘the Field of Zoan.’ Sân is its present name, and Zoan is probably a nearer approach to the old Egyptian form than the Greek Tanis. The expression of ‘the Field of Zoan’ was, of course, meant to be descriptive of the character of the surrounding country. There would have been nothing appropriate in speaking of the Field of Memphis, or of Thebes. It indicated that the district had been originally, as it is again at the present day, composed of pools and marshes, just what our fens once were, but that by a system of dykes and drains it had been reclaimed. And so, just as we might talk of the Fen of Boston, they talked of the Field, we should say the Fen, of Zoan.

Such having been the character and position of Tanis, it does not surprise us that it was made the royal residence, and in some respect, the capital, in the time of the Hyksos. Not only was it the nearest point to their old home, from which they might at times be glad to receive some assistance, but as it commanded the road into Egypt they had themselves so successfully traversed, they would naturally wish by strengthening the defences of the place, and residing there themselves, to use it as a bar against any who might make a similar attempt. More traces of these conquerors are found here than anywhere else in the land. And it is very interesting to see in these traces that they adopted, just as we might have expected, the religion of Egypt; and yet that they did not, in so doing, abandon that of their old home. For there is evidence that they placed by the side of the temples of the gods of Egypt, temples to Set or Soutekh, the Egyptian name of the Assyrian Baal. This was the obvious compromise of the opposing difficulties that beset them in this matter. They could not abandon their own morality; and, on the other hand, the conquerors and the conquered could never become one people as long as their moral ideas and sentiments were different. Of course the Gods, and the services of religion, were the external embodiment and representation of these ideas and sentiments.

On the expulsion of the Hyksos we find the history of the Great Pharaohs of the XIXth Dynasty closely connected with Tanis. Its magnificent temple, as we have already mentioned, was built by Rameses the Great. Meneptha, his son, was holding his court here at the time of the Exodus; and it must have been with the militia of the neighbourhood, where a considerable force of the military caste was settled, that he pursued the fugitive Israelites. We are, therefore, prepared to find that at last it became the actual recognized capital of Egypt. This was brought about under the XXIst Dynasty. It had come to be seen that under existing circumstances Thebes was no longer the best position from which the country could be guarded and governed. It was now the opposite extremity of the country that needed all the vigilance that could be exercised, and where should be placed the head quarters of the military power of the Empire.

We now come to Bubastis. The great temple of this famous city, of which Herodotus gives a minute account, and which appeared to him more finished and beautiful than any other structure in Egypt, was nearly a furlong in length, and of the same width. It was built throughout of granite. Its sculptures also bear the name of the great Rameses. It was placed on a peninsula, formed in an artificial lake in the middle of the city. The isthmus leading to the sacred enclosure was a strip of land between two parallel canals from the Nile. Each of them was 100 feet wide. They fed the lake which completely surrounded the temple, with the exception of the isthmic entrance. The width of the lake was 1,400 feet. Along the sides of the isthmus were rows of lofty evergreen trees. As the ground on which the city stood had been raised by the earth excavated from the bed of the lake, and by other accumulations, to a considerable height above the temple enclosure, the spectator looked down on the temple of red granite, the green trees, and the water from all sides. We can understand Herodotus’s preference for this temple. Most of the particulars of his description and measurements can still be traced out. Of the temple itself, however, only a few scattered stones remain, but these are sufficient to show of what materials, and by whom, it was built.

It was to Bubastis that the XXIInd Dynasty transferred the seat of Government. Almost all the names of this Dynasty are Assyrian. The strange apparition of these names is accounted for by the probable supposition that its founder was a military adventurer, who, while stationed in this city, had become connected by marriage with the Royal Family. This semi-foreign House occupied the throne for a little more than a century and a half, when Tanis again became the capital under the XXIIIrd Dynasty.

The temple of Sais could not have been inferior, in extent, or in costliness, to those either of Tanis, or of Bubastis. It was built partly of limestone and partly of granite. Here were buried all the kings of the Saite Dynasty. Herodotus dwells upon its magnificence. Its propylæa exceeded all others in dimensions. It, too, had its lake, on which were celebrated the mysteries of the sufferings of the martyred Osiris. Like the temple of Tanis, it had its obelisks, and, besides, several colossi and androsphinxes. The margin of its sacred lake was cased with stone; but its chief ornament was a shrine composed of a single block of granite, in the transport of which, from Elephantiné to Sais, two thousand boatmen had been employed for three years. This shrine was 31 feet long, 22 broad, and 12 high. The lake, but without the stone casing of its margin, and the site of the temple remain, but every other trace of all this magnificence has almost entirely disappeared.

The last Capital of Egypt, in which the wealth, culture, and glory of the old Pharaohnic Empire were completely revived, and exhibited to the world, was Sais. This revival took place under the XXVIth Dynasty; and, fortunately for us, was witnessed and described by the Greeks. Absolutely, and in itself, the country, probably, was then quite as great in all the elements of power as it ever had been in the palmiest days of the famous times of old; but, relatively, the sceptre had departed from Egypt. The arts which minister to and maintain civilization, and endow it with the ability to organize, wield, and support large armies, had travelled to the banks of the Euphrates, and from thence were spreading over the highlands of Media and Persia. By a law of nature civilization first germinated, and bore its precious fruit, in the teeming South, but by a right of nature Empire belongs to the enduring and thoughtful North. History contains the oft-repeated narrative of the fashion in which those, who have successively received the gift, have successively repaid it by subjugating the donors. The Assyrians had already, taking advantage of the disturbed state of the country during the XXVth Dynasty, looted all the great cities of Egypt, from Migdol to Syené. But where prosperity does not depend on the use and profits of accumulated capital, but on the annual bounty of Nature, recovery is very rapid. And to this bounty, which was larger and more varied in Egypt than anywhere else in the world, by reason of its winter as well as summer harvest, there had now been superadded the unbought gains resulting from her having been allowed to become what nature had intended her to be, that is, the centre for the interchange of the commodities of Asia, including India, of Africa, and of Europe.

Sais was placed on the Canopic, the most westerly branch of the river, at a distance of about forty miles from the sea; between which and it was Naucratis, where the Greeks had been allowed to establish a factory and emporium. In the city also of Sais itself a quarter was assigned to them, where they were governed by their own laws, administered by magistrates selected from among their own body. As Psammetichus, the founder of the Saite Dynasty, had been raised to the throne, and was maintained upon it, mainly by the aid of Greek mercenaries, we can hardly suppose that this contiguity of the city he made his Capital to the source from which so much of his support was derived, was accidental. It was in accordance with his policy towards the Greeks that he granted a Factory to every other nation which was desirous of maintaining one, giving to all equal liberty to trade in the land. From the same motive he had his children taught Greek.

Facts of this kind imply the complete reversal of the old national policy of seclusion. The Government, and it must have been seconded by the general approval of the people, saw that seclusion could no longer be maintained, while at the same time the opposite system was offering to the country very great advantages; and so, just as is the case at the present day with the Japanese, the requirements of the new conditions were speedily and unreservedly accepted. The military caste, however, whose susceptibility was offended at the employment of, and still more at the preference which was shown to, a large body of Greek mercenaries, was an exception to the general acquiescence. To the number of 240,000 they seceded from Egypt; and, having been well received in the now rival country of Ethiopia, were settled in a fertile tract of land which was bestowed upon them in the neighbourhood of Meroé.

Necho, the son and successor of Psammetichus, was desirous of pushing the new commercial policy of his Father to its utmost limits. With this view, he undertook to adapt for navigation, and to prolong to the head of the Arabian Gulf, an old canal, that had for many centuries connected Bubastis with Lake Timsah, in order that every impediment to the traffic of the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean might be removed. He had carried this great work as far as the Bitter Lakes, when, from some military, or perhaps for an agricultural, reason, he abandoned the work, after having expended upon it the lives of 120,000 of the Fellahs of those times. Herodotus saw the Docks which, as a part of this plan, he had constructed on the Red Sea.

The only incident in the History of Geographical Discovery which can be set by the side of the great achievement of Columbus, is this Necho’s circumnavigation of Africa. These two enterprises resemble each other not only in hardihood, grandeur, and success, but also in being equally instances of the happy way in which the scientific, and even the semi-scientific, imagination at times divines the truth, or the real nature of things. The truth, indeed, appears to possess not only some power of suggesting itself, but also of compelling the mind, to which it has suggested itself, to undertake the demonstration of its being the truth.

It would be unfair to the Father of History to make mention of this famous undertaking in any words but his. “Libya itself,” he says, “enables us to ascertain that it is everywhere surrounded by water, except so far as it is conterminous with Asia. The Egyptian King, Necho, was the first we know of who demonstrated this. He did it in this wise: when he had abandoned the attempt to dig the Canal from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, he despatched a squadron manned by Phœnicians, with instructions to sail on till they got back into the Northern (Mediterranean) Sea, through the Pillars of Hercules; and in this way to return to Egypt. These Phœnicians, then, having set sail from the Erythrœan (Red) Sea, entered on the navigation of the Southern Sea (the Indian Ocean). When the autumn came, they would draw up their vessels on the beach, and sow what land was required, wherever they might happen to be at that point of the voyage. They would then wait for the harvest, and when they had got it in, would again set sail. In this way two years were spent; and, in the third year, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules, they returned to Egypt. They said what I cannot believe, though some, perhaps, may, that while they were sailing round Libya, they had the sun on their right hand. So was first acquired a knowledge of the contour of Libya.”

Necho also pursued the policy of his Father in attempting to recover for the Double Crown of the then reunited Upper and Lower Egypt, the Asiatic dependencies, of which the Assyrians had despoiled it. For nine and twenty years had Psammetichus been barred in the first step of this enterprise by the obstinate resistance of Ashdod, which had thus sustained, as Herodotus observes, the longest siege then known to History. At last, however, it had succumbed; and being now, again, in the hands of the Egyptians, the old line of march into, and through, Syria was open, and Necho set out for the re-conquest of the old provinces. He could not deem that his Egypt was the Egypt of Tuthmosis and Rameses, unless what they had held along the maritime plain of Syria, and back to Carchemish on the Euphrates, and which had been—more or less completely—in subjection to Egypt during the intervening nine centuries, with the exception of the short period of Assyrian supremacy, had been recovered. As might have been expected, he could not see that, though Nineveh had fallen, its power had only been transferred to Babylon; and that behind Babylon was being organized the Empire of the still more energetic Persians, which was soon to overshadow all that part of the world. It was, in truth, only wasting his resources to retake Carchemish: he should have attacked Babylon itself. Nothing was gained if its power was not destroyed. But, however, as he advanced along the maritime plain, with which the Egyptians had been familiar from time out of mind, Josiah, we know, attempted to stop him at Megiddo, where he was defeated and slain.

The Hebrew Prophets of these times saw as clearly, as we do now, that the course of events had transferred the constituents of power from the Nile to the Euphrates; and so they became the uncompromising instigators of this anti-Egyptian policy. Of course it would have been wise in Josiah to have remained quiet: his best policy would have been that of “masterly inactivity.” Necho, however, as it happened, having easily crushed him, did not allow himself to be diverted from his main object by the tempting facility thus offered to him for at once taking possession of the Kingdom of Judah, but continued, as rapidly as he could, his advance to the Euphrates. Having reached Carchemish, and provided sufficiently, as he thought, for the permanent re-occupation of all that had thereabouts “pertained to Egypt,” he returned home; and, by the way, settled, without any resistance having been offered to him, the conditions of the subjection of the Kingdom of Judah.

At this juncture Egypt must have deemed that all was recovered, and that everything was again, and would continue to be, as of old. Isaiah, however, and Jeremiah, and the other Prophets of the time were right; for the Babylonians were not long in expelling the Egyptians from Asia.

Necho was succeeded by his son Psammis; and he by the Apries of Herodotus, the Pharaoh Hophra of the Hebrew Scriptures. Egypt is still very rich and prosperous, and so he makes another attempt for the recovery of the dominion of Western Asia. In this effort he attacked Phœnicia both by sea and land. Still no change, or vacillation, is perceptible in the utterances of the Hebrew Prophets. They at all events are not misled, or dazzled, by the riches and greatness of Egypt. Ezekiel sees, just as Isaiah and Jeremiah had seen, that the valley of the Nile can no longer be the seat of Empire; and that the capacity for acquiring it had passed into the hands of their North-Eastern neighbours.

In the reign of Amasis, the successor of Apries, “Egypt,” as Herodotus tells us, “reached the very acmé of its prosperity. Never before had the river been more bountiful to the land, or the land to those who dwelt in it. It contained 20,000 inhabited cities.” Such was the Egypt Amasis marshalled against this invading host of Persia. But to no purpose: the single and signal defeat his son sustained at Pelusium, the very threshold of the land, gave to Cambyses the whole country. From that day to this Power has continued the Northward course it had then commenced; and, consequently, there has been no resurrection for the first-born of civilization, the inventress of Letters, and of Political Organization, and of so many of the arts that better man’s Estate, and embellish life. This, to some extent, hides from our view the fact that we are, greatly, what we are at this day, because Egypt had been what she was in the prehistoric times.

At Sais and Bubastis were held two of the great annual religious Assemblies and Festivals of the Egyptians. It naturally occurs to us to ask, why at these two cities of the Delta, and not at primæval This, royal Memphis, or imperial Thebes? The answer that first occurs is that these two then modern Capitals may have been selected in order to bring them into repute, and invest them with an importance, they would not otherwise have possessed. This supposition, however, is, to some extent, negatived by the known antiquity, at all events, of Bubastis, and by the remark of Herodotus that the Egyptians were the first of mankind to institute these religious gatherings and fêtes: we are, therefore, precluded from imagining that their chief celebrations of this kind dated only from the Bubastic or Saite Dynasties. We can also see that the people of Upper Egypt, all of whom dwelt on the actual bank of the river, would be more disposed to come down the stream to the Delta, than the people of the broad Delta would be to ascend the stream to This or Thebes.

These great annual Feasts answered several important purposes. They impressed the same religious ideas on all who participated in them; and this contributed much to national, as well as to religious, unity and amalgamation. By their tone also of gladness, festivity, and licence they temporarily lightened the yoke of an austere religion, and provided a recognized vent for some very natural, and not unhealthy, impulses of our common humanity. Just what the Saturnalia were to the ancient Roman, and what the Carnival is to his modern representative, the Feast of Bubastis was to the old Egyptian for some thousands of years before the name of Rome had been heard on the seven Hills. The reader may form his own opinion on this point by turning to the account of the Festival given by one who four centuries and a half before our era was travelling through Egypt, and who we may be pretty sure himself witnessed what he thus describes. “While those, who are about to keep the Feast, are on the way to Bubastis, this is what they do. The men and women go together; and there is a large number of both sexes in each boat. Some of the women are provided with castanets, and some of the men with pipes, upon which they perform throughout the whole of the voyage. The rest of the men, and of the women, accompany them with singing, and with clapping their hands. When, as they sail along, they have reached any city, having made fast their boat to the bank, some of the women do what has been already mentioned, while of the rest some assail the women of the city with loud cries and scurrilous jibes, others dance, and others stand up, and make immodest exhibitions. They go through these performances at every river-side city. When they have reached Bubastis they keep the feast with unusually large offerings, and there is a greater consumption of grape wine at this feast than in the remainder of the whole of the twelve months. The number of men and women who are brought together on this occasion, for the children are not reckoned, reaches, as the Egyptians themselves say, to 700,000 souls.”

I will append his account of the Feast at Sais. “When the people are assembled at Sais for the solemnity, on a certain night everybody lights a great number of lamps, in the open air, in a circle round his house. The lamps are cups full of oil mixed with salt. The wick rests on the surface, and burns all night. This is called the Feast of Lamps. All Egyptians who happen not to be present at the gathering, wherever they may be, light lamps; and thus there is an illumination not only in Sais, but throughout the whole of the country. A religious reason is given to account for this particular night having been thus honoured by illumination.” He does not give the reason; but as we know that the Festival was in honour of Neith, the Egyptian Athena or Minerva, or of Osiris, we may suppose that the old Egyptians were the first to use light shining in darkness as the symbol of the mind-illuminating power of the Divine Spirit.

A few fragments of granite, in the mounds of the old city, are all the remains of the former greatness of Sebennytus.

Only six miles, however, from Sebennytus are the rubbish-heaps of Iseum. Here are the ruins of a most stately temple, every stone in the walls and roof of which was an enormous block of granite. No other material had been used. So regardless had been its builders of cost, that throughout the greater part of the structure they had sculptured this intractable adamant in unusually high relief. But though it had been thus massively constructed of imperishable materials, and decorated with such lavish expenditure, it was so completely wrecked, that now the traveller finds in its place merely a heap of stones. What had been the temple is there, but not one stone has been left standing on another.

And so we might go on throughout the whole Delta. Every few miles would bring us to the site of a city that once was great—the distinguishing feature of the greatness of which had been its temple. The peculiarity of them all was that the material chiefly used in their construction was granite. In most cases, the very materials of which the temples were constructed have utterly disappeared, though the spot on which each stood is still easily distinguishable. In some few cases, where the temple was of unusual extent—Iseum is the most conspicuous instance of this—considerable proportions of the materials remain, but even there everything has been thrown down, and, as far as possible, destroyed.

The reason generally given for this, in every case, utter ruin, and in most cases complete disappearance of the monuments of antiquity throughout the Delta is, that the climate being rendered comparatively moist by the contiguity of the sea, has not been so favourable to their preservation as the drier climate of Upper Egypt has proved to the monuments of that district. The difference in the hygrometrical condition of the air, and the rain that falls occasionally in the Delta, will not account, I think, for the effect that has been produced. The climate of Gizeh is not very different from that of the actual Delta, and here five or six thousand years have not in the least affected the original casing at the top of the Second Pyramid. The obelisk that had been standing for very nearly two thousand years on the very beach at Alexandria, and which for the previous two thousand years had stood at the apex of the Delta, has not been affected to such an extent as would contribute, in any appreciable degree, I will not say to the overthrow, but to the injury, of any building ever raised by an Egyptian architect. And yet at Alexandria these supposed disintegrating influences are at their maximum, and are aided by the salt-impregnated drift from the sea in the case of this obelisk, which has, notwithstanding, outlived for so long a period every temple and palace throughout the Delta, after having witnessed the erection of every one of them. If it had a tongue, it would, I think, tell us that it was not the climate that had been the destroyer, but man.

The decree which the Emperor Theodosius issued at the instance of the Archbishop and Christians of Alexandria, to authorize the destruction of the great temple of Serapis in that city, shows what was probably the cause of the first overthrow of the temples of the Delta. As long as they stood, it was thought there would be priests to minister in them, and worshippers to frequent them. And in those days of religious faction-fights, we know that they were frequently used as fortresses. We might say that the way to meet these difficulties was to trust to the imperishableness of truth, and to the sure decay of falsehood; but whatever we might do, we certainly should not destroy the historic monuments of a glorious antiquity. They, however, had not our ideas on these subjects; and, moreover, were blinded by the dust and smoke of the battle that was raging around them; and so they acted on the principle that was afterwards formulated to the north of the Tweed, that the way to get rid of the rooks is to pull down the nests.

When the overthrow of a temple had been once effected, we may be quite sure that all the limestone that could be found in it would be very soon sent to the kiln. A great deal of lime is used in Egypt for walls, and for plastering; and everywhere throughout the country, even in places where the stone might be had for the quarrying, the Arab has preferred the stones of old tombs and temples to the somewhat more costly process of cutting what he wanted from the living rock. Mehemet Ali, while constructing his paltry nitre-works at Karnak, although the mountain on the opposite bank was of limestone, to get what of this material was requisite for his purpose, destroyed one of the historic propylons within the sacred enclosure. In the pyramid district, often with the limestone under their feet and all around them, it has been the common practice to calcine the, to us, precious sculptured and painted stones from the tombs. And in this the modern Arab is only following the example of the old Egyptian, and of all other people who wanted the materials of unused buildings close at hand. We may, therefore, be sure that, a few centuries after the overthrow of these temples of the Delta, all the limestone that could be picked out of their ruins was consumed in this way.

We have seen, however, that the chief material employed in the construction of the grandest of them was not limestone, but granite. This was utterly indestructible by the climate; and yet, in some places, it has entirely vanished as completely as the limestone; and has in the rest been much diminished. The same cause, I believe, has brought about the disappearance of both. As was done with the limestone, so has it happened to the granite: it has been used for whatever purposes it was adapted. The smaller pieces, as may frequently be seen, have been carried off for building material; and the larger pieces have been turned to account in the way in which we find that fragments of the granite colossus of Rameses the Great at Thebes have been employed, that is to say, as millstones for grinding, and mortars for pounding corn. In the alluvial Delta the old buildings were the only quarries.

All the phenomena of the case are thus accounted for. Every one must wish that these imposing historic monuments of a great past had been preserved to our times. We feel as if those who threw them down, and those who afterwards employed their displaced, but still sacred, stones for their own petty purposes, had done to ourselves, and to the civilized world, an irreparable wrong. It may, however, mitigate our indignation, to remember that the former acted under a misapprehension of the nature and requirements of their cause; and that we ought not to be hard upon the poor Arab for having done what popes and cardinals did, when, to build palaces for themselves, they pulled down, with sacrilegious hands, the monuments of old Rome.

This destruction of tombs and temples has in Egypt been going on always. Of late years, indeed, there has been an increased demand for building materials, in consequence of some portion of the Khedivé’s numerous loans having been spent in public works, and in giving employment to a great many people who have had to build houses for themselves: the work of destruction, therefore, is now advancing at a greater rate than it ever did before. Many can confirm this from their own observation. Every one who revisits the country sees how rapidly and completely the stones of newly-opened tombs have disappeared. He saw them a few years ago: now he hears that they have been sent to the kiln.