The History of Antiquity, Vol. 1 (of 6)

Beside the law of the state stood the law of religion, of the priests. It was not sufficient to offer bread, and geese, and thighs of bulls, to pour drink-offerings of milk and wine, and "all things whereon the divine nature lives," to burn frankincense before the images of the gods, to offer the firstlings of the fruits, figs, onions, and flowers, to set up in the temples dedicatory offerings, small statues, crowns, and rings, to celebrate in honour of the gods of the district the great and small festivals, to honour the dead and bring sacrifice to them at the beginning and end of the year, at the festivals of the great and the little heat, on the monthly and fortnightly festivals (the calendars of the festivals on the monuments exhibit an almost unbroken series of sacrifices), to attend to the animals of the sacred kinds and bury them handsomely, "to give bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and shelter to the wanderer" – the whole life must be a religious service. In their favoured land the Egyptians considered themselves a favoured people. Full of gratitude to the gods who had given them this land and this life, they looked with contempt on the unclean and perverse nations who dwelt beyond the valley of the Nile. To keep themselves clean from the unclean is the essential task of their lives. To the merely superficial view, cleanliness of body and clothing seems cleanliness of soul and life. But this purity, which the law of the priests required from every Egyptian, and above all and in an especial degree from the priests, was not limited to simple and natural cleanliness. There were beneficent life-giving gods, and there were also evil and destructive deities. To these belonged the side of nature which seemed to correspond to their being. Contact with this side of nature is not only displeasing to the good and pure gods, it gives the evil influences power over the men contaminated by it. Hence for the salvation of men such contact must be shunned. Certain things must be avoided for clothing and others for nourishment, certain impulses must not be satisfied, or must at any rate be limited.

This conception introduced certain usages and customs, which were developed by the priests into a system of rules for purification and food. Herodotus says, "the Egyptians are the most religious of all men; they have a severe and strict service, and many sacred customs." The boys were circumcised. Beans, rye, and barley might not be eaten; the flesh of many animals and many kinds of fish was forbidden. It was not lawful to eat the head of any animal. The animals for sacrifice must first be examined by the priests, to see that they did not belong to the sacred kinds – to sacrifice these was an inexpiable offence – and whether in other respects they were without blemish and pleasing to the gods. This examination was the duty of the class of temple-servants already mentioned, and it devolved on them to mark the animals found to be clean with a seal, which in bulls was placed on the horns. The Egyptians never ate at the same table with strangers, nor used a cup from which a stranger had drunk, nor ate flesh cooked in the vessel of a stranger and cut with a stranger's knife; all strangers and their utensils were unclean. Nothing woollen might be taken into a temple or a tomb. The Egyptians always wore newly-washed under-clothing of linen; they were obliged frequently to wash their bodies, and for three days in each month they used means of evacuation, clysters and emetics, in order to cleanse the body internally.277 These statements are confirmed by papyrus rolls containing medicinal precepts. If the king, a sacred animal, or a member of the family died, no one was allowed to wear white or bright-coloured clothes; he must shave his eyebrows, and abstain from intercourse with his wife and from baths. Men and women threw dust on their heads and faces, and the women ran to and fro wailing with bare breasts.278

If an Egyptian had not committed murder, theft, or adultery, if he had not defamed the gods nor the king, nor those in authority over him, nor his own father, if he were not guilty of lying or slandering, if he had deceived neither gods nor men, nor oppressed his workmen in their daily tasks, nor drawn off the water, if he had allowed no one to be hungry, and caused no one to weep, if he were not slothful and idle in his occupation, if he sacrificed to the gods at the appointed time, and poured libations and observed all the regulations for cleanliness, then he might hope to find grace in the presence of the twenty-four judges before Osiris on the day of judgment in Amenti (p. 79). In order to gain by such conduct and careful observation of the laws of cleanliness and the ritual, a long life in this world, rest in the grave, and eternal life in the fields of the sun-god, the Egyptians worshipped their gods with unwearied zeal, while their kings raised temple upon temple of enormous blocks in honour of the life-giving powers of heaven.

We cannot rate the knowledge and science of the Egyptians very low, however absurd and singular much in it appears to be. The early discovery of writing, however unwieldy the form, gave them the means of preserving not only invocations and incidents, but also the results of observation and experience, and of increasing slowly and surely their stock of knowledge. They made an unusually extensive use of writing. The walls of the temples are covered with inscriptions, which often enough only repeat once more what has been repeated already innumerable times. Even in the tombs at Beni Hassan from the time of the Amenemha and Sesurtesen, we find scribes engaged in numbering the flocks and ticketing the sacks of corn. The scribes of the king registered the game obtained in hunting, the number of hands hewn off after a victory, and of prisoners, and calculated the amount of the booty. The temple-scribes are seen in the processions with pen in hand, and on the monuments the gods note down the years of the kings on the leaves of the arbor vitæ. Everything is to be enumerated, registered, and entered. Even ornaments and utensils are covered with inscriptions. As the hieroglyphics on the walls explained the images in the temples, and the hieroglyphics on the sides of the sepulchral chambers recorded the race and achievements of eminent persons and officers, so did the priests write down their wisdom, and private people their documents on a lighter material, the leaves of the papyrus, a tall reed growing in abundance in the swamps of Egypt.

Notwithstanding this extensive use, the system of writing among the Egyptians continued to the end a clumsy and difficult system, partly owing to the number of pictures and symbols, and partly to the variety of the phonetic pictures. The unchanging character of the Egyptians, the symbolical and mystic sense concealed in the hieroglyphics, the religious character of these old and sacred signs, stood in the way of the change to a more simple and phonetic mode of writing. Yet the effort to obtain such a system is unmistakable. After the year 1300 B.C. a number of picture symbols were used as phonetic symbols, which up to that time had no phonetic value, and this change becomes more and more frequent in the last centuries B.C. The habit of writing the hieroglyphics on the papyrus had early led to abbreviation in writing; the pictures were represented by simple outlines more adapted to the hand; and hence arose a cursive mode of writing the hieroglyphics, the so-called "hieratic" writing, which we already (pp. 90, 94) found in use on the pyramids under the old kingdom, and which was in use on an extensive scale at the time when the new kingdom was at its height. Finally, from the hieratic writing arose a third and more abbreviated kind, the demotic, which represented the language of ordinary intercourse and the national dialect. This was in existence when Herodotus travelled in Egypt. Here we see the most marked effort to avoid the ideographic element and picture signs, and to extend the use of the phonetic symbols. Beside the remains of the picture symbols, the demotic writing employs seventeen simple phonetic symbols and some fifty symbols of syllables. The hieroglyphic and hieratic modes of writing are called on the monuments the "writing of the gods," the demotic is "the writing of the books." For us the difficulty of the hieroglyphics is materially increased by the fact that the Coptic language in the form accessible to us is removed by thousands of years from the form of words represented by the hieroglyphics of the old and new kingdom. The forms which we obtain from the records preserved in the demotic writing are about midway between those in the hieroglyphics and the forms retained in the Coptic translation of the Scriptures, and in some books of liturgies, which belong to the first centuries A.D.279

In the circles of the priests the traditional invocations of the gods, the rules for the proper conduct of sacrifices and feasts, for the pure conversation which is the way to life and salvation in this world and the next, were without doubt committed to writing at a very early period. When gradually extended and continued, those writings grew into a liturgical canon and ecclesiastical codex of religious and moral law, and a comprehensive collection of all the wisdom known to the priests. We learn that the Egyptian priests possessed forty-two sacred books. Regarded as a collection of religious rules in every department of civilisation and life, as the measure of holy and upright conversation, and as rules of civil law, these books passed as the writings of the god Thoth, the scribe of heaven, the god of truth and justice. The civil law also was grounded upon the rules and axioms of religion; from these it arose, and the books of civil law without doubt formed a part of the sacred law, and of the books of the priests. Of these forty-two books ten belonged to the high priest, of which eight may have been the eight books of civil law (p. 202). In that case the two others would contain the doctrine concerning the gods, and the instruction of the priests. Ten other books belonged to the temple-scribe. Of these the first contained the rules for the sacred writing; the second the geography and cosmogony; the third and fourth the arrangement of the sun, moon, and five planets; the fifth and sixth the description of Egypt and the Nile; the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, the weights and measures, the mode of registering the temple furniture and property. Again, ten books belonged to the chamberlain. These taught the ritual and the liturgy, the offering of first-fruits and sacrifices, hymns and prayers, together with the conduct of festivals and other things of the kind, and, finally, discipline and the rules for examining the animals for sacrifices. The two books of the minstrel contained the hymns and the contemplation of the life proper for a king (p. 188). The four books of the astrologer concluded the narrower circle of the sacred writings. Of these, the first contained the arrangement of the fixed stars; the second and third the coincidences of the orbits of the sun and moon; the fourth, the rising of the constellations. Besides these sacred books the pastophors (p. 196) had six books which taught the principles and practice of medicine;280 for the art of healing, i. e. of preserving life, also belonged to the priests. The medicine of the Egyptians is commended as early as the Homeric poems (p. 15). Herodotus assures us that in Egypt every kind of sickness had a special physician, and Diodorus states that the art was carried out strictly according to the written principles, i. e. no doubt, according to these six sacred books. A hieratic papyrus on the subject of medicine has been recently found at Thebes, which is supposed to belong to the first centuries of the restoration of the monarchy. A section of this deals with diseases of the eye.281 Egyptian physicians were much sought after in the East (the founder of the Persian kingdom, Cyrus, procured an oculist from Egypt), until the fame of the Greek medicine about 500 B.C. threw Egyptian physicians into the shade.282

In the sacred books of the priests was drawn up the religious system into which the original conceptions of the gods were shaped and developed in the circles of the priests. The gods who passed for the greatest and mightiest in the various districts out of which Egypt was made up, the protecting deities of the separate localities, were here arranged in definite ranks and classes. And if, nevertheless, considerable differences can be observed in the teaching of the priests of Memphis and Thebes, they are sufficiently explained by the mode in which religion and state were developed in Egypt, and the rival position of the two great centres of ecclesiastical life. According to the doctrine of Memphis the seven highest deities were Ptah, the creative god of light of the lower country; Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis; and Shu (Sosis, p. 50), the deity of the clear air; these three were followed by the forms belonging to the Osiris circle, on whose nature rested the moral basis of the life of the Egyptians; Seb, the father of Osiris; Osiris himself; then his opposite, Typhon; and lastly, Horus, the conqueror of Typhon.283 The doctrine of Thebes placed Ammon at the head instead of Ptah, and in the place of Ra stood the two sun-gods of Upper Egypt, Tum (Atum, p. 51) and Mentu; these were followed by Shu, and the gods of the Osiris circle. To the seven or eight great gods was appended a circle of twelve gods, and among these Thoth and Anubis. The twelve were followed by a number of spirits, genii and demigods. With this system of gods the doctrine of the priests was connected. Even from the attributes of Ptah, Neith, and other deities, it is clear that there was among the priests a strong tendency to gather up the divine powers into the forms of Ptah, Tum, Osiris, and Ra. The teaching of the priests evidently desired to grasp the connection of life, and attain to a theogony and a theory of creation. It has been already pointed out on the authority of documents belonging to the times of the Amenemha and Sesurtesen, that the priests in their doctrine were at pains to discover the unity of the divine spirits, and to conceive the forms of the gods as manifestations of one being. They regarded the animals as the manifestations of special characteristics of the gods, and men as phænomena of a divine origin and nature, who would return to the place whence they came. To go further and grasp the heart of the system is impossible in the present condition of our researches. Conceptions and inferences of the Græco-Egyptian speculation of the time of the Ptolemies and the first centuries after Christ cannot be accepted as the true form of the old Egyptian religion, or as the doctrine of the priests of ancient Egypt.

With the Egyptians, as with other nations, poetry probably arose out of the invocations of the gods and hymns of praise and thanksgiving. Religious poetry had a fixed canon in the books of the minstrels. That national songs were also in vogue is shown by the monuments (p. 222). Diodorus told us above that the achievements of Sesostris were celebrated in poetry (p. 144). The description of a deed of arms of Ramses II. which he must have regarded as of considerable importance has been preserved. The battle he fought with the Cheta in the fifth year of his reign (p. 152), he caused to be represented in the rock temple at Abu Simbel and in the Ramesseum, and a description of it is engraved in these temples, as at Luxor and Beth-el-Walli, and in the walls of the great temple at Karnak. It is found in still greater detail in a papyrus of the British Museum.284 At the end is the observation that the scribe Pentaur composed it in the seventh year of the reign of Ramses II. In this poem we are told that the chief of the Cheta had come with his archers and chariots, three men on each chariot. North-west of Kadesh they lay in ambush. The king, urging on his chariot, pressed into the midst of the miserable Cheta. He found himself surrounded by 2,500 chariots. "My bowmen and my chariots have abandoned me, this is what the king said; none of them is here to fight beside me. What is the will of my father Ammon? Is he a father who denies his son? Or have I followed my own thoughts? Did I not set forth at thy command; has not thy mouth led my armies, and thy counsel guided them? Have I not celebrated many brilliant festivals, and filled thy house with booty? Thirty thousand bulls I have sacrificed with odorous herbs and perfumes of all kinds. I have built thee temples of stone, I bring obelisks from Elephantine, and cause the everlasting stones to be carried down. For thee – the great ships swim upon the sea, to bring thee the tribute of the nations. Has the like been done before? Ruin on him who opposes thee: salvation to him who comprehends thee, Ammon. On thee I call. I am alone before thee in the midst of unknown nations. My bowmen and chariots left me when I called; no one heard me when I cried for help. But I choose Ammon before thousands of bowmen and millions of chariots. The devices of men are nothing; Ammon will deliver from them. These words echoed in Hermonthis. Ra comes to him who calls upon him. He reaches to thee his hand. He flies to thee, Ramses Miamun. I am with thee, I am thy father, the sun, and my hand is with thee. Their hearts shall waver in their breasts and all their limbs shall fail. They shall not shoot their arrows; their lances they shall not be able to hold. The chief of the Cheta sent princes, the prince of Aratus (Aradus) and the prince of Kirkamischa (Karchemish). My charioteer was weak, and a great terror came upon his limbs. He said, Brave king, hold, and let us save the breath of our lives. What can we do, noble lord, Ramses Miamun? Mark what his majesty answered to his charioteer. Courage! Stablish thine heart, my charioteer. Like the divine hawk, I will swoop into their midst, they shall be overthrown and hewn down into the dust. Ammon were no god if he glorified not my face before their countless hosts. The king pressed into the midst of the miserable Cheta, six times he pressed into their midst. My bowmen and charioteers came at the hour of evening from their camp: they found the whole region covered with dead bathed in their blood. His holiness answered his army and the captains who had not fought. Ye did not well to leave me alone in the midst of the enemies. I have fought, I have beaten back thousands of enemies, and I was alone. The horses which drew me were 'Might in Thebes,' and 'Rest in the upper land.' As soon as I am within my royal gates, I command that they have corn every day before the god Ra. When the earth again became light, he began the conflict again; he dashed into the battle like a bull, which hurls himself upon geese, and with him the mighty lion beside his horses. Rage inflamed all his limbs. They were hewn in pieces before his mares. The chief of the miserable Cheta sent to call upon the great name of his majesty. Thou art the sun, the god of both worlds, thou art Sutech the great conqueror, the son of heaven. Baal is in all thy limbs. Terror is upon the land of Cheta; thou hast possessed thyself of their inwards for ever. The slave said, as he spoke to Pharaoh: Since Ammon has granted to thee that Egypt and the nation of the Cheta shall be slaves at thy feet, and Ra has granted thee the dominion over them, thou canst slay thy slaves; they are in thy power; we lie bowed to the earth, ready to obey thy command. O brave king, delight of the warriors, grant us the breath of our lives! The king summoned his generals in order to hear the message and write an answer, and toward midday he took ship. He returned in peace with his army to Egypt. The whole earth has subjected itself to his name, and the princes, lying on the ground, worship his countenance."285

Not only certain turns in this description, but passages in invocations which have come down to us, show that in expressing themselves, the Egyptians, in spite of the predominant vein of reflection, were not without force of imagination, or striking figures, or largeness and vigour of conception. That they are not free from bombast, foolish exaggeration, and incessant repetition, any more, or even so little, as the other nations of the East, is proved more especially by the inscriptions in the temples recording the mighty deeds of the kings. Our knowledge of the manuscripts does not as yet allow us to pass a more definite judgment. Yet it is beyond doubt that even in the centuries immediately preceding the irruption of the Hyksos, under the Sesurtesen and Amenemha, they were in possession of a written literature, that even then the oldest parts of the "Book of the Dead" were not only in existence, but already commentated upon, and that after the restoration of the kingdom, beside the comprehensive books of the priests, and manuscripts on medicine (p. 209), there was at any rate after the fourteenth century B.C., and the reign of Ramses II., a literature of a considerable extent. There is a second papyrus in existence by the author of the description of the battle, of which the title runs, "Beginning of the Rudiments of the Art of Letter-writing by the Scribe Pentaur, composed in the 10th year of Ramses II."286 The fifth letter of this collection is addressed by Ameneman, the head of the keepers of the archives of the treasure of the king, to Pentaur; it is said that Pentaur has turned his back on the sacred writings, and applied himself to agriculture. The farmer has to fear grubs and rats, sparrows and locusts for his crops; and thieves too. Implements and horses wear out. The scribes come and demand the taxes, and the neighbours are away and busy with the harvest. On the other hand, the work of the scribe is the highest of all, and the scribe has no taxes to pay.287 On a third papyrus a hymn, addressed by Ramses III. to Ammon, is said to have been found.288 A fourth has the name-shields of Sethos II. (p. 163). It is a composition by a scribe of the name of Enna, and contains the story of the fate of two brothers.289 A fifth papyrus, which is also attributed to the time of successors of Ramses II., has preserved a collection of apothegms.290 In a country which placed such importance on preserving every incident, on enumerating, recording, and registering everything, care must have been taken to record the series of the kings. When the shepherds were driven out, the liberation from foreign dominion would give a strong impulse toward the attempt to keep firmly before the eyes the old days of independent Egypt. At the same time these attempts must have met with serious hindrances. The destruction which came upon numerous records and monuments of those old times, and the want of any definite æra of chronology, made it difficult to obtain a really correct order of succession, or a historical picture of the ancient period. The historical truth of the writings, which, in spite of these difficulties, were undertaken, as is shown by the monuments mentioned above, and the Turin papyrus (p. 25), was still more seriously impaired by the fact that the views of the priests were governed by the conception that the course of certain periods was allotted to the world by the gods, and in these periods the fortunes of Egypt had reached their fulfilment, and would continue to reach it. We have already become acquainted with this Sothis period (p. 29 ff). From the gods came life and the world. So the gods were said to have reigned in person over Egypt, before the kings, their divine successors, ruled over men. Hence the priests of Lower Egypt commenced the reign of the seven great gods with the beginning of a Sothis period. The seven great gods were followed by the twelve gods of the second rank, Thoth, Anubis, Chunsu, &c., in reigns of gradually diminishing length through a certain number of Sothis periods. According to the scheme still preserved, Ptah reigned 9,000 years, and the last of the gods only seventy years, so that on an average each occupies exactly half a Sothis period, or 730 of our years. These nineteen gods were followed by thirty demigods; to each of whom was allotted the twelfth part of a Sothis period for a reign, so that the whole period of the reign of the gods takes up twelve Sothis periods, or 17,520 years. After this, according to some authorities, began the period of human rulers; others allotted four Sothis periods, i. e. 5840 years, to another set of demigods. Then followed, beginning like the rest with the beginning of a Sothis period, the rule of human kings. This Sothis period commenced either in the year 5702 B.C., or, according to the arrangement of Lepsius, with the year 4242 B.C. This year, therefore, was the first of the history of Egypt. To Menes the priests attached the long list of names in one continuous series, without in the least regarding whether the dynasties were contemporaneous or successive, whether they ruled in Upper or Lower Egypt, over the whole land, or in certain districts only. If we calculate the rule of the human kings from the first of the dates given, the first Sothis period of men came to an end, according to the canon of Manetho, in 4242 B.C.; the second in 2782 B.C. The third ended in the time of Menephta I., in whose reign as a fact the Egyptian year did again coincide with the natural year.291