We have seen that it was in the Theban period that Egypt emerged from her isolation, and for the first time came into contact with Western Asia. This grand turning-point in Egyptian history seemed to be the appropriate place at which to pause in the description of our latest knowledge of Egyptian history, in order to make known the results of archaeological discovery in Mesopotamia and Western Asia generally. The description has been carried down past the point of convergence of the two originally isolated paths of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, and what new information the latest discoveries have communicated to us on this subject has been told in the preceding chapters. We now have to retrace our steps to the point where we left Egyptian history and resume the thread of our Egyptian narrative.

The Hyksos conquest and the rise of Thebes are practically contemporaneous. The conquest took place perhaps three or four hundred years after the first advancement of Thebes to the position of capital of Egypt, but it must be remembered that this position was not retained during the time of the XIIth Dynasty. The kings of that dynasty, though they were Thebans, did not reign at Thebes. Their royal city was in the North, in the neighbourhood of Lisht and Mêdûm, where their pyramids were erected, and their chief care was for the lake province of the Fayyûm, which was largely the creation of Amenemhat III, the Moeris of the Greeks. It was not till Thebes became the focus of the national resistance to the Hyksos that its period of greatness began. Henceforward it was the undisputed capital of Egypt, enlarged and embellished by the care and munificence of a hundred kings, enriched by the tribute of a hundred conquered nations.

But were we to confine ourselves to the consideration only of the latest discoveries of Theban greatness after the expulsion of the Hyksos, we should be omitting much that is of interest and importance. For the Egyptians the first grand climacteric in their history (after the foundation of the monarchy) was the transference of the royal power from Memphis and Herakleopolis to a Theban house. The second, which followed soon after, was the Hyksos invasion. The two are closely connected in Theban history; it is Thebes that defeated Herakleopolis and conquered Memphis; it is Theban power that was overthrown by the Hyksos; it is Thebes that expelled them and initiated the second great period of Egyptian history. We therefore resume our narrative at a point before the great increase of Theban power at the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos, and will trace this power from its rise, which followed the defeat of Herakleopolis and Memphis. It is upon this epoch—the beginning of Theban power—that the latest discoveries at Thebes have thrown some new light.

More than anywhere else in Egypt excavations have been carried on at Thebes, on the site of the ancient capital of the country. And here, if anywhere, it might have been supposed that there was nothing more to be found, no new thing to be exhumed from the soil, no new fact to be added to our knowledge of Egyptian history. Yet here, no less than at Abydos, has the archaeological exploration of the last few years been especially successful, and we have seen that the ancient city of Thebes has a great deal more to tell us than we had expected.

The most ancient remains at Thebes were discovered by Mr. Newberry in the shape of two tombs of the VIth Dynasty, cut upon the face of the well-known hill of Shêkh Abd el-Kûrna, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. Every winter traveller to Egypt knows, well the ride from the sandy shore opposite the Luxor temple, along the narrow pathway between the gardens and the canal, across the bridges and over the cultivated land to the Ramesseum, behind which rises Shêkh Abd el-Kûrna, with its countless tombs, ranged in serried rows along the scarred and scarped face of the hill. This hill, which is geologically a fragment of the plateau behind which some gigantic landslip was sent sliding in the direction of the river, leaving the picturesque gorge and cliffs of Dêr el-Bahari to mark the place from which it was riven, was evidently the seat of the oldest Theban necropolis. Here were the tombs of the Theban chiefs in the period of the Old Kingdom, two of which have been found by Mr. Newberry. In later times, it would seem, these tombs were largely occupied and remodelled by the great nobles of the XVIIIth Dynasty, so that now nearly all the tombs extant on Shêkh Abd el-Kûrna belong to that dynasty.

Of the Thebes of the IXth and Xth Dynasties, when the Herakleopolites ruled, we have in the British Museum two very remarkable statues—one of which is here illustrated—of the steward of the palace, Mera. The tomb from which they came is not known. Both are very beautiful examples of the Egyptian sculptor's art, and are executed in a style eminently characteristic of the transition period between the work of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. As specimens of the art of the Hierakonpolite period, of which we have hardly any examples, they are of the greatest interest. Mera is represented wearing a different head-dress in each figure; in one he has a short wig, in the other a skullcap.

When the Herakleopolite dominion was finally overthrown, in spite of the valiant resistance of the princes of Asyût, and the Thebans assumed the Pharaonic dignity, thus founding the XIth Dynasty, the Theban necropolis was situated in the great bay in the cliffs, immediately north of Shêkh Abd el-Kûrna, which is known as Dêr el-Bahari. In this picturesque part of Western Thebes, in many respects perhaps the most picturesque place in Egypt, the greatest king of the XIth Dynasty, Neb-hapet-Râ Mentuhetep, excavated his tomb and built for the worship of his ghost a funerary temple, which he called Akh-aset, "Glorious-is-its- Situation," a name fully justified by its surroundings. This temple is an entirely new discovery, made by Prof. Naville and Mr. Hall in 1903. The results obtained up to date have been of very great importance, especially with regard to the history of Egyptian art and architecture, for our sources of information were few and we were previously not very well informed as to the condition of art in the time of the XIth Dynasty.

The new temple lies immediately to the south of the great XVIIIth Dynasty temple at Dêr el-Bahari, which has always been known, and which was excavated first by Mariette and later by Prof. Naville, for the Egypt Exploration Fund. To the results of the later excavations we shall return. When they were finally completed, in the year 1898, the great XVIIIth Dynasty temple, which was built by Queen Hatshepsu, had been entirely cleared of débris, and the colonnades had been partially restored (under the care of Mr. Somers Clarke) in order to make a roof under which to protect the sculptures on the walls. The whole mass of débris, consisting largely of fallen talus from the cliffs above, which had almost hidden the temple, was removed; but a large tract lying to the south of the temple, which was also covered with similar mounds of débris, was not touched, but remained to await further investigation. It was here, beneath these heaps of débris, that the new temple was found when work was resumed by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1903. The actual tomb of the king has not yet been revealed, although that of Neb-hetep Mentuhetep, who may have been his immediate predecessor, was discovered by Mr. Carter in 1899. It was known, however, and still uninjured in the reign of Ramses IX of the XXth Dynasty. Then, as we learn from the report of the inspectors sent to examine the royal tombs, which is preserved in the Abbott Papyrus, they found the pyramid-tomb of King Xeb-hapet-Râ which is in Tjesret (the ancient Egyptian name for Dêr el-Bahari); it was intact. We know, therefore, that it was intact about 1000 B.C. The description of it as a pyramid-tomb is interesting, for in the inscription of Tetu, the priest of Akh-aset, who was buried at Abydos, Akh-aset is said to have been a pyramid. That the newly discovered temple was called Akh-aset we know from several inscriptions found in it. And the most remarkable thing about this temple is that in its centre there was a pyramid. This must be the pyramid-tomb which was found intact by the inspectors, so that the tomb itself must be close by. But it does not seem to have been beneath the pyramid, below which is only solid rock. It is perhaps a gallery cut in the cliffs at the back of the temple.

The pyramid was then a dummy, made of rubble within a revetment of heavy flint nodules, which was faced with fine limestone. It was erected on a pyloni-form base with heavy cornice of the usual Egyptian pattern. This central pyramid was surrounded by a roofed hall or ambulatory of small octagonal pillars, the outside wall of which was decorated with coloured reliefs, depicting various scenes connected with the sed-heb or jubilee-festival of the king, processions of the warriors and magnates of the realm, scenes of husbandry, boat-building, and so forth, all of which were considered appropriate to the chapel of a royal tomb at that period. Outside this wall was an open colonnade of square pillars. The whole of this was built upon an artificially squared rectangular platform of natural rock, about fifteen feet high. To north and south of this were open courts. The southern is bounded by the hill; the northern is now bounded by the Great Temple of Hat-shepsu, but, before this was built, there was evidently a very large open court here. The face of the rock platform is masked by a wall of large rectangular blocks of fine white limestone, some of which measure six feet by three feet six inches. They are beautifully squared and laid in bonded courses of alternate sizes, and the walls generally may be said to be among the finest yet found in Egypt. We have already remarked that the architects of the Middle Kingdom appear to have been specially fond of fine masonry in white stone. The contrast between these splendid XIth Dynasty walls, with their great base-stones of sandstone, and the bad rough masonry of the XVIIIth Dynasty temple close by, is striking. The XVIIIth Dynasty architects and masons had degenerated considerably from the standard of the Middle Kingdom.

This rock platform was approached from the east in the centre by an inclined plane or ramp, of which part of the original pavement of wooden beams remains in situ.

324.jpg Xith Dynasty Wall: Dêr El-bahari.

     Excavated by Mr. Hall, 1904, for the Egypt Exploration Fund.

To right and left of this ramp are colonnades, each of twenty-two square pillars, all inscribed with the name and titles of Mentuhetep. The walls masking the platform in these colonnades were sculptured with various scenes, chiefly representing boat processions and campaigns against the Aamu or nomads of the Sinaitic peninsula. The design of the colonnades is the same as that of the Great Temple, and the whole plan of this part, with its platform approached by a ramp flanked by colonnades, is so like that of the Great Temple that we cannot but assume that the peculiar design of the latter, with its tiers of platforms approached by ramps flanked by colonnades, is not an original idea, but was directly copied by the XVIIIth Dynasty architects from the older XIth Dynasty temple which they found at Dêr el-Bahari when they began their work.

325.jpg Xviiith Dynasty Wall, Dbr El-bahari.

     Excavated by M. Naville, 1896; repaired by Mr. Howard
     Carter, 1904.

The supposed originality of Hatshepsu's temple is then non-existent; it was a copy of the older design, in fact, a magnificent piece of archaism. But Hatshepsu's architects copied this feature only; the actual arrangements on the platforms in the two temples are as different as they can possibly be. In the older we have a central pyramid with a colonnade round it, in the newer may be found an open court in front of rock-cave shrines.

326.jpg Excavation of the North Lower Colonnade Of The
Xith Dynasty Temple, Der El-bahari, 1904.

Before the XIth Dynasty temple was set up a series of statues of King Mentuhetep and of a later king, Amenhetep I, in the form of Osiris, like those of Usertsen (Senusret) I at Lisht already mentioned. One of these statues is in the British Museum. In the south court were discovered six statues of King Usertsen (Senusret) III, depicting him at different periods of his life. Pour of the heads are preserved, and, as the expression of each differs from that of the other, it is quite evident that some show him as a young, others as an old, man.

327.jpg Granite Threshold and Octagonal Sandstone
Pillars

     Of The XIth Dynasty Temple At Dee El-Bahari. About 2500 B.C.

The face is of the well-known hard and lined type which is seen also in the portraits of Amenemhat III, and was formerly considered to be that of the Hyksos. Messrs. Newberry and Garstang, as we have seen, consider it to be so, indirectly, as they regard the type as having been introduced into the XIIth Dynasty by Queen Nefret, the mother of Usertsen (Sen-usret) III. This queen, they think, was a Hittite princess, and the Hittites were practically the same thing as the Hyksos. We have seen, however, that there is very little foundation for this view, and it is more than probable that this peculiar physiognomy is of a type purely Egyptian in character.

328.jpg Excavation of the Tomb Of a Priestess,

     On The Platform Of The XIth Dynasty Temple, Der El-Bahari,
     1904.

On the platform, around the central pyramid, were buried in small chamber-tombs a number of priestesses of the goddess Hathor, the mistress of the desert and special deity of Dêr el-Bahari. They were all members of the king's harîm, and they bore the title of "King's Favourite." As told in a previous chapter, all were buried at one time, before the final completion of the temple, and it is by no means impossible that they were strangled at the king's death and buried round him in order that their ghosts might accompany him in the next world, just as the slaves were buried around the graves (or secondary graves) of the 1st Dynasty kings at Aby-dos. They themselves, as also already related, took with them to the next world little waxen figures which when called upon could by magic be turned into ghostly slaves. These images were ushabtiu, "answerers," the predecessors of the little figures of wood, stone, and pottery which are found buried with the dead in later times. The priestesses themselves were, so to speak, human ushabtiu, for royal use only, and accompanied the kings to their final resting-place.

With the priestesses was buried the usual funerary furniture characteristic of the period. This consisted of little models of granaries with the peasants bringing in the corn, models of bakers and brewers at work, boats with their crews, etc., just as we find them in the XIth and XIIth Dynasty tombs at el-Bersha and Beni Hasan. These models, too, were supposed to be transformed by magic into actual workmen who would work for the deceased, heap up grain for her, brew beer for her, ferry her over the ghostly Nile into the tomb-world, or perform any other services required.

Some of the stone sarcophagi of the priestesses are very elaborately decorated with carved and painted reliefs depicting each deceased receiving offerings from priests, one of whom milks the holy cows of Hathor to give her milk. The sarcophagi were let down into the tomb in pieces and there joined together, and they have been removed in the same way. The finest is a unique example of XIth Dynasty art, and it is now preserved in the Museum of Cairo.

330.jpg Cases of Antiquities Leaving Dêr El-bahari For
Transport to Cairo.

In memory of the priestesses there were erected on the platform behind the pyramid a number of small shrines, which were decorated with the most delicately coloured carvings in high relief, representing chiefly the same subjects as those on the sarcophagi. The peculiar style of these reliefs was previously unknown. In connection with them a most interesting possibility presents itself.

331.jpg Shipping Cases of Antiquities on Board the Nile
Steamer at Luxor, for the Egypt Exploration Fund.

We know the name of the chief artist of Mentuhetep's reign. He was called Mertisen, and he thus describes himself on his tombstone from Abydos, now in the Louvre: "I was an artist skilled in my art. I knew my art, how to represent the forms of going forth and returning, so that each limb may be in its proper place. I knew how the figure of a man should walk and the carriage of a woman, the poising of the arm to bring the hippopotamus low, the going of the runner. I knew how to make amulets, which enable us to go without fire burning us and without the flood washing us away. No man could do this but I, and the eldest son of my body. Him has the god decreed to excel in art, and I have seen the perfections of the work of his hands in every kind of rare stone, in gold and silver, in ivory and ebony." Now since Mertisen and his son were the chief artists of their day, it is more than probable that they were employed to decorate their king's funerary chapel. So that in all probability the XIth Dynasty reliefs from Dêr el-Bahari are the work of Mertisen and his son, and in them we see the actual "forms of going forth and returning, the poising of the arm to bring the hippopotamus low, the going of the runner," to which he refers on his tombstone. This adds a note of personal interest to the reliefs, an interest which is often sadly wanting in Egypt, where we rarely know the names of the great artists whose works we admire so much. We have recovered the names of the sculptor and painter of Seti I's temple at Abydos and that of the sculptor of some of the tombs at Tell el-Amarna, but otherwise very few names of the artists are directly associated with the temples and tombs which they decorated, and of the architects we know little more. The great temple of Dêr el-Bahari was, however, we know, designed by Senmut, the chief architect to Queen Hatshepsu.

It is noticeable that Mertisen's art, if it is Mertisen's, is of a peculiar character. It is not quite so fully developed as that of the succeeding XIIth Dynasty. The drawing of the figures is often peculiar, strange lanky forms taking the place of the perfect proportions of the IVth-VIth and the XIIth Dynasty styles. Great elaboration is bestowed upon decoration, which is again of a type rather archaic in character when compared with that of the XIIth Dynasty. We are often reminded of the rude sculptures which used to be regarded as typical of the art of the XIth Dynasty, while at the same time we find work which could not be surpassed by the best XIIth Dynasty masters. In fact, the art of Neb-hapet-Râ's reign was the art of a transitional period. Under the decadent Memphites of the VIIth and VIIIth Dynasties, Egyptian art rapidly fell from the high estate which it had attained under the Vth Dynasty, and, though good work was done under the Hierakonpolites, the chief characteristic of Egyptian art at the time of the Xth and early XIth Dynasties is its curious roughness and almost barbaric appearance. When, however, the kings of the XIth Dynasty reunited the whole land under one sceptre, and the long reign of Neb-hapet-Râ Mentuhetep enabled the reconsolidation of the realm to be carried out by one hand, art began to revive, and, just as to Neb-hapet-Râ must be attributed the renascence of the Egyptian state under the hegemony of Thebes, so must the revival of art in his reign be attributed to his great artists, Mertisen and his son. They carried out in the realm of art what their king had carried out in the political realm, and to them must be attributed the origin of the art of the Middle Kingdom which under the XIIth Dynasty attained so high a pitch of excellence. The sculptures of the king's temple at Dêr el-Bahari, then, are monuments of the renascence of Egyptian art, after the state of decadence into which it had fallen during the long civil wars between South and North; it is a reviving art, struggling out of barbarism to regain perfection, and therefore has much about it that seems archaic, stiff, and curious when compared with later work. To the XVIIIth Dynasty Egyptian it would no doubt have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and even semi-barbarous, and he had no qualms about sweeping it aside whenever it appeared in the way of the work of his own time; but to us this very strangeness gives additional charm and interest, and we can only be thankful that Mertisen's work has lasted (in fragments only, it is true) to our own day, to tell us the story of a little known chapter in the history of ancient Egyptian art.

From this description it will have been seen that the temple is an important monument of the Egyptian art and architecture of the Middle Kingdom. It is the only temple of that period of which considerable traces have been found, and on that account the study of it will be of the greatest interest. It is the best preserved of the older temples of Egypt, and at Thebes it is by far the most ancient building recovered. Historically it has given us a new king of the XIth Dynasty, Sekhâhe-tep-Râ Mentuhetep, and the name of the queen of Neb-hapet-Râ Mentuhetep, Aasheit, who seems to have been an Ethiopian, to judge from her portrait, which has been discovered. It is interesting to note that one of the priestesses was a negress.

The name Neb-hapet-Râ may be unfamiliar to those readers who are acquainted with the lists of the Egyptian kings. It is a correction of the former reading, "Neb-kheru-Râ," which is now known from these excavations to be erroneous. Neb-hapet-Râ (or, as he used to be called, Neb-kheru-Râ) is Mentuhetep III of Prof. Petrie's arrangement. Before him there seem to have come the kings Mentuhetep Neb-hetep (who is also commemorated in this temple) and Neb-taui-Râ; after him, Sekhâhetep-Râ Mentuhetep IV and Seânkhkarâ Mentuhetep V, who were followed by an Antef, bearing the banner or hawk-name Uah-ânkh. This king was followed by Amenemhat I, the first king of the XIIth Dynasty. Antef Uah-ânkh may be numbered Antef I, as the prince Antefa, who founded the XIth Dynasty, did not assume the title of king.

Other kings of the name of Antef also ruled over Egypt, and they used to be regarded as belonging to the XIth Dynasty; but Prof. Steindorff has now proved that they really reigned after the XIIIth Dynasty, and immediately before the Sekenenrâs, who were the fighters of the Hyksos and predecessors of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The second names of Antef III (Seshes-Râ-up-maat) and Antef IV (Seshes-Râ-her-her-maat) are exactly similar to those of the XIIIth Dynasty kings and quite unlike those of the Mentuheteps; also at Koptos a decree of Antef II (Nub-kheper-Râ) has been found inscribed on a doorway of Usertsen (Senusret) I; so that he cannot have preceded him. Prof. Petrie does not yet accept these conclusions, and classes all the Antefs together with the Mentuheteps in the XIth Dynasty. He considers that he has evidence from Herakleopolis that Antef Xub-kheper-Râ (whom he numbers Antef V) preceded the XIIth Dynasty, and he supposes that the decree of Nub-kheper-Râ at Koptos is a later copy of the original and was inscribed during the XIIth Dynasty. But this is a difficult saying. The probabilities are that Prof. Steindorff is right. Antef Uah-ânkh must, however, have preceded the XIIth Dynasty, since an official of that period refers to his father's father as having lived in Uah-ânkh 's time.

The necropolis of Dêr el-Bahari was no doubt used all through the period of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties, and many tombs of that period have been found there. A large number of these were obliterated by the building of the great temple of Queen Hatshepsu, in the northern part of the cliff-bay. We know of one queen's tomb of that period which runs right underneath this temple from the north, and there is another that is entered at the south side which also runs down underneath it. Several tombs were likewise found in the court between it and the XIth Dynasty temple. We know that the XVIIIth Dynasty temple was largely built over this court, and we can see now the XIth Dynasty mask-wall on the west of the court running northwards underneath the mass of the XVIIIth Dynasty temple. In all probability, then, when the temple of Hatshepsu was built, the larger portion of the Middle Kingdom necropolis (of chamber-tombs reached by pits), which had filled up the bay to the north of the Mentuhetep temple, was covered up and obliterated, just as the older VIth Dynasty gallery tombs of Shêkh Abd el-Kûrna had been appropriated and altered at the same period.

The kings of the XIIth and XIIIth Dynasties were not buried at Thebes, as we have seen, but in the North, at Dashûr, Lisht, and near the Fayymn, with which their royal city at Itht-taui had brought them into contact. But at the end of the XIIIth Dynasty the great invasion of the Hyksos probably occurred, and all Northern Egypt fell under the Arab sway. The native kings were driven south from the Fayymn to Abydos, Koptos, and Thebes, and at Thebes they were buried, in a new necropolis to the north of Dêr el-Bahari (probably then full), on the flank of a long spur of hill which is now called Dra' Abu-'l-Negga, "Abu-'l-Negga's Arm." Here the Theban kings of the period between the XIIIth and XVIIth Dynasties, Upuantemsaf, Antef Nub-kheper-Râ, and his descendants, Antefs III and IV, were buried. In their time the pressure of foreign invasion seems to have been felt, for, to judge from their coffins, which show progressive degeneration of style and workmanship, poverty now afflicted Upper Egypt and art had fallen sadly from the high standard which it had reached in the days of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties. Probably the later Antefs and Sebekemsafs were vassals of the Hyksos. Their descendants of the XVIIth Dynasty were buried in the same necropolis of Dra' Abu-'l-Negga, and so were the first two kings of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Aahmes and Amenhetep I. The tombs of the last two have not yet been found, but we know from the Abbott Papyrus that Amenhetep's was here, for, like that of Menttihetep III, it was found intact by the inspectors. It was a gallery-tomb of very great length, and will be a most interesting find when it is discovered, as it no doubt eventually will be. Aahmes had a tomb at Abydos, which was discovered by Mr. Currelly, working for the Egypt Exploration Fund. This, however, like the Abydene tomb of Usert-sen (Senusret) III, was in all likelihood a sham or secondary tomb, the king having most probably been buried at Thebes, in the Dra' Abu-'l-Negga. The Abydos tomb is of interesting construction. The entrance is by a simple pit, from which a gallery runs round in a curving direction to a great hall supported by eighteen square pillars, beyond which is a further gallery which was never finished. Nothing was found in the tomb. On the slope of the mountain, due west of and in a line with the tomb, Mr. Currelly found a terrace-temple analogous to those of Dêr el-Bahari, approached not by means of a ramp but by stairways at the side. It was evidently the funerary temple of the tomb.

     Grandmother of Aahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos and
     founder of the XVIIIth Dynasty. About 1700 B. C. British
     Museum. From the photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co.

The secondary tomb of Usertsen (Senusret) III at Abydos, which has already been mentioned, was discovered in the preceding year by Mr. A. E. P. Weigall, and excavated by Mr. Currelly in 1903. It lies north of the Aahmes temple, between it and the main cemetery of Abydos. It is a great bâb or gallery-tomb, like those of the later kings at Thebes, with the usual apparatus of granite plugs, barriers, pits, etc., to defy plunderers. The tomb had been plundered, nevertheless, though it is probable that the robbers were vastly disappointed with what they found in it. Mr. Currelly ascribes the absence of all remains to the plunderers, but the fact is that there probably never was anything in it but an empty sarcophagus. Near the tomb Mr. Weigall discovered some dummy mastabas, a find of great interest. Just as the king had a secondary tomb, so secondary mastabas, mere dummies of rubble like the XIth Dynasty pyramid at Dêr el-Bahari, were erected beside it to look like the tombs of his courtiers. Some curious sinuous brick walls which appear to act as dividing lines form a remarkable feature of this sham cemetery. In a line with the tomb, on the edge of the cultivation, is the funerary temple belonging to it, which was found by Mr. Randall-Maclver in 1900. Nothing remains but the bases of the fluted limestone columns and some brick walls. A headless statue of Usertsen was found.

We have an interesting example of the custom of building a secondary tomb for royalties in these two nécropoles of Dra' Abu-'l-Negga and Abydos. Queen Teta-shera, the grandmother of Aahmes, a beautiful statuette of whom may be seen in the British Museum, had a small pyramid at Abydos, eastward of and in a line with the temple and secondary tomb of Aahmes. In 1901 Mr. Mace attempted to find the chamber, but could not. In the next year Mr. Currelly found between it and the Aahmes tomb a small chapel, containing a splendid stele, on which Aahmes commemorates his grandmother, who, he says, was buried at Thebes and had a mer-âhât at Abydos, and he records his determination to build her also a pyramid at Abydos, out of his love and veneration for her memory. It thus appeared that the pyramid to the east was simply a dummy, like Usertsen's mastabas, or the Mentuhetep pyramid at Dêr el-Bahari. Teta-shera was actually buried at Dra' Abu-'l-Negga. Her secondary pyramid, like that of Aahmes himself, was in the "holy ground" at Abydos, though it was not an imitation bâb, but a dummy pyramid of rubble. This well illustrates the whole custom of the royal primary and secondary tombs, which, as we have seen, had obtained in the case of royal personages from the time of the 1st Dynasty, when Aha had two tombs, one at Nakâda and the other at Abydos. It is probable that all the 1st Dynasty tombs at Abydos are secondary, the kings being really buried elsewhere. After their time we know for certain that Tjeser and Snefru had duplicate tombs, possibly also Unas, and certainly Usertsen (Senusret) III, Amenemhat III, and Aahmes; while Mentuhetep III and Queen Teta-shera had dummy pyramids as well as their tombs. Ramses III also had two tombs, both at Thebes. The reasons for this custom were two: first, the desire to elude plunderers, and second, the wish to give the ghost a pied-à-terre on the sacred soil of Abydos or Sakkâra.

As the inscription of Aahmes which records the building of the dummy pyramid of Teta-shera is of considerable interest, it may here be translated. The text reads: "It came to pass that when his Majesty the king, even the king of South and North, Neb-pehti-Râ, Son of the Sun, Aahmes, Giver of Life, was taking his pleasure in the tjadu-hall, the hereditary princess greatly favoured and greatly prized, the king's daughter, the king's sister, the god's wife and great wife of the king, Nefret-ari-Aahmes, the living, was in the presence of his Majesty. And the one spake unto the other, seeking to do honour to These There,* which consisteth in the pouring of water, the offering upon the altar, the painting of the stele at the beginning of each season, at the Festival of the New Moon, at the feast of the month, the feast of the going-forth of the Sem-priest, the Ceremonies of the Night, the Feasts of the Fifth Day of the Month and of the Sixth, the Hak-festival, the Uag-festival, the feast of Thoth, the beginning of every season of heaven and earth. And his sister spake, answering him: 'Why hath one remembered these matters, and wherefore hath this word been said? Prithee, what hath come into thy heart?' The king spake, saying: 'As for me, I have remembered the mother of my mother, the mother of my father, the king's great wife and king's mother Teta-shera, deceased, whose tomb-chamber and mer-ahât are at this moment upon the soil of Thebes and Abydos. I have spoken thus unto thee because my Majesty desireth to cause a pyramid and chapel to be made for her in the Sacred Land, as a gift of a monument from my Majesty, and that its lake should be dug, its trees planted, and its offerings prescribed; that it should be provided with slaves, furnished with lands, and endowed with cattle, with hen-ka priests and kher-heb priests performing their duties, each man knowing what he hath to do.' Behold! when his Majesty had thus spoken, these things were immediately carried out. His Majesty did these things on account of the greatness of the love which he bore her, which was greater than anything. Never had ancestral kings done the like for their mothers. Behold! his Majesty extended his arm and bent his hand, and made for her the king's offering to Geb, to the Ennead of Gods, to the lesser Ennead of Gods... [to Anubis] in the God's Shrine, thousands of offerings of bread, beer, oxen, geese, cattle... to [the Queen Teta-shera]." This is one of the most interesting inscriptions discovered in Egypt in recent years, for the picturesqueness of its diction is unusual.

     * A polite periphrasis for the dead.

As has already been said, the king Amenhetep I was also buried in the Dra' Abu-'l-Negga, but the tomb has not yet been found. Amenhetep I and his mother, Queen Nefret-ari-Aahmes, who is mentioned in the inscription translated above, were both venerated as tutelary demons of the Western Necropolis of Thebes after their deaths, as also was Mentuhetep III. At Dêr el-Bahari both kings seem to have been worshipped with Hathor, the Mistress of the Waste. The worship of Amen-Râ in the XVIIIth Dynasty temple of Dêr el-Bahari was a novelty introduced by the priests of Amen at that time. But the worship of Hathor went on side by side with that of Amen in a chapel with a rock-cut shrine at the side of the Great Temple. Very possibly this was the original cave-shrine of Hathor, long before Mentuhetep's time, and was incorporated with the Great Temple and beautified with the addition of a pillared hall before it, built over part of the XIth Dynasty north court and wall, by Hatshepsu's architects.

The Great Temple, the excavation of which for the Egypt Exploration Fund was successfully brought to an end by Prof. Naville in 1898, was erected by Queen Hatshepsu in honour of Amen-Râ, her father Thothmes I, and her brother-husband Thothmes II, and received a few additions from Thothmes III, her successor. He, however, did not complete it, and it fell into disrepair, besides suffering from the iconoclastic zeal of the heretic Akhunaten, who hammered out some of the beautifully painted scenes upon its walls. These were badly restored by Ramses II, whose painting is easily distinguished from the original work by the dulness and badness of its colour.

The peculiar plan and other remarkable characteristics of this temple are well known. Its great terraces, with the ramps leading up to them, flanked by colonnades, which, as we have seen, were imitated from the design of the old XIth Dynasty temple at its side, are familiar from a hundred illustrations, and the marvellously preserved colouring of its delicate reliefs is known to every winter visitor to Egypt, and can be realized by those who have never been there through the medium of Mr. Howard Carter's wonderful coloured reproductions, published in Prof. Naville's edition of the temple by the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Great Temple stands to-day clear of all the débris which used to cover it, a lasting monument to the work of the greatest of the societies which busy themselves with the unearthing of the relics of the ancient world.

344.jpg the Two Temples of Des El-bahari. Excavated By
Prof. Naville, 1893-8 and 1903-6, for the Egypt Exploration Fund

The two temples of Dêr el-Bahari will soon stand side by side, as they originally stood, and will always be associated with the name of the society which rescued them from oblivion, and gave us the treasures of the royal tombs at Abydos. The names of the two men whom the Egypt Exploration Fund commissioned to excavate Dêr el-Bahari and Abydos, and for whose work it exclusively supplied the funds, Profs. Naville and Petrie, will live chiefly in connection with their work at Dêr el-Bahari and Abydos.

The Egyptians called the two temples Tjeserti, "the two holy places," the new building receiving the name of Tjeser-tjesru, "Holy of Holies," and the whole tract of Dêr el-Bahari the appellation Tjesret, "the Holy." The extraordinary beauty of the situation in which they are placed, with its huge cliffs and rugged hillsides, may be appreciated from the photograph which is taken from a steep path half-way up the cliff above the Great Temple. In it we see the Great Temple in the foreground with the modern roofs of two of its colonnades, devised in order to protect the sculptures beneath them, the great trilithon gate leading to the upper court, and the entrance to the cave-shrine of Amen-Râ, with the niches of the kings on either side, immediately at the foot of the cliff. In the middle distance is the duller form of the XIth Dynasty temple, with its rectangular platform, the ramp leading up to it, and the pyramid in the centre of it, surrounded by pillars, half-emerging from the great heaps of sand and débris all around. The background of cliffs and hills, as seen in the photograph, will serve to give some idea of the beauty of the surroundings,—an arid beauty, it is true, for all is desert. There is not a blade of vegetation near; all is salmon-red in colour beneath a sky of ineffable blue, and against the red cliffs the white temple stands out in vivid contrast.

The second illustration gives a nearer view of the great trilithon gate in the upper court, at the head of the ramp. The long hill of Dra' Abu-'l-Negga is seen bending away northward behind the gate.

346.jpg the Upper Court and Trilithon Gate

     Of The Xviiith Dynasty Temple At Dêk El-Bahari. About 1500
     B.C.

This is the famous gate on which the jealous Thothmes III chiselled out Hatshepsu's name in the royal cartouches and inserted his own in its place; but he forgot to alter the gender of the pronouns in the accompanying inscription, which therefore reads "King Thothmes III, she made this monument to her father Amen."

Among Prof. Naville's discoveries here one of the most important is that of the altar in a small court to the north, which, as the inscription says, was made in honour of the god Râ-Harmachis "of beautiful white stone of Anu." It is of the finest white limestone known. Here also were found the carved ebony doors of a shrine, now in the Cairo Museum. One of the most beautiful parts of the temple is the Shrine of Anubis, with its splendidly preserved paintings and perfect columns and roof of white limestone. The effect of the pure white stone and simplicity of architecture is almost Hellenic.

The Shrine of Hathor has been known since the time of Mariette, but in connection with it some interesting discoveries have been made during the excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple. In the court between the two temples were found a large number of small votive offerings, consisting of scarabs, beads, little figures of cows and women, etc., of blue glazed faïence and rough pottery, bronze and wood, and blue glazed ware ears, eyes, and plaques with figures of the sacred cow, and other small objects of the same nature. These are evidently the ex-votos of the XVIIIth Dynasty fellahîn to the goddess Hathor in the rock-shrine above the court. When the shrine was full or the little ex-votos broken, the sacristans threw them over the wall into the court below, which thus became a kind of dust-heap. Over this heap the sand and débris gradually collected, and thus they were preserved. The objects found are of considerable interest to anthropological science.

The Great Temple was built, as we have said, in honour of Thothmes I and II, and the deities Amen-Râ and Hathor. More especially it was the funerary chapel of Thothmes I. His tomb was excavated, not in the Dra' Abu-l-Negga, which was doubtless now too near the capital city and not in a sufficiently dignified position of aloofness from the common herd, but at the end of the long valley of the Wadiyên, behind the cliff-hill above Dêr el-Bahari. Hence the new temple was oriented in the direction of his tomb. Immediately behind the temple, on the other side of the hill, is the tomb which was discovered by Lepsius and cleared in 1904 for Mr. Theodore N. Davis by Mr. Howard Carter, then chief inspector of antiquities at Thebes. Its gallery is of very small dimensions, and it winds about in the hill in corkscrew fashion like the tomb of Aahmes at Aby-dos. Owing to its extraordinary length, the heat and foul air in the depths of the tomb were almost insupportable and caused great difficulty to the excavators. When the sarcophagus-chamber was at length reached, it was found to contain the empty sarcophagi of Thothmes I and of Hatshepsu. The bodies had been removed for safe-keeping in the time of the XXIst Dynasty, that of Thothmes I having been found with those of Set! I and Ramses II in the famous pit at Dêr el-Bahari, which was discovered by M. Maspero in 1881. Thothmes I seems to have had another and more elaborate tomb (No. 38) in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, which was discovered by M. Loret in 1898. Its frescoes had been destroyed by the infiltration of water.

The fashion of royal burial in the great valley behind Dêr el-Bahari was followed during the XVIIIth, XIXth, and XXth Dynasties. Here in the eastern branch of the Wadiyên, now called the Bibân el-Mulûk, "the Tombs of the Kings," the greater number of the mightiest Theban Pharaohs were buried. In the western valley rested two of the kings of the XVIIIth Dynasty, who desired even more remote burial-places, Amenhetep III and Ai. The former chose for his last home a most kingly site. Ancient kings had raised great pyramids of artificial stone over their graves. Amenhetep, perhaps the greatest and most powerful Pharaoh of them all, chose to have a natural pyramid for his grave, a mountain for his tumulus. The illustration shows us the tomb of this monarch, opening out of the side of one of the most imposing hills in the Western Valley. No other king but Amenhetep rested beneath this hill, which thus marks his grave and his only.

It is in the Eastern Valley, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings properly speaking, that the tombs of Thothmes I and Hatshepsu lie, and here the most recent discoveries have been made. It is a desolate spot. As we come over the hill from Dêr el-Bahari we see below us in the glaring sunshine a rocky canon, with sides sometimes sheer cliff, sometimes sloped by great falls of rock in past ages. At the bottom of these slopes the square openings of the many royal tombs can be descried. [See illustration.] Far below we see the forms of tourists and the tomb-guards accompanying them, moving in and out of the openings like ants going in and out of an ants' nest. Nothing is heard but the occasional cry of a kite and the ceaseless rhythmical throbbing of the exhaust-pipe of the electric light engine in the unfinished tomb of Ramses XI. Above and around are the red desert hills. The Egyptians called it "The Place of Eternity."

350.jpg the Tomb-mountain of Amenhetef Iii, in The
Western Valley, Thebes.

In this valley some remarkable discoveries have been made during the last few years. In 1898 M. Grébaut discovered the tomb of Amenhetep II, in which was found the mummy of the king, intact, lying in its sarcophagus in the depths of the tomb. The royal body now lies there for all to see. The tomb is lighted with electricity, as are all the principal tombs of the kings. At the head of the sarcophagus is a single lamp, and, when the party of visitors is collected in silence around the place of death, all the lights are turned out, and then the single light is switched on, showing the royal head illuminated against the surrounding blackness. The effect is indescribably weird and impressive. The body has only twice been removed from the tomb since its burial, the second time when it was for a brief space taken up into the sunlight to be photographed by Mr.. Carter, in January, 1902. The temporary removal was carefully carried out, the body of his Majesty being borne up through the passages of the tomb on the shoulders of the Italian electric light workmen, preceded and followed by impassive Arab candle-bearers. The workmen were most reverent in their handling of the body of " il gran ré," as they called him.

In the tomb were found some very interesting objects, including a model boat (afterwards stolen), across which lay the body of a woman. This body now lies, with others found close by, in a side chamber of the tomb. One may be that of Hatshepsu. The walls of the tomb-chamber are painted to resemble papyrus, and on them are written chapters of the "Book of What Is in the Underworld," for the guidance of the royal ghost.

In 1902-3 Mr. Theodore Davis excavated the tomb of Thothmes IV. It yielded a rich harvest of antiquities belonging to the funeral state of the king, including a chariot with sides of embossed and gilded leather, decorated with representations of the king's warlike deeds, and much fine blue pottery, all of which are now in the Cairo Museum. The tomb-gallery returns upon itself, describing a curve. An interesting point with regard to it is that it had evidently been violated even in the short time between the reigns of its owner and Horem-heb, probably in the period of anarchy which prevailed at Thebes during the reign of the heretic Akhunaten; for in one of the chambers is a hieratic inscription recording the repair of the tomb in the eighth year of Horemheb by Maya, superintendent of works in the Tombs of the Kings. It reads as follows: "In the eighth year, the third month of summer, under the Majesty of King Tjeser-khepru-Râ Sotp-n-Râ, Son of the Sun, Horemheb Meriamen, his Majesty (Life, health, and wealth unto him!) commanded that orders should be sent unto the Fanbearer on the King's Left Hand, the King's Scribe and Overseer of the Treasury, the Overseer of the Works in the Place of Eternity, the Leader of the Festivals of Amen in Karnak, Maya, son of the judge Aui, born of the Lady Ueret, that he should renew the burial of King Men-khepru-Râ, deceased, in the August Habitation in Western Thebes." Men-khepru-Râ was the prenomen or throne-name of Thothmes IV. Tied round a pillar in the tomb is still a length of the actual rope used by the thieves for crossing the chasm, which, as in many of the tombs here, was left open in the gallery to bar the way to plunderers. The mummy of the king was found in the tomb of Amenhetep II, and is now at Cairo.

The discovery of the tomb of Thothmes I and Hat-shepsu has already been described. In 1905 Mr. Davis made his latest find, the tomb of Iuaa and Tuaa, the father and mother of Queen Tii, the famous consort of Amenhetep III and mother of Akhunaten the heretic. Readers of Prof. Maspero's history will remember that Iuaa and Tuaa are mentioned on one of the large memorial scarabs of Amenhetep III, which commemorates his marriage. The tomb has yielded an almost incredible treasure of funerary furniture, besides the actual mummies of Tii's parents, including a chariot overlaid with gold. Gold overlay of great thickness is found on everything, boxes, chairs, etc. It was no wonder that Egypt seemed the land of gold to the Asiatics, and that even the King of Babylon begs this very Pharaoh Amenhetep to send him gold, in one of the letters found at Tell el-Amarna, "for gold is as water in thy land." It is probable that Egypt really attained the height of her material wealth and prosperity in the reign of Amenhetep III. Certainly her dominion reached its farthest limits in his time, and his influence was felt from the Tigris to the Sudan. He hunted lions for his pleasure in Northern Mesopotamia, and he built temples at Jebel Barkal beyond Dongola. We see the evidence of lavish wealth in the furniture of the tomb of Iuaa and Tuaa. Yet, fine as are many of these gold-overlaid and overladen objects of the XVIIIth Dynasty, they have neither the good taste nor the charm of the beautiful jewels from the XIIth Dynasty tombs at Dashûr. It is mere vulgar wealth. There is too much gold thrown about. "For gold is as water in thy land." In three hundred years' time Egypt was to know what poverty meant, when the poor priest-kings of the XXIst Dynasty could hardly keep body and soul together and make a comparatively decent show as Pharaohs of Egypt. Then no doubt the latter-day Thebans sighed for the good old times of the XVIIIth Dynasty, when their city ruled a considerable part of Africa and Western Asia and garnered their riches into her coffers. But the days of the XIIth Dynasty had really been better still. Then there was not so much wealth, but what there was (and there was as much gold then, too) was used sparingly, tastefully, and simply. The XIIth Dynasty, not the XVIIIth, was the real Golden Age of Egypt.

From the funeral panoply of a tomb like that of Iuaa and Tuaa we can obtain some idea of the pomp and state of Amenhetep III. But the remains of his Theban palace, which have been discovered and excavated by Mr. C. Tytus and Mr. P. E. Newberry, do not bear out this idea of magnificence. It is quite possible that the palace was merely a pleasure house, erected very hastily and destined to fall to pieces when its owner tired of it or died, like the many palaces of the late Khedive Ismail. It stood on the border of an artificial lake, whereon the Pharaoh and his consort Tii sailed to take their pleasure in golden barks. This is now the cultivated rectangular space of land known as the Birket Habû, which is still surrounded by the remains of the embankment built to retain its waters, and becomes a lake during the inundation. On the western shore of this lake Amenhetep erected the "stately pleasure dome," the remains of which still cover the sandy tract known as el-Malkata, "the Salt-pans," south of the great temple of Medînet Habû. These remains consist merely of the foundations and lowest wall-courses of a complicated and rambling building of many chambers, constructed of common unburnt brick and plastered with white stucco on walls and floors, on which were painted beautiful frescoes of fighting bulls, birds of the air, water-fowl, fish-ponds, etc., in much the same style as the frescoes of Tell el-Amarna executed in the next reign. There were small pillared halls, the columns of which were of wood, mounted on bases of white limestone. The majority still remain in position. In several chambers there are small daïses, and in one the remains of a throne, built of brick and mud covered with plaster and stucco, upon which the Pharaoh Amenhetep sat. This is the palace of him whom the Greeks called Memnon, who ruled Egypt when Israel was in bondage and when the dynasty of Minos reigned in Crete. Here by the side of his pleasure-lake the most powerful of Egyptian Pharaohs whiled away his time during the summer heats. Evidently the building was intended to be of the lightest construction, and never meant to last; but to our ideas it seems odd that an Egyptian Pharaoh should live in a mud palace. Such a building is, however, quite suited to the climate of Egypt, as are the modern crude brick dwellings of the fellahîn. In the ruins of the palace were found several small objects of interest, and close by was an ancient glass manufactory of Amenhetep III's time, where much of the characteristic beautifully coloured and variegated opaque glass of the period was made.

356.jpg the Tomb-hill of Shekh 'abd El-kubna, Thebes.

The tombs of the magnates of Amenhetep III's reign and of the reigns of his immediate predecessors were excavated, as has been said, on the eastern slope of the hill of Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna, where was the earliest Theban necropolis. No doubt many of the early tombs of the time of the VIth Dynasty were appropriated and remodelled by the XVIIIth Dynasty magnates. We have an instance of time's revenge in this matter, in the case of the tomb of Imadua, a great priestly official of the time of the XXth Dynasty. This tomb previously belonged to an XVIIIth Dynasty worthy, but Imadua appropriated it three hundred years later and covered up all its frescoes with the much begilt decoration fashionable in his period. Perhaps the XVIIIth Dynasty owner had stolen it from an original owner of the time of the VIth Dynasty. The tomb has lately been cleared out by Mr. Newberry.

Much work of the same kind has been done here of late years by Messrs. Newberry and R. L. Mond, in succession. To both we are indebted for the excavation of many known tombs, as well as for the discovery of many others previously unknown. Among the former was that of Sebekhetep, cleared by Mr. Newberry. Se-bekhetep was an official of the time of Thothmes III. From his tomb, and from others in the same hill, came many years ago the fine frescoes shown in the illustration, which are among the most valued treasures of the Egyptian department of the British Museum. They are typical specimens of the wall-decoration of an XVIIIth Dynasty tomb. On one may be seen a bald-headed peasant, with staff in hand, pulling an ear of corn from the standing crop in order to see if it is ripe. He is the "Chief Reaper," and above him is a prayer that the "great god in heaven" may increase the crop. To the right of him is a charioteer standing beside a car and reining back a pair of horses, one black, the other bay. Below is another charioteer with two white horses. He sits on the floor of the car with his back to them, eating or resting, while they nibble the branches of a tree close by. Another scene is that of a scribe keeping tally of offerings brought to the tomb, while fellahm are bringing flocks of geese and other fowl, some in crates. The inscription above is apparently addressed by the goose-herd to the man with the crates. It reads: "Hasten thy feet because of the geese! Hearken! thou knowest not the next minute what has been said to thee!" Above, a reïs with a stick bids other peasants squat on the ground before addressing the scribe, and he is saying to them: "Sit ye down to talk." The third scene is in another style; on it may be seen Semites bringing offerings of vases of gold, silver, and copper to the royal presence, bowing themselves to the ground and kissing the dust before the throne. The fidelity and accuracy with which the racial type of the tribute-bearers is given is most extraordinary; every face seems a portrait, and each one might be seen any day now in the Jewish quarters of Whitechapel.

The first two paintings are representative of a very common style of fresco-pictures in these tombs. The care with which the animals are depicted is remarkable. Possibly one of the finest Egyptian representations of an animal is the fresco of a goat in the tomb of Gen-Amen, discovered by Mr. Mond. There is even an attempt here at chiaroscuro, which is unknown to Egyptian art generally, except at Tell el-Amarna. Evidently the Egyptian painters reached the apogee of their art towards the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The third, the representation of tribute-bearers, is of a type also well known at this period. In all the chief tombs we have processions of Egyptians, Westerners, Northerners, Easterners, and Southerners, bringing tribute to the Pharaoh. The North is represented by the Semites, the East by the Punites (when they occur), the South by negroes, the West by the Keftiu or people of Crete and Cyprus. The representations of the last-named people have become of the very highest interest during the last few years, on account of the discoveries in Crete, which have revealed to us the state and civilization of these very Keftiu. Messrs. Evans and Halbherr have discovered at Knossos and Phaistos the cities and palace-temples of the king who sent forth their ambassadors to far-away Egypt with gifts for the mighty Pharaoh; these ambassadors were painted in the tombs of their hosts as representative of the quarter of the world from which they came.

The two chief Egyptian representations of these people, who since they lived in Greece may be called Greeks, though their more proper title would be "Pe-lasgians," are to be found in the tombs of Rekhmarâ and Senmut, the former a vizier under Thothmes III, the latter the architect of Hatshepsu's temple at Dêr el-Bahari. Senmut's tomb is a new rediscovery. It was known, as Rekhmarâ's was, in the early days of Egyptological science, and Prisse d'Avennes copied its paintings. It was afterwards lost sight of until rediscovered by Mr. Newberry and Prof. Steindorff.

360.jpg Fresco in the Tomb of Senmut at Thebes. About
1500 B.c.

The tomb of Rekhmarâ (No. 35) is well known to every visitor to Thebes, but it is difficult to get at that of Senmut (No. 110); it lies at the top of the hill round to the left and overlooking Dêr el-Bahari, an appropriate place for it, by the way. In some ways Senmut's representations are more interesting than Rekhmarâ's. They are more easily seen, since they are now in the open air, the fore hall of the tomb having been ruined; and they are better preserved, since they have not been subjected to a century of inspection with naked candles and pawing with greasy hands, as have Rekhmarâ's frescoes. Further, there is no possibility of mistaking what they represent. From right to left, walking in procession, we see the Minoan gift-bearers from Crete, carrying in their hands and on their shoulders great cups of gold and silver, in shape like the famous gold cups found at Vaphio in Lakonia, but much larger, also a ewer of gold and silver exactly like one of bronze discovered by Mr. Evans two years ago at Knossos, and a huge copper jug with four ring-handles round the sides. All these vases are specifically and definitely Mycenaean, or rather, following the new terminology, Minoan. They are of Greek manufacture and are carried on the shoulders of Pelasgian Greeks. The bearers wear the usual Mycenaean costume, high boots and a gaily ornamented kilt, and little else, just as we see it depicted in the fresco of the Cupbearer at Knossos and in other Greek representations. The coiffure, possibly the most characteristic thing about the Mycenaean Greeks, is faithfully represented by the Egyptians both here and in Rekhmarâ's tomb. The Mycenaean men allowed their hair to grow to its full natural length, like women, and wore it partly hanging down the back, partly tied up in a knot or plait (the kepas of the dandy Paris in the Iliad) on the crown of the head. This was the universal fashion, and the Keftiu are consistently depicted by the XVIIIth Dynasty Egyptians as following it. The faces in the Senmut fresco are not so well portrayed as those in the Rekhmarâ fresco. There it is evident that the first three ambassadors are faithfully depicted, as the portraits are marked. The procession advances from left to right. The first man, "the Great Chief of the Kefti and the Isles of the Green Sea," is young, and has a remarkably small mouth with an amiable expression. His complexion is fair rather than dark, but his hair is dark brown. His lieutenant, the next in order, is of a different type,—elderly, with a most forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nutcracker jaws. Most of the others are very much alike,—young, dark in complexion, and with long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into fantastic knots and curls on the tops of their heads. One, carrying on his shoulder a great silver vase with curving handles and in one hand a dagger of early European Bronze Age type, is looking back to hear some remark of his next companion. Any one of these gift-bearers might have sat for the portrait of the Knossian Cupbearer, the fresco discovered by Mr. Evans in the palace-temple of Minos; he has the same ruddy brown complexion, the same long black hair dressed in the same fashion, the same parti-coloured kilt, and he bears his vase in much the same way. We have only to allow for the difference of Egyptian and Mycenaean ways of drawing. There is no doubt whatever that these Keftiu of the Egyptians were Cretans of the Minoan Age. They used to be considered Phoenicians, but this view was long ago exploded. They are not Semites, and that is quite enough. Neither are they Asiatics of any kind. They are purely and simply Mycenaean, or rather Minoan, Greeks of the pre-Hellenic period—Pelasgi, that is to say.

Probably no discovery of more far-reaching importance to our knowledge of the history of the world generally and of our own culture especially has ever been made than the finding of Mycenæ by Schliemann, and the further finds that have resulted therefrom, culminating in the discoveries of Mr. Arthur Evans at Knossos. Naturally, these discoveries are of extraordinary interest to us, for they have revealed the beginnings and first bloom of the European civilization of to-day. For our culture-ancestors are neither the Egyptians, nor the Assyrians, nor the Hebrews, but the Hellenes, and they, the Aryan-Greeks, derived most of their civilization from the pre-Hellenic people whom they found in the land before them, the Pelasgi or "Mycenæan" Greeks, "Minoans," as we now call them, the Keftiu of the Egyptians. These are the ancient Greeks of the Heroic Age, to which the legends of the Hellenes refer; in their day were fought the wars of Troy and of the Seven against Thebes, in their day the tragedy of the Atridse was played out to its end, in their day the wise Minos ruled Knossos and the Ægean. And of all the events which are at the back of these legends we know nothing. The hiéroglyphed tablets of the pre-Hellenic Greeks lie before us, but we cannot read them; we can only see that the Minoan writing in many ways resembled the Egyptian, thus again confirming our impression of the original early connection of the two cultures.

In view of this connection, and the known close relations between Crete and Egypt, from the end of the XIIth Dynasty to the end of the XVIIIth, we might have hoped to recover at Knossos a bilingual inscription in Cretan and Egyptian hieroglyphs which would give us the key to the Minoan script and tell us what we so dearly wish to know. But this hope has not yet been realized. Two Egyptian inscriptions have been found at Knossos, but no bilingual one. A list of Keftian names is preserved in the British Museum upon an Egyptian writing-board from Thebes with what is perhaps a copy of a single Cretan hieroglyph, a vase; but again, nothing bilingual. A list of "Keftian words" occurs at the head of a papyrus, also in the British Museum, but they appear to be nonsense, a mere imitation of the sounds of a strange tongue. Still we need not despair of finding the much desired Cretan-Egyptian bilingual inscription yet. Perhaps the double text of a treaty between Crete and Egypt, like that of Ramses II with the Hittites, may come to light. Meanwhile we can only do our best with the means at our hand to trace out the history of the relations of the oldest European culture with the ancient civilization of Egypt. The tomb-paintings at Thebes are very important material. Eor it is due to them that the voice of the doubter has finally ceased to be heard, and that now no archaeologist questions that the Egyptians were in direct communication with the Cretan Mycenæans in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, for no one doubts that the pictures of the Keftiu are pictures of Mycenaeans.

As we have seen, we know that this connection was far older than the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, but it is during that time and the Hyksos period that we have the clearest documentary proof of its existence, from the statuette of Abnub and the alabastron lid of King Khian, found at Knossos, down to the Mycenaean pottery fragments found at Tell el-Amarna, a site which has been utterly abandoned since the time of the heretic Akhunaten (B.C. 1430), so that there is no possibility of anything found there being later than his time. That the connection existed as late as the time of the XXth Dynasty we know from the representations of golden Bügelkannen or false-necked vases of Mycenaean form in the tomb of Ramses III in the Bibân el-Mulûk, and of golden cups of Vaphio type in the tomb of Imadua, already mentioned. This brings the connection down to about 1050 B.C.

After that date we cannot hope to find any certain evidence of connection, for by that time the Mycenaean civilization had probably come to an end. In the days of the XIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties a great and splendid power evidently existed in Crete, and sent its peaceful ambassadors, the Keftiu who are represented in the Theban tombs, to Egypt. But with the XIXth Dynasty the name of the Keftiu disappears from Egyptian records, and their place is taken by a congeries of warring seafaring tribes, whose names as given by the Egyptians seem to be forms of tribal and place names well known to us in the Greece of later days. We find the Akaivasha (Axaifol, Achaians), Shakalsha (Sagalassians of Pisidia), Tursha (Tylissians of Crete?), and Shardana (Sardians) allied with the Libyans and Mashauash (Maxyes) in a land attack upon Egypt in the days of Meneptah, the successor of Ramses II—just as in the later days of the XXVIth Dynasty the Northern pirates visited the African shore of the Mediterranean, and in alliance with the predatory Libyans attacked Egypt.

Prof. Petrie has lately [History of Egypt, iii, pp. Ill, I12.] proffered an alternative view, which would make all these tribes Tunisians and Algerians, thus disposing of the identification of the Akaivasha with the Achaians, and making them the ancient representatives of the town of el-Aghwat (Roman Agbia) in Tunis. But several difficulties might be pointed out which are in the way of an acceptance of this view, and it is probable that the older identifications with Greek tribes must still be retained, so that Meneptah's Akaivasha are evidently the ancient representatives of the Achai(v)ans, the Achivi of the Roman poets. The terminations sha and na, which appear in these names, are merely ethnic and locative affixes belonging to the Asianic language system spoken by these tribes at that time, to which the language of the Minoan Cretans (which is written in the Knossian hieroglyphs) belonged. They existed in ancient Lycian in the forms azzi and nna, and we find them enshrined in the Asia Minor place-names terminating in assos and nda, as Halikarnassos, Sagalassos (Shakalasha in Meneptah's inscription), Oroanda, and Labraunda (which, as we have seen, is the same as the [Greek word], a word of pre-Hellenic origin, both meaning "Place of the Double Axe") The identification of these sha and nal terminations in the Egyptian transliterations of the foreign names, with the Lycian affixes referred to, was made some five years ago,* and is now generally accepted. We have, then, to find the equivalents of these names, to strike off the final termination, as in the case of Akaiva-sha, where Akaiva only is the real name, and this seems to be the Egyptian equivalent of Axaifol, Achivi. It is strange to meet with this great name on an Egyptian monument of the thirteenth century B.C. But yet not so strange, when we recollect that it is precisely to that period that Greek legend refers the war of Troy, which was an attack by Greek tribes from all parts of the Ægean upon the Asianic city at Hissarlik in the Troad, exactly parallel to the attacks of the Northerners on Egypt. And Homer preserves many a reminiscence of early Greek visits, peaceful and the reverse, to the coast of Egypt at this period. The reader will have noticed that one no longer treats the siege of Troy as a myth. To do so would be to exhibit a most uncritical mind; even the legends of King Arthur have a historic foundation, and those of the Nibelungen are still more probable.

     * See Hall, Oldest Civilization of Greece, p. 178/.

368.jpg Page Image to Display Greek Words

369.jpg Page Image to Display Greek Words

In the eighth year of Ramses III the second Northern attack was made, by the Pulesta (Pelishtim, Philistines), Tjakaray, Shakalasha (Sagalassians), Vashasha, and Danauna or Daanau, in alliance with North Syrian tribes. The Danauna are evidently the ancient representatives of the Aavaoî, the Danaans who formed the bulk of the Greek army against Troy under the leadership of the long-haired Achaians, [Greek words] (like the Keftiu). The Vashasha have been identified by the writer with the Axians, the [Greek word] of Crete. Prof. Petrie compares the name of the Tjakaray with that of the (modern) place Zakro in Crete. Identifications with modern place-names are of doubtful value; for instance, we cannot but hold that Prof. Petrie errs greatly in identifying the name of the Pidasa (another tribe mentioned in Ramses II's time) with that of the river Pidias in Cyprus. "Pidias" is a purely modern corruption of the ancient Pediseus, which means the "plain-river" (because it flows through the central plain of the island), from the Greek [Greek word]. If, then, we make the Pidasa Cypriotes we assume that pure Greek was spoken in Cyprus as early as 1100 b. c, which is highly improbable. The Pidasa were probably Le-leges (Pedasians); the name of Pisidia may be the same, by metathesis. Pedasos is a name always connected with the much wandering tribe of the Leleges, where-ever they are found in Lakonia or in Asia Minor. We believe them to have been known to the Egyptians as Pidasa. The identification of the Tjakaray with Zakro is very tempting. The name was formerly identified with that of the Teukrians, but the v in the word Tewpot lias always been a stumbling-block in the way. Perhaps Zakro is neither more nor less than the Tetkpoc-name, since the legendary Teucer, the archer, was connected with the eastern or Eteokretan end of Crete, where Zakro lies. In Mycenæan times Zakro was an important place, so that the Tjakaray may be the Teukroi, after all, and Zakro may preserve the name. At any rate, this identification is most alluring and, taken in conjunction with the other cumulative identifications, is very probable; but the identification of the Pidæa with the river Pediæus in Cyprus is neither alluring nor probable.

In the time of Ramses II some of these Asia Minor tribes had marched against Egypt as allies of the Hittites. We find among them the Luka or Lycians, the Dardenui (Dardanians, who may possibly have been at that time in the Troad, or elsewhere, for all these tribes were certainly migratory), and the Masa (perhaps the Mysians). With the Cretans of Ramses Ill's time must be reckoned the Pulesta, who are certainly the Philistines, then most probably in course of their traditional migration from Crete to Palestine. In Philistia recent excavations by Mr. Welch have disclosed the unmistakable presence of a late Mycenæan culture, and we can only ascribe this to the Philistines, who were of Cretan origin.

Thus we see that all these Northern tribal names hold together with remarkable persistence, and in fact refuse to be identified with any tribes but those of Asia Minor and the Ægean. In them we see the broken remnants of the old Minoan (Keftian) power, driven hither and thither across the seas by intestinal feuds, and "winding the skein of grievous wars till every man of them perished," as Homer says of the heroes after the siege of Troy. These were in fact the wanderings of the heroes, the period of Sturm und Drang which succeeded the great civilized epoch of Minos and his thalassocracy, of Knossos, Phaistos, and the Keftius. On the walls of the temple of Medînet Habû, Ramses III depicted the portraits of the conquered heroes who had fallen before the Egyptian onslaught, and he called them heroes, tuher in Egyptian, fully recognizing their Berserker gallantry. Above all in interest are the portraits of the Philistines, those Greeks who at this very time seized part of Palestine (which takes its name from them), and continued to exist there as a separate people (like the Normans in France) for at least two centuries. Goliath the giant was, then, a Greek; certainly he was of Cretan descent, and so a Pelasgian.

Such are the conclusions to which modern discovery in Crete has impelled us with regard to the pictures of the Keftiu at Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna. It is indeed a new chapter in the history of the relations of ancient Egypt with the outside world that Dr. Arthur Evans has opened for us. And in this connection some American work must not be overlooked. An expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania, under Miss Harriet Boyd, has discovered much of importance to Mycenæan study in the ruins of an ancient town at Gournia in Crete, east of Knossos. Here, however, little has been found that will bear directly on the question of relations between Mycenaean Greece and Egypt.

The Theban nécropoles of the New Empire are by no means exhausted by a description of the Tombs of the Kings and Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna; but few new discoveries have been made anywhere except in the picturesque valley of the Tombs of the Queens, south of Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna. Here the Italian Egyptologist, Prof. Schiaparelli, has lately discovered and excavated some very fine tombs of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties. The best is that of Queen Nefertari, one of the wives of Ramses II. The colouring of the reliefs upon these walls is extraordinarily bright, and the portraits of the queen, who has a very beautiful face, with aquiline nose, are wonderfully preserved. She was of the dark type, while another queen, Titi by name, who was buried close by, was fair, and had a retroussé nose. Prof. Schiaparelli also discovered here the tombs of some princes of the XXth Dynasty, who died young. All the tombs are much alike, with a single short gallery, on the walls of which are mythological scenes, figures of the prince and of his father, the king, etc., painted in a crude style, which shows a great degeneration from that of the XVIIIth Dynasty tombs.

We now leave the great necropolis and turn to the later temples of the Western Bank at Thebes. These were of a funerary character, like those of Dêr el-Bahari, already described. The most imposing of all in some respects is the Ramesseum, where lies the huge granite colossus of Ramses II, prostrate and broken, which Diodorus knew as the statue of Osymandyas. This name is a late corruption of Ramses II's throne-name, User-maat-Rà, pronounced Ûsimare. The temple has been cleared by Mr. Howard Carter for the Egyptian government, and the small town of priests' houses, magazines, and cellars, to the west of it, has been excavated by him. This is quite a little Pompeii, with its small streets, its houses with the stucco still clinging to the walls, its public altar, its market colonnade, and its gallery of statues. The statues are only of brick like the walls, and roughly shaped and plastered, but they were portraits, undoubtedly, of celebrities of the time, though we do not know of whom. On either side are the long magazines in which were kept the possessions of the priests of the Ramesseum, the grain from the lands with which they were endowed, and everything meet to be offered to the ghost of the king whom they served. The plan of the place had evidently been altered after the time of Ramses II, as remains of overbuilding were found here and there. The magazines were first investigated in 1896 by Prof. Petrie, who also found in the neighbourhood the remains of a number of small royal funerary temples of the XVIIIth Dynasty, all looking in the direction of the hill, beyond which lay the tombs of the kings.

372.jpg the Valley of The Tombs Of The Queens at Thebes.

     In which Prof. Schiaparelli discovered the tomb of Ramses
     II's wife (1904).

We may now turn to Luxor, where immediately above the landing-place of the steamers and dahabiyas rise the stately coloured colonnades of the Temple of Luxor. Unfortunately, modern excavations have not been allowed to pursue their course to completion here, as in the first great colonnaded court, which was added by Ramses II to the original building of Amenhetep III, Tutankhamen, and Horemheb, there still remains the Mohammedan Mosque of Abu-'l-Haggâg, which may not be removed. Abu-'l-Haggâg, "the Father of Pilgrims" (so called on account of the number of pilgrims to his shrine), was a very holy shêkh, and his memory is held in the greatest reverence by the Luksuris. It is unlucky that this mosque was built within the court of the Great Temple, and it cannot be removed till Moslem religious prejudices become at least partially ameliorated, and then the work of completely excavating the Temple of Luxor may be carried out.

Between Luxor and Karnak lay the temple of the goddess Mut, consort of Amen and protectress of Thebes. It stood in the part of the city known as Asheru. This building was cleared in 1895 at the expense and under the supervision of two English ladies, Miss Benson and Miss Gourlay.

     With A Dahabîya And A Steamer Of The Anglo-American Nile
     Company.

The temple had always been remarkable on account of the prodigious number of seated figures of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhemet, or Pakhet, which it contains, dedicated by Amenhetep III and Sheshenk I; most of those in the British Museum were brought from this temple. The excavators found many more of them, and also some very interesting portrait-statues of the late period which had been dedicated there. The most important of these was the head and shoulders of a statue of Mentuemhat, governor of Thebes at the time of the sack of the city by Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria in 668 B.C. In Miss Benson's interesting book, The Temple of Mut in Asher, it is suggested, on the authority of Prof. Petrie, that his facial type is Cypriote, but this speculation is a dangerous one, as is also the similar speculation that the wonderful portrait-head of an old man found by Miss Benson [* Plate vii of her book.] is of Philistine type. We have only to look at the faces of elderly Egyptians to-day to see that the types presented by Mentuemhat and Miss Benson's "Philistine" need be nothing but pure Egyptian. The whole work of the clearing was most efficiently carried out, and the Cairo Museum obtained from it some valuable specimens of Egyptian sculpture.

The Great Temple of Karnak is one of the chief cares of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. Its paramount importance, so to speak, as the cathedral temple of Egypt, renders its preservation and exploration a work of constant necessity, and its great extent makes this work one which is always going on and which probably will be going on for many years to come. The Temple of Karnak has cost the Egyptian government much money, yet not a piastre of this can be grudged. For several years past the works have been under the charge of M. Georges Legrain, the well-known engineer and draughtsman who was associated with M. de Morgan in the work at Dashûr. His task is to clear out the whole temple thoroughly, to discover in it what previous investigators have left undiscovered, and to restore to its original position what has fallen.

     The left-hand obelisk is the highest in Egypt, and was
     erected by Hatshepsu; the right-hand obelisk was put up by
     Thothmes III. No general work of restoration is
     contemplated, nor would this be in the slightest degree
     desirable. Up to the present M. Legrain has certainly
     carried out all three branches of his task with great
     success. An unforeseen event has, however, considerably
     complicated and retarded the work.

In October, 1899, one of the columns of the side aisles of the great Hypostyle Hall fell, bringing down with it several others. The whole place was a chaotic ruin, and for a moment it seemed as though the whole of the Great Hall, one of the wonders of the world, would collapse. The disaster was due to the gradual infiltration of water from the Nile beneath the structure, whose foundations, as is usual in Egypt, were of the flimsiest description. Even the most imposing Egyptian temples have jerry-built foundations; usually they are built on the top of the wall-stumps of earlier buildings of different plan, filled in with a confused mass of earlier slabs and weak rubbish of all kinds. Had the Egyptian buildings been built on sure foundations, they would have been preserved to a much greater extent even than they are. In such a climate as that of Egypt a stone building well built should last for ever.

M. Legrain has for the last five years been busy repairing the damage. All the fallen columns are now restored to the perpendicular, and the capitals and architraves are in process of being hoisted into their original positions. The process by which M. Legrain carries out this work has been already described. He works in the old Egyptian fashion, building great inclines or ramps of earth up which the pillar-drums, the capitals, and the architrave-blocks are hauled by manual labour, and then swung into position. This is the way in which the Egyptians built Karnak, and in this way, too, M. Le-grain is rebuilding it. It is a slow process, but a sure one, and now it will not be long before we shall see the hall, except its roof, in much the same condition as it was when Seti built it. Lovers of the picturesque will, however, miss the famous leaning column, hanging poised across the hall, which has been a main feature in so many pictures and photographs of Karnak. This fell in the catastrophe of 1899, and naturally it has not been possible to restore it to its picturesque, but dangerous, position.

The work at Karnak has been distinguished during the last two years by two remarkable discoveries. Outside the main temple, to the north of the Hypostyle Hall, M. Legrain found a series of private sanctuaries or shrines, built of brick by personages of the XVIIIth Dynasty and later, in order to testify their devotion to Amen. In these small cells were found some remarkable statues, one of which is illustrated. It is one of the most perfect of its kind. A great dignitary of the XVIIIth Dynasty is seen seated with his wife, their daughter standing between them. Round his neck are four chains of golden rings, with which he had been decorated by the Pharaoh for his services. It is a remarkable group, interesting for its style and workmanship as well as for its subject. As an example of the formal hieratic type of portraiture it is very fine.

The other and more important discovery of the two was made by M. Legrain on the south side of the Hypo-style Hall.

The left-hand obelisk is the highest in Egypt, and was erected by Hatshepsu; the right-hand obelisk was put up by Thothmes III.

M. de Morgan in the work at Dashûr. His task is to clear out the whole temple thoroughly, to discover in it what previous investigators have left undiscovered, and to restore to its original position what has fallen. Tentative excavations, begun in an unoccupied tract under the wall of the hall, resulted in the discovery of parts of statues; the place was then regularly excavated, and the result has been amazing. The ground was full of statues, large and small, at some unknown period buried pell-mell, one on the top of another. Some are broken, but the majority are perfect, which is in itself unusual, and is due very much to the soft, muddy soil in which they have lain. Statues found on dry desert land are often terribly cracked, especially when they are of black granite, the crystals of which seem to have a greater tendency to disintegration than have those of the red syenite. The Karnak statues are figures of pious persons, who had dedicated portraits of themselves in the temple of Amen, together with those of great men whom the king had honoured by ordering their statues placed in the temple during their lives.

Of this number was the great sage Amenhetep, son of Hapi, the founder of the little desert temple of Dêr el-Medîna, near Dêr el-Bahari, who was a sort of prime minister under Amenhetep III, and was venerated in later days as a demigod. His statue was found with the others by M. Legrain. Among them is a figure made entirely of green felspar, an unusual material for so large a statuette. A fine portrait of Thothmes III was also found. The illustration shows this wonderfully fruitful excavation in progress, with the diggers at work in the black mud soil, in the foreground the basket-boys carrying away the rubbish on their shoulders, and the massive granite walls of the Great Hypostyle Hall of Seti in the background. The huge size of the roof-blocks is noticeable. These are not the actual uppermost roof-blocks, but only the architraves from pillar to pillar; the original roof consisted of similar blocks laid across in the transverse direction from architrave to architrave. An Egyptian granite temple was in fact built upon the plan of a child's box of bricks; it was but a modified and beautified Stonehenge.

381.jpg Portrait-group of a Great Noble and his Wife

     Of The Time Of The Xviiith Dynasty. Discovered by M. Legrain
     at Karnak.

Other important discoveries have been made by M. Legrain in the course of his work.

382.jpg a Tomb Fitted up As an Explorer's Residence.

     The Tomb of Pentu (No. 5) at Tell el-Amarna, inhabited by
     Mr. de G. Davies during his work for the Archaeological
     Survey of Egypt (Egypt Exploration Fund). About 1400 B.C.

Among them are statues of the late Middle Kingdom, including one of King Usertsen (Senusret) IV of the XIIIth Dynasty. There are also reliefs of the reign of Amenhetep I, which are remarkable for the delicacy of their workmanship and the sureness of their technique.

We know that the temple was built as early as the time of TJsertsen, for in it have been found one or two of his blocks; and no doubt the original shrine, which was rebuilt in the time of Philip Arrhidseus, was of the same period, but hitherto no remains of the centuries between his time and that of Hatshepsu had been found. With M. Legrain's work in the greatest temple of Thebes we finish our account of the new discoveries in the chief city of ancient Egypt, as we began it with the work of M. Naville in the oldest temple there.

One of the most interesting questions connected with the archaeology of Thebes is that which asks whether the heretical disk-worshipper Akhunaten (Amenhetep IV) erected buildings there, and whether any trace of them has ever been discovered. To those who are interested in Egyptian history and religion the transitory episode of the disk-worship heresy is already familiar. The precise character of the heretical dogma, which Amenhetep IV proclaimed and desired his subjects to. accept, has lately been well explained by Mr. de Garis Davies in his volumes, published by the "Archaeological Survey of Egypt" branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund, on the tombs of el-Amarna. He shows that the heretical doctrine was a monotheism of a very high order. Amenhetep IV (or as he preferred to call himself, Akhunaten, "Glory of the Disk") did not, as has usually been supposed, merely worship the Sun-disk itself as the giver of life, and nothing more. He venerated the glowing disk merely as the visible emanation of the deity behind it, who dispensed heat and life to all living things through its medium. The disk was, so to speak, the window in heaven through which the unknown God, the "Lord of the Disk," shed a portion of his radiance on the world. Now, given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion this was. In effect, the sun is the source of all life upon this earth, and so Akhunaten caused its rays to be depicted each with a hand holding out the sign of life to the earth. The monotheistic worship of the sun alone is certainly the highest form of pagan religion, but Akhunaten saw further than this. His doctrine was that there was a deity behind the sun, whose glory shone through it and gave us life. This deity was unnamed and unnamable; he was "the Lord of the Disk." We see in his heresy, therefore, the highest attitude to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.

This religion seems to have been developed out of the philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis. Akhunaten with unwise iconoclastic zeal endeavoured to root out the worship of the ancient gods of Egypt, and especially that of Amen-Bà, the ruler of the Egyptian pantheon, whose primacy in the hearts of the people made him the most redoubtable rival of the new doctrine. But the name of the old Sun-god Bà-Harmaehis was spared, and it is evident that Akhunaten regarded him as more or less identical with his god.

It has been supposed by Prof. Petrie that Queen Tii, the mother of Akhunaten, was of Mitannian (Armenian) origin, and that she brought the Aten religion to Egypt from her native land, and taught it to her son. Certainly it seems as though the new doctrine had made some headway before the death of Amenhetep III, but we have no reason to attribute it to Tii, or to suppose that she brought it with her from abroad. There is no proof whatever that she was not a native Egyptian, and the mummies of her parents, Iuaa and Tuaa, are purely Egyptian in facial type. It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.

At first Akhunaten tried to establish his religion at Thebes alongside that of Amen and his attendant pantheon. He seems to have built a temple to the Aten there, and we see that his courtiers began to make tombs for themselves in the new realistic style of sculptural art, which the king, heretical in art as in religion, had introduced. The tomb of Barnes at Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna has on one side of the door a representation of the king in the old regular style, and on the other side one in the new realistic style, which depicts him in all the native ugliness in which this strange truth-loving man seems to have positively gloried. We find, too, that he caused a temple to the Aten to be erected in far-away Napata, the capital of Nubia, by Jebel Barkal in the Sudan. The facts as to the Theban and Napata temples have been pointed out by Prof. Breasted, of Chicago.

But the opposition of the Theban priesthood was too strong. Akhunaten shook the dust of the capital off his feet and retired to the isolated city of Akhet-aten, "the Glory of the Disk," at the modern Tell el-Amarna, where he could philosophize in peace, while his kingdom was left to take care of itself. He and his wife Nefret-iti, who seems to have been a faithful sharer of his views, reigned over a select court of Aten-worship-ping nobles, priests, and artists. The artists had under Akhunaten an unrivalled opportunity for development, of which they had already begun to take considerable advantage before the end of his reign and the restoration of the old order of ideas. Their style takes on itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the similar characteristic in Mycenaean art. There is a strange little relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning on a staff, and languidly smelling a flower, while the queen stands by with her garments blown about by the wind. The artistic monarch's graceful attitude is probably a faithful transcript of a characteristic pose.

We see from this what an Egyptian artist could do when his shackles were removed, but unluckily Egypt never produced another king who was at the same time an original genius, an artist, and a thinker. When Akhunaten died, the Egyptian artists' shackles were riveted tighter than ever. The reaction was strong. The kingdom had fallen into anarchy, and the foreign empire which his predecessors had built up had practically been thrown to the winds by Akhunaten. The whole is an example of the confusion and disorganization which ensue when a philosopher rules. Not long after the heretic's death the old religion was fully restored, the cult of the disk was blotted out, and the Egyptians returned joyfully to the worship of their myriad deities. Akhunaten's ideals were too high for them. The débris of the foreign empire was, as usual in such cases, put together again, and customary law and order restored by the conservative reactionaries who succeeded him. Henceforth Egyptian civilization runs an uninspired and undeveloping course till the days of the Saïtes and the Ptolemies. This point in the history of Egypt, therefore, forms a convenient stopping-place at which to pause, while we turn once more to Western Asia, and ascertain to what extent recent excavations and research have thrown new light upon the problems connected with the rise and history of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires.

CHAPTER VIII—THE ASSYRIAN AND NEO-BABYLONIAN EMPIRES IN THE LIGHT OF

RECENT RESEARCH

The early history of Assyria has long been a subject on which historians were obliged to trust largely to conjecture, in their attempts to reconstruct the stages by which its early rulers obtained their independence and laid the foundations of the mighty empire over which their successors ruled. That the land was colonized from Babylonia and was at first ruled as a dependency of the southern kingdom have long been regarded as established facts, but until recently little was known of its early rulers and governors, and still less of the condition of the country and its capital during the early periods of their existence. Since the excavations carried out by the British Museum at Kala Sherghat, on the western bank of the Tigris, it has been known that the mounds at that spot mark the site of the city of Ashur, the first capital of the Assyrians, and the monuments and records recovered during those excavations have hitherto formed our principal source of information for the early history of the country.* Some of the oldest records found in the course of these excavations were short votive texts inscribed by rulers who bore the title of ishshakku, corresponding to the Sumerian and early Babylonian title of patesi, and with some such meaning as "viceroy." It was rightly conjectured from the title which they bore that these early rulers owed allegiance to the kings of Babylon and were their nominees, or at any rate their tributaries. The names of a few of these early viceroys were recovered from their votive inscriptions and from notices in later historical texts, but it was obvious that our knowledge of early Assyrian history would remain very fragmentary until systematic excavations in Assyria were resumed. Three years ago (1902) the British Museum resumed excavations at Kuyunjik, the site of Nineveh. The work was begun and carried out under the direction of Mr. L. W. King, but since last summer has been continued by Mr. R. C. Thompson. Last year, too, excavations were reopened at Sherghat by the Deutsch-Orient Ge-sellschaft, at first under the direction of Dr. Koldewey, and afterwards under that of Dr. Andrae, by whom they are at present being carried on. This renewed activity on the sites of the ancient cities of Assyria is already producing results of considerable interest, and the veil which has so long concealed the earlier periods in the history of that country is being lifted.

     * For the texts and translations of these documents, see
     Budge and King, Annals of the Kings of Assyria, pp. iff.

Shortly before these excavations in Assyria were set on foot an indication was obtained from an early Babylonian text that the history of Assyria as a dependent state or province of Babylon must be pushed back to a far more remote period than had hitherto been supposed. In one of Hammurabi's letters to Sin-idinnam, governor of the city of Larsam, to which reference has already been made, directions are given for the despatch to the king of "two hundred and forty men of 'the King's Company' under the command of Nannar-iddina... who have left the country of Ashur and the district of Shitullum." From this most interesting reference it followed that the country to the north of Babylonia was known as Assyria at the time of the kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, and the fact that Babylonian troops were stationed there by Hammurabi proved that the country formed an integral part of the Babylonian empire.

These conclusions were soon after strikingly confirmed by two passages in the introductory sections of Hammurabi's code of laws which was discovered at Susa. Here Hammurabi records that he "restored his (i.e. the god Ashur's) protecting image unto the city of Ashur," and a few lines farther on he describes himself as the king "who hath made the names of Ishtar glorious in the city of Nineveh in the temple of E-mish-mish." That Ashur should be referred to at this period is what we might expect, inasmuch as it was known to have been the earliest capital of Assyria; more striking is the reference to Nineveh, proving as it does that it was a flourishing city in Hammurabi's time and that the temple of Ishtar there had already been long established. It is true that Gudea, the Sumerian patesi of Shirpurla, records that he rebuilt the temple of the goddess Ninni (Ishtar) at a place called Nina. Now Nina may very probably be identified with Nineveh, but many writers have taken it to be a place in Southern Babylonia and possibly a district of Shirpurla itself. No such uncertainty attaches to Hammurabi's reference to Nineveh, which is undoubtedly the Assyrian city of that name. Although no account has yet been published of the recent excavations carried out at Nineveh by the British Museum, they fully corroborate the inference drawn with regard to the great age of the city. The series of trenches which were cut deep into the lower strata of Kuyunjik revealed numerous traces of very early habitations on the mound.

Neither in Hammurabi's letters, nor upon the stele inscribed with his code of laws, is any reference made to the contemporary governor or ruler of Assyria, but on a contract tablet preserved in the Pennsylvania Museum a name has been recovered which will probably be identified with that of the ruler of Assyria in Hammurabi's reign. In legal and commercial documents of the period of the First Dynasty of Babylon the contracting parties frequently swore by the names of two gods (usually Shamash and Marduk) and also that of the reigning king. Now it has been found by Dr. Banke that on this document in the Pennsylvania Museum the contracting parties swear by the name of Hammurabi and also by that of Shamshi-Adad. As only gods and kings are mentioned in the oath formulas of this period, it follows that Shamshi-Adad was a king, or at any rate a patesi or ishshakku. Now from its form the name Shamshi-Adad must be that of an Assyrian, not that of a Babylonian, and, since he is associated in the oath formula with Hammurabi, it is legitimate to conclude that he governed Assyria in the time of Hammurabi as a dependency of Babylon. An early Assyrian ishshakku of this name, who was the son of Ishme-Dagan, is mentioned by Tiglath-Pileser I, but he cannot be identified with the ruler of the time of Hammurabi, since, according to Tiglath-Pileser, he ruled too late, about 1800 B.C. A brick-inscription of another Shamshi-Adad, however, the son of Igur-kapkapu, is preserved in the British Museum, and it is probable that we may identify him with Hammurabi's Assyrian viceroy. Erishum and his son Ikunum, whose inscriptions are also preserved in the British Museum, should certainly be assigned to an early period of Assyrian history.

The recent excavations at Sherghat are already yielding the names of other early Assyrian viceroys, and, although the texts of the inscriptions in which their names occur have not yet been published, we may briefly enumerate the more important of the discoveries that have been made. Last year a small cone or cylinder was found which, though it bears only a few lines of inscription, restores the names of no less than seven early Assyrian viceroys whose existence was not previously known. The cone was inscribed by Ashir-rîm-nishêshu, who gives his own genealogy and records the restoration of the wall of the city of Ashur, which he states had been rebuilt by certain of his predecessors on the throne. The principal portion of the inscription reads as follows: "Ashir-rîm-nishêshu, the viceroy of the god Ashir, the son of Ashir-nirari, the viceroy of the god Ashir, the son of Ashir-rabi, the viceroy. The city wall which Kikia, Ikunum, Shar-kenkate-Ashir, and Ashir-nirari, the son of Ishme-Dagan, my forefathers, had built, was fallen, and for the preservation of my life... I rebuilt it." Perhaps no inscription has yet been recovered in either Assyria or Babylonia which contained so much new information packed into so small a space. Of the names of the early viceroys mentioned in it only one was previously known, i.e. the name of Ikunum, the son of Erishum, is found in a late copy of a votive text preserved in the British Museum. Thus from these few lines the names of three rulers in direct succession have been recovered, viz., Ashir-rabi, Ashir-nirari, and Ashur-rîm-nishêshu, and also those of four earlier rulers, viz., Kikia, Shar-kenkate-Ashir, Ishme-Dagan, and his son Ashir-nirari. Another interesting point about the inscription is the spelling of the name of the national god of the Assyrians. In the later periods it is always written Ashur, but at this early time we see that the second vowel is changed and that at first the name was written Ashir, a form that was already known from the Cappadocian cuneiform inscriptions. The form Ashir is a good participial construction and signifies "the Beneficent," "the Merciful One."

Another interesting find, which was also made last year, consists of four stone tablets, each engraved with the same building-inscription of Shalmaneser I, a king who reigned over Assyria about 1300 B.C. In recording his rebuilding of E-kharsag-kurkura, the temple of the god Ashur in the city of Ashur, he gives a brief summary of the temple's history with details as to the length of time which elapsed between the different periods during which it had been previously restored. The temple was burned in Shalmaneser's time, and, when recording this fact and the putting out of the fire, he summarizes the temple's history in a long parenthesis, as will be seen from the following translation of the extract: "When E-kharsag-kurkura, the temple of Ashur, my lord, which Ushpia (variant Aushpia), the priest of Ashur, my forefather, had built aforetime,—and it fell into decay and Erishu, my forefather, the priest of Ashur, rebuilt it; 159 years passed by after the reign of Erishu, and that temple fell into decay, and Shamshi-Adad, the priest of Ashur, rebuilt it; (during) 580 years that temple which Shamshi-Adad, the priest of Ashur, had built, grew hoary and old—(when) fire broke out in the midst thereof..., at that time I drenched that temple (with water) in (all) its circuit."

From this extract it will be seen that Shalmaneser gives us, in Ushpia or Aushpia, the name of a very early Assyrian viceroy, who in his belief was the founder of the great temple of the god Ashur. He also tells us that 159 years separated Erishu from a viceroy named Shamshi-Adad, and that 580 years separated Shamshi-Adad from his own time. When these inscriptions were first found they were hailed with considerable satisfaction by historians, as they gave what seemed to be valuable information for settling the chronology of the early patesis. But confidence in the accuracy of Shalmaneser's reckoning was somewhat shaken a few months afterwards by the discovery of a prism of Esarhaddon, who gave in it a history of the same temple, but ascribed totally different figures for the periods separating the reigns of Erishu and Shamshi-Adad, and the temple's destruction by fire. Esarhaddon agrees with Shalmaneser in ascribing the founding of the temple to Ushpia, but he states that only 126 years (instead of 159 years) separated Erishu (whom he spells Irishu), the son of Ilu-shumma, from Shamshi-Adad, the son of Bêl-kabi; and he adds that 434 years (instead of 580 years) elapsed between Shamshi-Adad's restoration of the temple and the time when it was burned down. As Shalmaneser I lived over six hundred years earlier than Esarhaddon, he was obviously in a better position to ascertain the periods at which the events recorded took place, but the discrepancy between the figures he gives and those of Esarhaddon is disconcerting. It shows that Assyrian scribes could make bad mistakes in their reckoning, and it serves to cast discredit on the absolute accuracy of the chronological notices contained in other late Assyrian inscriptions. So far from helping to settle the unsolved problems of Assyrian chronology, these two recent finds at Sherghat have introduced fresh confusion, and Assyrian chronology for the earlier periods is once more cast into the melting pot.

In addition to the recovery of the names of hitherto unknown early rulers of Assyria, the recent excavations at Sherghat have enabled us to ascertain the true reading of the name of Shalmaneser I's grandfather, who reigned a considerable time after Assyria had gained her independence. The name of this king has hitherto been read as Pudi-ilu, but it is now shown that the signs composing the first part of the name are not to be taken phonetically, but as ideographs, the true reading of the name being Arik-dên-ilu, the signification of which is "Long (i.e. far-reaching) is the judgment of God." Arik-dên-ilu was a great conqueror, as were his immediate descendants, all of whom extended the territory of Assyria. By strengthening the country and increasing her resources they enabled Arik-dên-ilu 's great-grandson, Tukulti-Ninib I, to achieve the conquest of Babylon itself. Concerning Tukulti-Ninib's reign and achievements an interesting inscription has recently been discovered. This is now preserved in the British Museum, and before describing it we may briefly refer to another phase of the excavations at Sherghat.

396.jpg Stone Object Bearing a Votive Inscription Of
Arik-den-ilu.

     An early independent King of Assyria, who reigned about B.C.
     1350. Photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co.

The mounds of Sherghat rise a considerable height above the level of the plain, and are to a great extent of natural and not of artificial formation. In fact, the existence of a group of high natural mounds at this point on the bank of the Tigris must have led to its selection by the early Assyrians as the site on which to build their first stronghold. The mounds were already so high, from their natural formation, that there was no need for the later Assyrian kings to increase their height artificially (as they raised the chief palace-mound at Nineveh), and the remains of the Assyrian buildings of the early period are thus only covered by a few feet of débris and not by masses of unburnt brick and artificially piled up soil. This fact has considerably facilitated the systematic uncovering of the principal mound that is now being carried out by Dr. Andrae.

397.jpg Entrance Into One of the Galleries Or Tunnels Cut
Into the Principal Mound at Sherghat.

Work has hitherto been confined to the northwest corner of the mound around the ziggurat, or temple tower, and already considerable traces of Assyrian buildings have been laid bare in this portion of the site. The city wall on the northern side has been uncovered, as well as quays with steps leading down to the water along the river front. Part of the great temple of the god Ashur has been excavated, though a considerable portion of it must be still covered by the modern Turkish fort at the extreme northern point of the mounds; also part of a palace erected by Ashur-nasir-pal has been identified. In fact, the work at Sherghat promises to add considerably to our knowledge of ancient Assyrian architecture.

The inscription of Tukulti-Ninib I, which was referred to above as having been recently acquired by the trustees of the British Museum, affords valuable information for the reconstruction of the history of Assyria during the first half of the thirteenth century B.C.* It is seen from the facts summarized that for our knowledge of the earlier history of the country we have to depend to a large extent on short brick-inscriptions and votive texts supplemented by historical references in inscriptions of the later period. The only historical inscription of any length belonging to the early Assyrian period, which had been published up to a year ago, was the famous memorial slab containing an inscription of Adad-nirari I, which was acquired by the late Mr. George Smith some thirty years ago. Although purchased in Mosul, the slab had been found by the natives in the mounds at Sherghat, for the text engraved upon it in archaic Assyrian characters records the restoration of a part of the temple of the god Ashur in the ancient city of Ashur, the first capital of the Assyrians, now marked by the mounds of Sherghat, which have already been described. The object of Adad-nirari in causing the memorial slab to be inscribed was to record the restoration of the portion of the temple which he had rebuilt, but the most important part of the inscription was contained in the introductory phrases with which the text opens. They recorded the conquests achieved not only by Adad-nirari but by his father Arik-dên-ilu, his grandfather Bél-nirari, and his great-grandfather Ashur-uballit. They thus enabled the historian to trace the gradual extension and consolidation of the Assyrian empire during a critical period in its early history.

     * For the text and translation of the inscription, see King,
     Studies it Eastern History, i (1904).

The recently recovered memorial slab of Tukulti-Ninib I is similar to that of his grandfather Adad-nirari I, and ranks in importance with it for the light it throws on the early struggles of Assyria. Tukulti-Ninib 's slab, like that of Adad-nirari, was a foundation memorial intended to record certain building operations carried out by order of the king. The building so commemorated was not the restoration of a portion of a temple, but the founding of a new city, in which the king erected no less than eight temples dedicated to various deities, while he also records that he built a palace therein for his own habitation, that he protected the city by a strongly fortified wall, and that he cut a canal from the Tigris by which he ensured a continuous supply of fresh water. These were the facts which the memorial was primarily intended to record, but, like the text of Adad-nirari I, the most interesting events for the historian are those referred to in the introductory portions of the inscription. Before giving details concerning the founding of the new city, named Kar-Tukulti-Mnib, "the Fortress of Tukulti-Mnib," the king supplies an account of the military expeditions which he had conducted during the course of his reign up to the time when the foundation memorial was inscribed. These introductory paragraphs record how the king gradually conquered the peoples to the north and northeast of Assyria, and how he finally undertook a successful campaign against Babylon, during which he captured the city and completely subjugated both Northern and Southern Babylonia. Tukulti-Mnib's reign thus marks an epoch in the history of his country.

We have already seen how, during the early ages of her history, Assyria had been merely a subject province of the Babylonian empire. Her rulers had been viceroys owing allegiance to their overlords in Babylon, under whose orders they administered the country, while garrisons of Babylonian soldiers, and troops commanded by Babylonian officers, served to keep the country in a state of subjection. Gradually, however, the country began to feel her feet and long for independence. The conquest of Babylon by the kings of the Country of the Sea afforded her the opportunity of throwing off the Babylonian yoke. In the fifteenth century the Assyrian kings were powerful enough to have independent relations with the kings of Egypt, and, during the two centuries which preceded Tukulti-Mnib's reign.

Assyria's relations with Babylon were the cause of constant friction due to the northern kingdom's growth in power and influence. The frontier between the two countries was constantly in dispute, and, though sometimes rectified by treaty, the claims of Assyria often led to war between the two countries. The general result of these conflicts was that Assyria gradually extended her authority farther southwards, and encroached upon territory which had previously been Babylonian. The successes gained by Ashur-uballit, Bêl-nirari, and Adad-nirari I against the contemporary Babylonian kings had all resulted in the cession of fresh territory to Assyria and in an increase of her international importance. Up to the time of Tukulti-Mnib no Assyrian king had actually seated himself upon the Babylonian throne. This feat was achieved by Tukulti-Mnib, and his reign thus marks an important step in the gradual advance of Assyria to the position which she later occupied as the predominant power in Western Asia.

Before undertaking his campaign against Babylon, Tukulti-Mnib secured himself against attack from other quarters, and his newly discovered memorial inscription supplies considerable information concerning the steps he took to achieve this object. In his inscription the king does not number his military expeditions, and, with the exception of the first one, he does not state the period of his reign in which they were undertaken. The results of his campaigns are summarized in four paragraphs of the text, and it is probable that they are not described in chronological order, but are arranged rather according to the geographical position of the districts which he invaded and subdued. Tukulti-Ninib records that his first campaign took place at the beginning of his sovereignty, in the first year of his reign, and it was directed against the tribes and peoples inhabiting the territory on the east of Assyria. Of the tribes which he overran and conquered on this occasion the most important was the Kuti, who probably dwelt in the districts to the east of the Lower Zâb. They were a turbulent race and they had already been conquered by Arik-dên-ilu and Adad-nirari I, but on neither occasion had they been completely subdued, and they had soon regained their independence. Their subjugation by Tukulti-Ninib was a necessary preliminary to any conquest in the south, and we can well understand why it was undertaken by the king at the beginning of his reign. Other conquests which were also made in the same region were the Ukumanî and the lands of Elkhu-nia, Sharnida, and Mekhri, mountainous districts which probably lay to the north of the Lower Zâb. The country of Mekhri took its name from the mekhru-tree, a kind of pine or fir, which grew there in abundance upon the mountainsides, and was highly esteemed by the Assyrian kings as affording excellent wood for building purposes. At a later period Ashur-nasir-pal invaded the country in the course of his campaigns and brought back beams of mekhru-wood, which he used in the construction of the temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar in Nineveh.

The second group of tribes and districts enumerated by Tukulti-Ninib as having been subdued in his early years, before his conquest of Babylon, all lay probably to the northwest of Assyria. The most powerful among these peoples were the Shubari, who, like the Kutî on the eastern border of Assyria, had already been conquered by Adad-nirari I, but had regained their independence and were once more threatening the border on this side. The third group of his conquests consisted of the districts ruled over by forty kings of the lands of Na'iri, which was a general term for the mountainous districts to the north of Assyria, including territory to the west of Lake Van and extending eastwards to the districts around Lake Urmi. The forty kings in this region whom Tukulti-Ninib boasts of having subdued were little more than chieftains of the mountain tribes, each one possessing authority over a few villages scattered among the hills and valleys. But the men of Na'iri were a warlike and hardy race, and, if left long in undisturbed possession of their native fastnesses, they were tempted to make raids into the fertile plains of Assyria. It was therefore only politic for Tukulti-Ninib to traverse their country with fire and sword, and, by exacting heavy tribute, to keep the fear of Assyrian power before their eyes. From the king's records we thus learn that he subdued and crippled the semi-independent races living on his borders to the north, to the northwest, and to the east. On the west was the desert, from which region he need fear no organized attack when he concentrated his army elsewhere, for his permanent garrisons were strong enough to repel and punish any incursion of nomadic tribes. He was thus in a position to try conclusions with his hereditary foe in the south, without any fear of leaving his land open to invasion in his absence.

The campaign against Babylon was the most important one undertaken by Tukulti-Ninib, and its successful issue was the crowning point of his military career. The king relates that the great gods Ashur, Bel, and Shamash, and the goddess Ishtar, the queen of heaven and earth, marched at the head of his warriors when he set out upon the expedition. After crossing the border and penetrating into Babylonian territory he seems to have had some difficulty in forcing Bitiliashu, the Kassite king who then occupied the throne of Babylon, to a decisive engagement. But by a skilful disposition of his forces he succeeded in hemming him in, so that the Babylonian army was compelled to engage in a pitched battle. The result of the fighting was a complete victory for the Assyrian arms. Many of the Babylonian warriors fell fighting, and Bitiliashu himself was captured by the Assyrian soldiers in the midst of the battle. Tukulti-Ninib boasts that he trampled his lordly neck beneath his feet, and on his return to Assyria he carried his captive back in fetters to present him with the spoils of the campaign before Ashur, the national god of the Assyrians.

Before returning to Assyria, however, Tukulti-Ninib marched with his army throughout the length and breadth of Babylonia, and achieved the subjugation of the whole of the Sumer and Akkad. He destroyed the fortifications of Babylon to ensure that they should not again be used against himself, and all the inhabitants who did not at once submit to his decrees he put co the sword. He then appointed his own officers to rule the country and established his own system of administration, adding to his previous title of "King of Assyria," those of "King of Karduniash (i. e. Babylonia)" and "King of Sumer and Akkad." It was probably from this period that he also adopted the title of "King of the Poor Quarters of the World." As a mark of the complete subjugation of their ancient foe, Tukulti-Ninib and his army carried back with them to Assyria not only the captive Babylonian king, but also the statue of Marduk, the national god of Babylon. This they removed from B-sagila, his sumptuous temple in Babylon, and they looted the sacred treasures from the treasure-chambers, and carried them off together with the spoil of the city.

Tukulti-Ninib no doubt left a sufficient proportion of his army in Babylon to garrison the city and support the governors and officials into whose charge he committed the administration of the land, but he himself returned to Assyria with the rich spoil of the campaign, and it was probably as a use for this large increase of wealth and material that he decided to found another city which should bear his own name and perpetuate it for future ages. The king records that he undertook this task at the bidding of Bel (i.e. the god Ashur), who commanded that he should found a new city and build a dwelling-place for him therein. In accordance with the desire of Ashur and the gods, which was thus conveyed to him, the king founded the city of Kar-Tukulti-Ninib, and he erected therein temples dedicated not only to Ashur, but also to the gods Adad, and Sha-mash, and Ninib, and Nusku, and Nergal, and Imina-bi, and the goddess Ishtar. The spoils from Babylon and the temple treasures from E-sagila were doubtless used for the decoration of these temples and the adornment of their shrines, and the king endowed the temples and appointed regular offerings, which he ordained should be their property for ever. He also built a sumptuous palace for his own abode when he stayed in the city, which he constructed on a mound or terrace of earth, faced with brick, and piled high above the level of the city. Finally, he completed its fortification by the erection of a massive wall around it, and the completion of this wall was the occasion on which his memorial tablet was inscribed.

The memorial tablet was buried and bricked up within the actual structure of the wall, in order that in future ages it might be read by those who found it, and so it might preserve his name and fame. After finishing the account of his building operations in the new city and recording the completion of the city wall from its foundation to its coping stone, the king makes an appeal to any future ruler who should find it, in the following words: "In the days that are to come, when this wall shall have grown old and shall have fallen into ruins, may a future prince repair the damaged parts thereof, and may he anoint my memorial tablet with oil, and may he offer sacrifices and restore it unto its place, and then Ashur will hearken unto his prayers. But whosoever shall destroy this wall, or shall remove my memorial tablet or my name that is inscribed thereon, or shall leave Kar-Tukulti-Ninib, the city of my dominion, desolate, or shall destroy it, may the lord Ashur overthrow his kingdom, and may he break his weapons, and may he cause his warriors to be defeated, and may he diminish his boundaries, and may he ordain that his rule shall be cut off, and on his days may he bring sorrow, and his years may he make evil, and may he blot out his name and his seed from the land!"

By such blessings and curses Tukulti-Ninib hoped to ensure the preservation of his name and the rebuilding of his city, should it at any time be neglected and fall into decay. Curiously enough, it was in this very city that Tukulti-Ninib met his own fate less than seven years after he had founded it. At that time one of his own sons, who bore the name of Ashur-nasir-pal, conspired against his father and stirred up the nobles to revolt. The insurrection was arranged when Tukulti-Ninib was absent from his capital and staying in Kar-Tukulti-Ninib, where he was probably protected by only a small bodyguard, the bulk of his veteran warriors remaining behind in garrison at Ashur. The insurgent nobles, headed by Ashur-nasir-pal, fell upon the king without warning when he was passing through the city without any suspicion of risk from a treacherous attack. The king defended himself and sought refuge in a neighbouring house, but the conspirators surrounded the building and, having forced an entrance, slew him with the sword. Thus Tukulti-Ninib perished in the city he had built and beautified with the spoils of his campaigns, where he had looked forward to passing a peaceful and secure old age. Of the fate of the city itself we know little except that its site is marked to-day by a few mounds which rise slightly above the level of the surrounding desert. The king's memorial tablet only has survived. For some 3,200 years it rested undisturbed in the foundations of the wall of unburnt brick, where it was buried by Tukulti-Ninib on the completion of the city wall.

408.jpg Stone Tablet. Bearing an Inscription Of
Tukulti-ninib I

     King of Assyria, about B. C. 1275.

Thence it was removed by the hands of modern Arabs, and it is now preserved in the British Museum, where the characters of the inscription may be seen to be as sharp and uninjured as on the day when the Assyrian graver inscribed them by order of the king.

In the account of his first campaign, which is preserved upon the memorial tablet, it is stated that the peoples conquered by Tukulti-Ninib brought their yearly tribute to the city of Ashur. This fact is of considerable interest, for it proves that Tukulti-Ninib restored the capital of Assyria to the city of Ashur, removing it from Calah, whither it had been transferred by his father Shalmaneser I. The city of Calah had been founded and built by Shalmaneser I in the same way that his son Tukulti-Ninib built the city of Kar-Tukulti-Ninib, and the building of both cities is striking evidence of the rapid growth of Assyria and her need of expansion around fresh centres prepared for administration and defence. The shifting of the Assyrian capital to Calah by Shalmaneser I was also due to the extension of Assyrian power in the north, in consequence of which there was need of having the capital nearer the centre of the country so enlarged. Ashur's recovery of her old position under Tukulti-Ninib I was only a temporary check to this movement northwards, and, so long as Babylon remained a conquered province of the Assyrian empire, obviously the need for a capital farther north than Ashur would not have been pressing.

410.jpg the Ziggurat, Or Temple Tower, of The Assyrian
City of Calah.

But with Tukulti-Ninib's death Babylon regained her independence and freed herself from Assyrian control, and the centre of the northern kingdom was once more subject to the influences which eventually resulted in the permanent transference of her capital to Nineveh. To the comparative neglect into which Ashur and Calah consequently fell, we may probably trace the extensive remains of buildings belonging to the earlier periods of Assyrian history which have been recovered and still remain to be found, in the mounds that mark their sites.

We have given some account of the results already achieved from the excavations carried out during the last two years at Sherghat, the site of the city of Ashur. That much remains to be done on the site of Calah, the other early capital of Assyria, is evident from even a cursory examination of the present condition of the mounds that mark the location of the city. These mounds are now known by the name of Nimrûd and are situated on the left or eastern bank of the Tigris, a short distance above the point at which it is joined by the stream of the Upper Zâb, and the great mound which still covers the remains of the ziggurat, or temple tower, can be seen from a considerable distance across the plain. During the excavations formerly carried out here for the British Museum, remains of palaces were recovered which had been built or restored by Shal-maneser I, Ashur-nasir-pal, Shalmaneser II, Tiglath-pileser III, Sargon, Esarhaddon, and Ashur-etil-ilâni. After the conclusion of the diggings and the removal of many of the sculptures to England, the site was covered again with earth, in order to protect the remains of Assyrian buildings which were left in place. Since that time the soil has sunk and been washed away by the rains so that many of the larger sculptures are now protruding above the soil, an example of which is seen in the two winged bulls in the palace of Ashur-nasir-pal. It is improbable that the mounds of Nimrûd will yield such rich results as Sherghat, but the site would probably well repay prolonged and systematic excavation.

We have hitherto summarized and described the principal facts, with regard to the early history of Babylonia and Assyria and the neighbouring countries, which have been obtained from the excavations conducted recently on the sites of ancient cities. From the actual remains of the buildings that have been unearthed we have secured information with regard to the temples and palaces of ancient rulers and the plans on which they were designed. Erom the objects of daily life and of religious use which have been recovered, such as weapons of bronze and iron, and vessels of metal, stone, and clay, it is possible for the archaeologist to draw conclusions with regard to the customs of these early peoples; while from a study of their style and workmanship and of such examples of their sculpture as have been brought to light, he may determine the stage of artistic development at which they had arrived. The clay tablets and stone monuments that have been recovered reveal the family life of the people, their commercial undertakings, their system of legislation and land tenure, their epistolary correspondence, and the administration under which they lived, while the royal inscriptions and foundation-memorials throw light on the religious and historical events of the period in which they were inscribed. Information on all these points has been acquired as the result of excavation, and is based on the discoveries in the ruins of early cities which have remained buried beneath the soil for some thousands of years. But for the history of Assyria and of the other nations in the north there is still another source of information to which reference must now be made.

The kings of Assyria were not content with recording their achievements on the walls of their buildings, on stelae set up in their palaces and temples, on their tablets of annals preserved in their archive-chambers, and on their cylinders and foundation-memorials concealed within the actual structure of the buildings themselves. They have also left records graven in the living rock, and these have never been buried, but have been exposed to wind and weather from the moment they were engraved. Records of irrigation works and military operations successfully undertaken by Assyrian kings remain to this day on the face of the mountains to the north and east of Assyria. The kings of one great mountain race that had its capital at Van borrowed from the Assyrians this method of recording their achievements, and, adopting the Assyrian character, have left numerous rock-inscriptions in their own language in the mountains of Armenia and Kurdistan. In some instances the action of rain and frost has nearly if not quite obliterated the record, and a few have been defaced by the hand of man. But as the majority are engraved in panels cut on the sheer face of the rock, and are inaccessible except by means of ropes and tackle, they have escaped mutilation. The photograph reproduced will serve to show the means that must be adopted for reaching such rock-inscriptions in order to examine or copy them.

413.jpg Work in Progress on One of the Rock-inscriptions
Of Sennacherib

     In The Gorge Of The River Gomel, Near Bavian.

The inscription shown in the photograph is one of those cut by Sennacherib in the gorge near Bavian, through which the river Gomel flows, and can be reached only by climbing down ropes fixed to the top of the cliff. The choice of such positions by the kings who caused the inscriptions to be engraved was dictated by the desire to render it difficult to destroy them, but it has also had the effect of delaying to some extent their copying and decipherment by modern workers.

414.jpg the Principal Rock Sculptures in The Gorge of The
Gomel

     Near Bavian In Assyria.

Considerable progress, however, has recently been made in identifying and copying these texts, and we may here give a short account of what has been done and of the information furnished by the inscriptions that have been examined.

Recently considerable additions have been made to our knowledge of the ancient empire of Van and of its relation to the later kings of Assyria by the labours of Prof Lehmann and Dr. Belck on the inscriptions which the kings of that period caused to be engraved upon the rocks among the mountains of Armenia.

The flat roofs of the houses of the city of Van may be seen to the left of the photograph nestling below the rock.

The centre and capital of this empire was the ancient city which stood on the site of the modern town of Van at the southwest corner of the lake which bears the same name. The city was built at the foot of a natural rock which rises precipitously from the plain, and must have formed an impregnable stronghold against the attack of the foe.

In this citadel at the present day remain the ancient galleries and staircases and chambers which were cut in the living rock by the kings who made it their fortress, and their inscriptions, engraved upon the face of the rock on specially prepared and polished surfaces, enable us to reconstruct in some degree the history of that ancient empire. From time to time there have been found and copied other similar texts, which are cut on the mountainsides or on the massive stones which formed part of the construction of their buildings and fortifications. A complete collection of these texts, together with translations, will shortly be published by Prof. Lehmann. Meanwhile, this scholar has discussed and summarized the results to be obtained from much of his material, and we are thus already enabled to sketch the principal achievements of the rulers of this mountain race, who were constantly at war with the later kings of Assyria, and for two centuries at least disputed her claim to supremacy in this portion of Western Asia.

The country occupied by this ancient people of Van was the great table-land which now forms Armenia. The people themselves cannot be connected with the Armenians, for their language presents no characteristics of those of the Indo-European family, and it is equally certain that they are not to be traced to a Semitic origin. It is true that they employed the Assyrian method of writing their inscriptions, and their art differs only in minor points from that of the Assyrians, but in both instances this similarity of culture was directly borrowed at a time when the less civilized race, having its centre at Van, came into direct contact with the Assyrians.

417.jpg Ancient Flight of Steps and Gallery on the Face
Of the Rock-citadel of Van.

The exact date at which this influence began to be exerted is not certain, but we have records of immediate relations with Assyria in the second half of the ninth century before Christ. The district inhabited by the Vannic people was known to the Assyrians by the name of Urartu, and although the inscriptions of the earlier Assyrian kings do not record expeditions against that country, they frequently make mention of campaigns against princes and petty rulers of the land of Na'iri. They must therefore for long have exercised an indirect, if not a direct, influence on the peoples and tribes which lay more to the north.

The earliest evidence of direct contact between the Assyrians and the land of Urartu which we at present possess dates from the reign of Ashur-nasir-pal, and in the reign of his son Shalmaneser II three expeditions were undertaken against the people of Van. The name of the king of Urartu at this time was Arame, and his capital city, Arzasku, probably lay to the north of Lake Van. On all three occasions the Assyrians were victorious, forcing Arame to abandon his capital and capturing his cities as far as the sources of the Euphrates. Subsequently, in the year 833 B.C., Shalmaneser II made another attack upon the country, which at that time was under the sway of Sarduris I. Under this monarch the citadel of Van became the great stronghold of the people of Urartu, for he added to the natural strength of the position by the construction of walls built between the rock of Van and the harbour. The massive blocks of stone of which his fortifications were composed are standing at the present day, and they bear eloquent testimony to the energy with which this monarch devoted himself to the task of rendering his new citadel impregnable. The fortification and strengthening of Van and its citadel was carried on during the reigns of his direct successors and descendants, Ispui-nis, Menuas, and Argistis I, so that when Tiglath-pile-ser III brought fire and sword into the country and laid siege to Van in the reign of Sarduris II, he could not capture the citadel.

419.jpg Part of the Ancient Fortifications Of The City Of
Van, Between the Citadel and The Lake.

It was not difficult for the Assyrian king to assault and capture the city itself, which lay at the foot of the citadel as it does at the present day, but the latter, within the fortifications of which Sarduris and his garrison withdrew, proved itself able to withstand the Assyrian attack. The expedition of Tiglath-pileser III did not succeed in crushing the Vannic empire, for Rusas I, the son and successor of Sarduris II, allied himself to the neighbouring mountain races and gave considerable trouble to Sargon, the Assyrian king, who was obliged to undertake an expedition to check their aggressions.

It was probably Rusas I who erected the buildings on Toprak Kala, the hill to the east of Van, traces of which remain to the present day. He built a palace and a temple, and around them he constructed a new city with a reservoir to supply it with water, possibly because the slopes of Toprak Kala rendered it easier of defence than the city in the plain (beneath the rock and citadel) which had fallen an easy prey to Tiglath-pileser III. The site of the temple on Toprak Kala has been excavated by the trustees of the British Museum, and our knowledge of Vannic art is derived from the shields and helmets of bronze and small bronze figures and fittings which were recovered from this building. One of the shields brought to the British Museum from the Toprak Kala, where it originally hung with others on the temple walls, bears the name of Argistis II, who was the son and successor of Rusas I, and who attempted to give trouble to the Assyrians by stirring the inhabitants of the land of Kummukh (Kommagene) to revolt against Sargon. His son, Rusas II, was the contemporary of Esarhaddon, and from some recently discovered rock-inscriptions we learn that he extended the limits of his kingdom on the west and secured victories against Mushki (Meshech) to the southeast of the Halys and against the Hittites in Northern Syria. Rusas III rebuilt the temple on Toprak Kala, as we know from an inscription of his on one of the shields from that place in the British Museum. Both he and Sarduris III were on friendly terms with the Assyrians, for we know that they both sent embassies to Ashur-bani-pal.

By far the larger number of rock-inscriptions that have yet been found and copied in the mountainous districts bordering on Assyria were engraved by this ancient Vannic people, and Drs. Lehmann and Belck have done good service by making careful copies and collations of all those which are at present known. Work on other classes of rock-inscriptions has also been carried on by other travellers. A new edition of the inscriptions of Sennacherib in the gorge of the Gomel, near the village of Bavian, has been made by Mr. King, who has also been fortunate enough to find a number of hitherto unknown inscriptions in Kurdistan on the Judi Dagh and at the sources of the Tigris. The inscriptions at the mouth of the Nahr el-Kelb, "the Dog River," in Syria, have been reexamined by Dr. Knudtzon, and the long inscription which Nebuchadnezzar II cut on the rocks at Wadi Brissa in the Lebanon, formerly published by M. Pognon, has been recopied by Dr. Weissbach. Finally, the great trilingual inscription of Darius Hystaspes on the rock at Bisutun in Persia, which was formerly copied by the late Sir Henry Raw-linson and used by him for the successful decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, was completely copied last year by Messrs. King and Thompson.

     Messrs. King and Thompson are preparing a new edition of
     this inscription.

The main facts of the history of Assyria under her later kings and of Babylonia during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods were many years ago correctly ascertained, and recent excavation and research have done little to add to our knowledge of the history of these periods. It was hoped that the excavations conducted by Dr. Koldewey at Babylon would result in the recovery of a wealth of inscriptions and records referring to the later history of the country, but unfortunately comparatively few tablets or inscriptions have been found, and those that have been recovered consist mainly of building-inscriptions and votive texts. One such building-inscription contains an interesting historical reference. It occurs on a barrel-cylinder of clay inscribed with a text of Nabopolassar, and it was found in the temple of Ninib and records the completion and restoration of the temple by the king. In addition to recording the building operations he had carried out in the temple, Nabopolassar boasts of his opposition to the Assyrians. He says: "As for the Assyrians who had ruled all peoples from distant days and had set the people of the land under a heavy yoke, I, the weak and humble man who worshippeth the Lord of Lords (i.e. the god Marduk), through the mighty power of Nabû and Marduk, my lords, held back their feet from the land of Akkad and cast off their yoke."

It is not yet certain whether the Babylonians under Nabopolassar actively assisted Cyaxares and the Medes in the siege and in the subsequent capture of Nineveh in 606 B.C. but this newly discovered reference to the Assyrians by Nabopolassar may possibly be taken to imply that the Babylonians were passive and not active allies of Cyaxares. If the cylinder were inscribed after the fall of Nineveh we should have expected Nabopolassar, had he taken an active part in the capture of the city, to have boasted in more definite terms of his achievement. On his stele which is preserved at Constantinople, Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire, who himself suffered defeat at the hands of Cyrus, King of Persia, ascribed the fall of Nineveh to the anger of Marduk and the other gods of Babylon because of the destruction of their city and the spoliation of their temples by Sennacherib in 689 B.C. We see the irony of fate in the fact that Cyrus also ascribed the defeat and deposition of Nabonidus and the fall of Babylon to Marduk's intervention, whose anger he alleges was aroused by the attempt of Nabonidus to concentrate the worship of the local city-gods in Babylon.

Thus it will be seen that recent excavation and research have not yet supplied the data for filling in such gaps as still remain in our knowledge of the later history of Assyria and Babylon. The closing years of the Assyrian empire and the military achievements of the great Neo-Babylonian rulers, Nabopolassar, Nerig-lissar, and Nebuchadnezzar II, have not yet been found recorded in any published Assyrian or Babylonian inscription, but it may be expected that at any moment some text will be discovered that will throw light upon the problems connected with the history of those periods which still await solution. Meanwhile, the excavations at Babylon, although they have not added much to our knowledge of the later history of the country, have been of immense service in revealing the topography of the city during the Neo-Babylonian period, as well as the positions, plans, and characters of the principal buildings erected by the later Babylonian kings. The discovery of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar II on the mound of the Kasr, of the small but complete temple E-makh, of the temple of the goddess Nin-makh to the northeast of the palaces, and of the sacred road dividing them and passing through the Great Gate of Ishtar (adorned with representations of lions, bulls, and dragons in raised brick upon its walls) has enabled us to form some conception of the splendour and magnificence of the city as it appeared when rebuilt by its last native rulers. Moreover, the great temple E-sagila, the famous shrine of the god Marduk, has been identified and partly excavated beneath the huge mound of Tell Amran ibn-Ali, while a smaller and less famous temple of Ninib has been discovered in the lower mounds which lie to the eastward. Finally, the sacred way from E-sagila to the palace mound has been traced and uncovered. We are thus enabled to reconstitute the scene of the most solemn rite of the Babylonian festival of the New Year, when the statue of the god Marduk was carried in solemn procession along this road from the temple to the palace, and the Babylonian king made his yearly obeisance to the national god, placing his own hands within those of Marduk, in token of his submission to and dependence on the divine will.

425.jpg Within the Shrine Op E-makh, The Temple Op The
Goddess Nin-makh.

Though recent excavations have not led to any startling discoveries with regard to the history of Western Asia during the last years of the Babylonian empire, research among the tablets dating from the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods has lately added considerably to our knowledge of Babylonian literature. These periods were marked by great literary activity on the part of the priests at Babylon, Sippar, and elsewhere, who, under the royal orders, scoured the country for all remains of the early literature which was preserved in the ancient temples and archives of the country, and made careful copies and collections of all they found. Many of these tablets containing Neo-Babylonian copies of earlier literary texts are preserved in the British Museum, and have been recently published, and we have thus recovered some of the principal grammatical, religious, and magical compositions of the earlier Babylonian period.

     Between The Mound Of The Kasr And Tell Amran Ibn-Ali,
     Showing A Section Of The Paved Sacred Way.

Among the most interesting of such recent finds is a series of tablets inscribed with the Babylonian legends concerning the creation of the world and man, which present many new and striking parallels to the beliefs on these subjects embodied in Hebrew literature. We have not space to treat this subject at greater length in the present work, but we may here note that discovery and research in its relation to the later empires that ruled at Babylon have produced results of literary rather than of historical importance. But we should exceed the space at our disposal if we attempted even to skim this fascinating field of study in which so much has recently been achieved. For it is time we turned once more to Egypt and directed our inquiry towards ascertaining what recent research has to tell us with regard to her inhabitants during the later periods of her existence as a nation of the ancient world.

CHAPTER IX—THE LAST DAYS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Before we turned from Egypt to summarize the information, afforded by recent discoveries, upon the history of Western Asia under the kings of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, we noted that the Asiatic empire of Egypt was regained by the reactionary kings of the XIXth Dynasty, after its temporary loss owing to the vagaries of Akhunaten. Palestine remained Egyptian throughout the period of the judges until the foundation of the kingdom of Judah. With the decline of military spirit in Egypt and the increasing power of the priesthood, authority over Asia became less and less a reality. Tribute was no longer paid, and the tribes wrangled without a restraining hand, during the reigns of the successors of Ramses III. By the time of the priest-kings of Thebes (the XXIst Dynasty) the authority of the Pharaohs had ceased to be exercised in Syria. Egypt was itself divided into two kingdoms, the one ruled by Northern descendants of the Ramessids at Tanis, the other by the priestly monarchs at Thebes, who reigned by right of inheritance as a result of the marriage of the daughter of Ramses with the high priest Amenhetep, father of Herhor, the first priest-king. The Thebans fortified Gebelên in the South and el-Hêbi in the North against attack, and evidently their relations with the Tanites were not always friendly.

In Syria nothing of the imperial power remained. The prestige of the god Amen of Thebes, however, was still very great. We see this clearly from a very interesting papyrus of the reign of Herhor, published in 1899 by Mr. Golenischeff, which describes the adventures of Uenuamen, an envoy sent (about 1050 B.C.) to Phoenicia to bring wood from the mountains of Lebanon for the construction of a great festival bark of the god Amen at Thebes. In the course of his mission he was very badly treated (We cannot well imagine Thothmes III or Amenhetep III tolerating ill-treatment of their envoy!) and eventually shipwrecked on the coast of the land of Alashiya or Cyprus. He tells us in the papyrus, which seems to be the official report of his mission, that, having been given letters of credence to the Prince of Byblos from the King of Tanis, "to whom Amen had given charge of his North-land," he at length reached Phoenicia, and after much discussion and argument was able to prevail upon the prince to have the wood which he wanted brought down from Lebanon to the seashore.

Here, however, a difficulty presented itself,—the harbour was filled with the piratical ships of the Cretan Tjakaray, who refused to allow Uenuamen to return to Egypt. They said, 'Seize him; let no ship of his go unto the land of Egypt!' "Then," says Uenuamen in the papyrus, "I sat down and wept. The scribe of the prince came out unto me; he said unto me, 'What ail-eth thee?' I replied, 'Seest thou not the birds which fly, which fly back unto Egypt? Look at them, they go unto the cool canal, and how long do I remain abandoned here? Seest thou not those who would prevent my return?' He went away and spoke unto the prince, who began to weep at the words which were told unto him and which were so sad. He sent his scribe out unto me, who brought me two measures of wine and a deer. He sent me Tentnuet, an Egyptian singing-girl who was with him, saying unto her, 'Sing unto him, that he may not grieve!' He sent word unto me, 'Eat, drink, and grieve not! To-morrow shalt thou hear all that I shall say.' On the morrow he had the people of his harbour summoned, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said unto the Tjakaray, 'What aileth you?' They answered him, 'We will pursue the piratical ships which thou sendest unto Egypt with our unhappy companions.' He said unto them, 'I cannot seize the ambassador of Amen in my land. Let me send him away and then do ye pursue after him to seize him!' He sent me on board, and he sent me away... to the haven of the sea. The wind drove me upon the land of Alashiya. The people of the city came out in order to slay me. I was dragged by them to the place where Hatiba, the queen of the city, was. I met her as she was going out of one of her houses into the other. I greeted her and said unto the people who stood by her, 'Is there not one among you who understandeth the speech of Egypt?' One of them replied, 'I understand it.' I said unto him, 'Say unto thy mistress: even as far as the city in which Amen dwelleth (i. e. Thebes) have I heard the proverb, "In all cities is injustice done; only in Alashiya is justice to be found," and now is injustice done here every day!' She said, 'What is it that thou sayest?' I said unto her, 'Since the sea raged and the wind drove me upon the land in which thou livest, therefore thou wilt not allow them to seize my body and to kill me, for verily I am an ambassador of Amen. Remember that I am one who will be sought for always. And if these men of the Prince of Byblos whom they seek to kill (are killed), verily if their chief finds ten men of thine, will he not kill them also?' She summoned the men, and they were brought before her. She said unto me, 'Lie down and sleep...'"

At this point the papyrus breaks off, and we do not know how Uenuamen returned to Egypt with his wood. The description of his casting-away and landing on Alashiya is quite Homeric, and gives a vivid picture of the manners of the time. The natural impulse of the islanders is to kill the strange castaway, and only the fear of revenge and of the wrath of a distant foreign deity restrains them. Alashiya is probably Cyprus, which also bore the name Yantinay from the time of Thothmes III until the seventh century, when it is called Yatnan by the Assyrians. A king of Alashiya corresponded with Amenhetep III in cuneiform on terms of perfect equality, three hundred years before: "Brother," he writes, "should the small amount of the copper which I have sent thee be displeasing unto thy heart, it is because in my land the hand of Nergal my lord slew all the men of my land (i.e. they died of the plague), and there was no working of copper; and this was, my brother, not pleasing unto thy heart. Thy messenger with my messenger swiftly will I send, and whatsoever amount of copper thou hast asked for, O my brother, I, even I, will send it unto thee." The mention by Herhor's envoy of Nesibinebdad (Smendes), the King of Tanis, a powerful ruler who in reality constantly threatened the existence of the priestly monarchy at Thebes, as "him to whom Amen has committed the wardship of his North-land," is distinctly amusing. The hard fact of the independence of Lower Egypt had to be glozed somehow.

The days of Theban power were coming to an end and only the prestige of the god Amen remained strong for two hundred years more. But the alliance of Amen and his priests with a band of predatory and destroying foreign conquerors, the Ethiopians (whose rulers were the descendants of the priest-kings, who retired to Napata on the succession of the powerful Bubastite dynasty of Shishak to that of Tanis, abandoning Thebes to the Northerners), did much to destroy the prestige of Amen and of everything connected with him. An Ethiopian victory meant only an Assyrian reconquest, and between them Ethiopians and Assyrians had well-nigh ruined Egypt. In the Saïte period Thebes had declined greatly in power as well as in influence, and all its traditions were anathema to the leading people of the time, although not of course in Akhunaten's sense.

With the Saïte period we seem almost to have retraced our steps and to have reentered the age of the Pyramid Builders. All the pomp and glory of Thothmes, Amenhetep, and Ramses were gone. The days of imperial Egypt were over, and the minds of men, sickened of foreign war, turned for peace and quietness to the simpler ideals of the IVth and Vth Dynasties. We have already seen that an archaistic revival of the styles of the early dynasties is characteristic of this late period, and that men were buried at Sakkâra and at Thebes in tombs which recall in form and decoration those of the courtiers of the Pyramid Builders. Everywhere we see this fashion of archaism. A Theban noble of this period named Aba was buried at Thebes. Long ago, nearly three thousand years before, under the VIth Dynasty, there had lived a great noble of the same name, who was buried in a rock-tomb at Dêr el-Gebrâwî, in Middle Egypt. This tomb was open and known in the days of the second Aba, who caused to be copied and reproduced in his tomb in the Asasîf at Thebes most of the scenes from the bas-relief with which it had been decorated. The tomb of the VIth Dynasty Aba has lately been copied for the Archaeological Survey of Egypt (Egypt Exploration Fund) by Mr. de Garis Davies, who has found the reliefs of the XXVIth Dynasty Aba of considerable use to him in reconstituting destroyed portions of their ancient originals.

During late years important discoveries of objects of this era have been few. One of the most noteworthy is that of a contemporary inscription describing the battle of Momemphis, which is mentioned by Herodotus (ii, 163, 169). We now have the official account of this battle, and know that it took place in the third year of the reign of Amasis—not before he became king. This was the fight in which the unpatriotic king, Apries, who had paid for his partiality for the Greeks of Nau-kratis with the loss of his throne, was finally defeated. As we see from this inscription, he was probably murdered by the country people during his flight.

The following are the most important passages of the inscription: "His Majesty (Amasis) was in the Festival-Hall, discussing plans for his whole land, when one came to say unto him, 'Hââ-ab-Râ (Apries) is rowing up; he hath gone on board the ships which have crossed over. Haunebu (Greeks), one knows not their number, are traversing the North-land, which is as if it had no master to rule it; he (Apries) hath summoned them, they are coming round him. It is he who hath arranged their settlement in the Peh-ân (the An-dropolite name); they infest the whole breadth of Egypt, those who are on thy waters fly before them!'... His Majesty mounted his chariot, having taken lance and bow in his hand... (the enemy) reached Andropolis; the soldiers sang with joy on the roads... they did their duty in destroying the enemy. His Majesty fought like a lion; he made victims among them, one knows not how many. The ships and their warriors were overturned, they saw the depths as do the fishes. Like a flame he extended, making a feast of fighting. His heart rejoiced.... The third year, the 8th Athyr, one came to tell Majesty: 'Let their vile-ness be ended! They throng the roads, there are thousands there ravaging the land; they fill every road. Those who are in ships bear thy terror in their hearts. But it is not yet finished.' Said his Majesty unto his soldiers: '...Young men and old men, do this in the cities and nomes!'... Going upon every road, let not a day pass without fighting their galleys!'... The land was traversed as by the blast of a tempest, destroying their ships, which were abandoned by the crews. The people accomplished their fate, killing the prince (Apries) on his couch, when he had gone to repose in his cabin. When he saw his friend overthrown... his Majesty himself buried him (Apries), in order to establish him as a king possessing virtue, for his Majesty decreed that the hatred of the gods should be removed from him."

This is the event to which we have already referred in a preceding chapter, as proving the great amelioration of Egyptian ideas with regard to the treatment of a conquered enemy, as compared with those of other ancient nations. Amasis refers to the deposed monarch as his "friend," and buries him in a manner befitting a king at the charges of Amasis himself. This act warded off from the spirit of Apries the just anger of the gods at his partiality for the "foreign devils," and ensured his reception by Osiris as a king neb menkh, "possessing virtues."

The town of Naukratis, where Apries established himself, had been granted to the Greek traders by Psametik I a century or more before. Mr. D. G. Hogarth's recent exploration of the site has led to a considerable modification of our first ideas of the place, which were obtained from Prof. Petrie 's excavations. Prof. Petrie was the discoverer of Naukratis, and his diggings told us what Naukratis was like in the first instance, but Mr. Hogarth has shown that several of his identifications were erroneous and that the map of the place must be redrawn. The chief error was in the placing of the Hellenion (the great meeting-place of the Greeks), which is now known to be in quite a different position from that assigned to it by Prof. Petrie. The "Great Temenos" of Prof. Petrie has now been shown to be non-existent. Mr. Hogarth has also pointed out that an old Egyptian town existed at Nau-kratis long before the Greeks came there. This town is mentioned on a very interesting stele of black basalt (discovered at Tell Gaif, the site of Naukratis, and now in the Cairo Museum), under the name of "Permerti, which is called Nukrate." The first is the old Egyptian name, the second the Greek name adapted to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stele was erected by Tekhtnebf, the last native king of Egypt, to commemorate his gifts to the temples of Neïth on the occasion of his accession at Sais. It is beautifully cut, and the inscription is written in a curious manner, with alphabetic spellings instead of ideographs, and ideographs instead of alphabetic spellings, which savours fully of the affectation of the learned pedant who drafted it; for now, of course, in the fourth century before Christ, nobody but a priestly antiquarian could read hieroglyphics. Demotic was the only writing for practical purposes.

We see this fact well illustrated in the inscriptions of the Ptolemaïc temples. The accession of the Ptolemies marked a great increase in the material wealth of Egypt, and foreign conquest again came in fashion. Ptolemy Euergetes marched into Asia in the grand style of a Ramses and brought back the images of gods which had been carried off by Esarhaddon or Nebuchadnezzar II centuries before. He was received on his return to Egypt with acclamations as a true successor of the Pharaohs. The imperial spirit was again in vogue, and the archaistic simplicity and independence of the Saïtes gave place to an archaistic imperialism, the first-fruits of which were the repair and building of temples in the great Pharaonic style. On these we see the Ptolemies masquerading as Pharaohs, and the climax of absurdity is reached when Ptolemy Auletes (the Piper) is seen striking down Asiatic enemies in the manner of Amen-hetep or Ramses! This scene is directly copied from a Ramesside temple, and we find imitations of reliefs of Ramses II so slavish that the name of the earlier king is actually copied, as well as the relief, and appears above the figure of a Ptolemy. The names of the nations who were conquered by Thothmes III are repeated on Ptolemaic sculptures to do duty for the conquered of Euergetes, with all sorts of mistakes in spelling, naturally, and also with later interpolations. Such an inscription is that in the temple of Kom Ombo, which Prof. Say ce has held to contain the names of "Caphtor and Casluhim" and to prove the knowledge of the latter name in the fourteenth century before Christ. The name of Caphtor is the old Egyptian Keftiu (Crete); that of Casluhim is unknown in real Old Egyptian inscriptions, and in this Ptolemaic list at Kom Ombo it may be quite a late interpolation in the lists, perhaps no older than the Persian period, since we find the names of Parsa (Persia) and Susa, which were certainly unknown to Thothmes III, included in it. We see generally from the Ptolemaic inscriptions that nobody could read them but a few priests, who often made mistakes. One of the most serious was the identification of Keftiu with Phoenicia in the Stele of Canopus. This misled modern archaeologists down to the time of Dr. Evans's discoveries at Knossos, though how these utterly un-Semitic looking Keftiu could have been Phoenicians was a puzzle to everybody. We now know, of course, that they were Mycenaean or Minoan Cretans, and that the Ptolemaic antiquaries made a mistake in identifying the land of Keftiu with Phoenicia.

We must not, however, say too much in dispraise of the Ptolemaic Egyptians and their works. We have to be grateful to them indeed for the building of the temples of Edfu and Dendera, which, owing to their later date, are still in good preservation, while the best preserved of the old Pharaonic fanes, such as Medinet Habû, have suffered considerably from the ravages of time. Eor these temples show us to-day what an old Egyptian temple, when perfect, really looked like. They are, so to speak, perfect mummies of temples, while of the old buildings we have nothing but the disjointed and damaged skeletons.

A good deal of repairing has been done to these buildings, especially to that at Edfu, of late years. But the main archaeological interest of Ptolemaic and Roman times has been found in the field of epigraphy and the study of papyri, with which the names of Messrs. Kenyon, Grenfell, and Hunt are chiefly connected. The treasures which have lately been obtained by the British Museum in the shape of the manuscripts of Aristotle's "Constitution of Athens," the lost poems of Bacchylides, and the Mimes of Herondas, all of which have been published for the trustees of that institution by Mr. Kenyon, are known to those who are interested in these subjects. The long series of publications of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, issued at the expense of the Egypt Exploration Fund (Graeco-Roman branch), with the exception of the volume of discoveries at Teb-tunis, which was issued by the University of California, is also well known.

The two places with which Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt's work has been chiefly connected are the Fayyûm and Behnesâ, the site of the ancient Permje or Oxyr-rhynchus. The lake-province of the Fayyûm, which attained such prominence in the days of the XIIth Dynasty, seems to have had little or no history during the whole period of the New Empire, but in Ptolemaic times it revived and again became one of the richest and most important provinces of Egypt. The town of Arsinoë was founded at Crocodilopolis, where are now the mounds of Kom el-Fâris (The Mound of the Horseman), near Medinet el-Payyum, and became the capital of the province. At Illahûn, just outside the entrance to the Fayyûm, was the great Nile harbour and entrepôt of the lake-district, called Ptolemaïs Hormos.

The explorations of Messrs. Hogarth, Grenfell, and Hunt in the years of 1895-6 and 1898-9 resulted in the identification of the sites of the ancient cities of Karanis (Kom Ushîm), Bacchias (Omm el-'Atl), Euhemeria (Kasr el-Banât), Theadelphia (Harît), and Philoteris (Wadfa). The work for the University of California in 18991900 at Umm el-Baragat showed that this place was Tebtunis. Dime, on the northern coast of the Birket Karûn, the modern representative of the ancient Lake Moeris, is now known to be the ancient Sokno-paiou Nesos (the Isle of Soknopaios), a local form of Sebek, the crocodile-god of the Fayyûm. At Karanis this god was worshipped under the name of Petesuchos ("He whom Sebek has given"), in conjunction with Osiris Pnepherôs (P-nefer-ho, "the beautiful of face"); at Tebtunis he became Seknebtunis., i.e. Sebek-neb-Teb-tunis (Sebek, lord of Tebtunis). This is a typical example of the portmanteau pronunciations of the latter-day Egyptians.

Many very interesting discoveries were made during the course of the excavations of these places (besides Mr. Hogarth's find of the temple of Petesuchos and Pnepherôs at Karanis), consisting of Roman pottery of varied form and Roman agricultural implements, including a perfect plough.* The main interest of all, however, lies, both here and at Behnesâ, in the papyri. They consist of Greek and Latin documents of all ages from the early Ptolemaic to the Christian. In fact, Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt have been unearthing and sifting the contents of the waste-paper baskets of the ancient Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptians, which had been thrown out on to dust-heaps near the towns. Nothing perishes in,, the dry climate and soil of Egypt, so the contents of the ancient dust-heaps have been preserved intact until our own day, and have been found by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, just as the contents of the houses of the ancient Indian rulers of Chinese Turkestan, at Niya and Khotan, with their store of Kha-roshthi documents, have been preserved intact in the dry Tibetan desert climate and have been found by Dr. Stein.** There is much analogy between the discoveries of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt and those of Dr. Stein in Turkestan.

     * Illustrated on Plate IX of Fayûm Towns and Their Papyri.

     ** See Dr. Stein's Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan, London,
     1903.

The Græco-Egyptian documents are of all kinds, consisting of letters, lists, deeds, notices, tax-assessments, receipts, accounts, and business records of every sort and kind, besides new fragments of classical authors and the important "Sayings of Jesus," discovered at Behnesâ, which have been published in a special popular form by the Egypt Exploration Fund.*

     * Aoyla 'Itjffov, 1897, and New Sayings of Jesus, 1904.

These last fragments of the oldest Christian literature, which are of such great importance and interest to all Christians, cannot be described or discussed here. The other documents are no less important to the student of ancient literature, the historian, and the sociologist. The classical fragments include many texts of lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ancestors or even the Elizabethans.

This is a boy's letter to his father, who would not take him up to town with him to see the sights: "Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won't take me with you to Alexandria, I won't write you a letter, or speak to you, or say good-bye to you; and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand or ever greet you again. That is what will happen if you won't take me. Mother said to Archelaus, 'It quite upsets him to be left behind.' It was good of you to send me presents on the 12th, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink: there now!'" Is not this more like the letter of a spoiled child of to-day than are the solemnly dutiful epistles of even our grandfathers and grandmothers when young? The touch about "Mother said to Archelaus, 'It quite upsets him to be left behind'" is delightfully like the modern small boy, and the final request and threat are also eminently characteristic.

Here is a letter asking somebody to redeem the writer's property from the pawnshop: "Now please redeem my property from Sarapion. It is pledged for two minas. I have paid the interest up to the month Epeiph, at the rate of a stater per mina. There is a casket of incense-wood, and another of onyx, a tunic, a white veil with a real purple border, a handkerchief, a tunic with a Laconian stripe, a garment of purple linen, two armlets, a necklace, a coverlet, a figure of Aphrodite, a cup, a big tin flask, and a wine-jar. From Onetor get the two bracelets. They have been pledged since the month Tybi of last year for eight... at the rate of a stater per mina. If the cash is insufficient owing to the carelessness of Theagenis, if, I say, it is insufficient, sell the bracelets and make up the money." Here is an affectionate letter of invitation: "Greeting, my dear Serenia, from Petosiris. Be sure, dear, to come up on the 20th for the birthday festival of the god, and let me know whether you are coming by boat or by donkey, that we may send for you accordingly. Take care not to forget."

Here is an advertisement of a gymnastic display:

"The assault-at-arms by the youths will take place to-morrow, the 24th. Tradition, no less than the distinguished character of the festival, requires that they should do their utmost in the gymnastic display. Two performances." Signed by Dioskourides, magistrate of Oxyrrhynchus.

Here is a report from a public physician to a magistrate: "To Claudianus, the mayor, from Dionysos, public physician. I was to-day instructed by you, through Herakleides your assistant, to inspect the body of a man who had been found hanged, named Hierax, and to report to you my opinion of it. I therefore inspected the body in the presence of the aforesaid Herakleides at the house of Epagathus in the Broadway ward, and found it hanged by a noose, which fact I accordingly report." Dated in the twelfth year of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 173).

The above translations are taken, slightly modified, from those in The Oxyrrhynchus Papyri, vol. i. The next specimen, a quaint letter, is translated from the text in Mr. Grenfell's Greek Papyri (Oxford, 1896), p. 69: "To Noumen, police captain and mayor, from Pokas son of Onôs, unpaid policeman. I have been maltreated by Peadius the priest of the temple of Sebek in Crocodilopolis. On the first epagomenal day of the eleventh year, after having abused me about... in the aforesaid temple, the person complained against sprang upon me and in the presence of witnesses struck me many blows with a stick which he had. And as part of my body was not covered, he tore my shirt, and this fact I called upon the bystanders to bear witness to. Wherefore I request that if it seems proper you will write to Klearchos the headman to send him to you, in order that, if what I have written is true, I may obtain justice at your hands."

A will of Hadrian's reign, taken from the Oxyrrhynchus Papyri (i, p. 173), may also be of interest: "This is the last will and testament, made in the street (i.e. at a street notary's stand), of Pekysis, son of Hermes and Didyme, an inhabitant of Oxyrrhynchus, being sane and in his right mind. So long as I live, I am to have powers over my property, to alter my will as I please. But if I die with this will unchanged, I devise my daughter Ammonous whose mother is Ptolema, if she survive me, but if not then her children, heir to my shares in the common house, court, and rooms situate in the Cretan ward. All the furniture, movables, and household stock and other property whatever that I shall leave, I bequeath to the mother of my children and my wife Ptolema, the freedwoman of Demetrius, son of Hermippus, with the condition that she shall have for her lifetime the right of using, dwelling in, and building in the said house, court, and rooms. If Ammonous should die without children and intestate, the share of the fixtures shall belong to her half-brother on the mother's side, Anatas, if he survive, but if not, to... No one shall violate the terms of this my will under pain of paying to my daughter and heir Ammonous a fine of 1,000 drachmae and to the treasury an equal sum." Here follow the signatures of testator and witnesses, who are described, as in a passport, one of them as follows: "I, Dionysios, son of Dionysios of the same city, witness the will of Pekysis. I am forty-six years of age, have a curl over my right temple, and this is my seal of Dionysoplaton."

During the Roman period, which we have now reached in our survey, the temple building of the Ptolemies was carried on with like energy. One of the best-known temples of the Roman period is that at Philse, which is known as the "Kiosk," or "Pharaoh's Bed." Owing to the great picturesqueness of its situation, this small temple, which was built in the reign of Trajan, has been a favourite subject for the painters of the last fifty years, and next to the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and Karnak, it is probably the most widely known of all Egyptian buildings. Recently it has come very much to the front for an additional reason. Like all the other temples of Philse, it had been archæologically surveyed and cleared by Col. H. Gr. Lyons and Dr. Borchardt, but further work of a far-reaching character was rendered necessary by the building of the great Aswan dam, below the island of Philse, one of the results of which has been the partial submergence of the island and its temples, including the picturesque Kiosk. The following account, taken from the new edition (1906) of Murray's Guide to Egypt and the Sudan, will suffice better than any other description to explain what the dam is, how it has affected Philse, and what work has been done to obviate the possibility of serious damage to the Kiosk and other buildings.

"In 1898 the Egyptian government signed a contract with Messrs. John Aird & Co. for the construction of the great reservoir and dam at Shellâl, which serves for the storage of water at the time of the flood Nile. The river is 'held up' here sixty-five feet above its old normal level. A great masonry dyke, 150 feet high in places, has been carried across the Bab el-Kebir of the First Cataract, and a canal and four locks, two hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, allow for the passage of traffic up and down the river.

Showing Water Rushing
Through The Sluices

The dam is 2,185 yards long and over ninety feet thick at the base; in places it rises one hundred feet above the bed of the river. It is built of the local red granite, and at each end the granite dam is built into the granite hillside. Seven hundred and eight thousand cubic yards of masonry were used. The sluices are 180 in number, and are arranged at four different levels. The sight of the great volume of water pouring through them is a very fine one. The Nile begins to rise in July, and at the end of November it is necessary to begin closing the sluice-gates to hold up the water. By the end of February the reservoir is usually filled and Philæ partially submerged, so that boats can sail in and out of the colonnades and Pharaoh's Bed. By the beginning of July the water has been distributed, and it then falls to its normal level.

"It is of course regrettable that the engineers were unable to find another site for the dam, as it seemed inevitable that some damage would result to the temples of Philæ from their partial submergence. Korosko was proposed as a site, but was rejected for cogent reasons, and apparently Shellâl was the only possible place. Further, no serious person, who places the greatest good of the greatest number above considerations of the picturesque and the 'interesting,' will deny that if it is necessary to sacrifice Philæ to the good of the people of Egypt, Philæ must go. 'Let the dead bury their dead.' The concern of the rulers of Egypt must be with the living people of Egypt rather than with the dead bones of the past; and they would not be doing their duty did they for a moment allow artistic and archaeological considerations to outweigh in their minds the practical necessities of the country. This does not in the least imply that they do not owe a lesser duty to the monuments of Egypt, which are among the most precious relics of the past history of mankind. They do owe this lesser duty, and with regard to Philae it has been conscientiously fulfilled. The whole temple, in order that its stability may be preserved under the stress of submersion, has been braced up and underpinned, under the superintendence of Mr. Ball, of the Survey Department, who has most efficiently carried out this important work, at a cost of £22,000.

449.jpg the Kiosk at Philae in Process of Underpinning
And Restoration, January, 1902.

Steel girders have been fixed across the island from quay to quay, and these have been surrounded by cement masonry, made water-tight by forcing in cement grout. Pharaoh's Bed and the colonnade have been firmly underpinned in cement masonry, and there is little doubt that the actual stability of Philae is now more certain than that of any other temple in Egypt. The only possible damage that can accrue to it is the partial discolouration of the lower courses of the stonework of Pharaoh's Bed, etc., which already bear a distinct high-water mark. Some surface disintegration from the formation of salt crystals is perhaps inevitable here, but the effects of this can always be neutralized by careful washing, which it should be an important charge of the Antiquities Department to regularly carry out."

450.jpg the Ancient Quay Op PhilÆ, November, 1904.

     This is entirely covered when the reservoir is full, and the
     palm-trees are farther submerged.

The photographs accompanying the present chapter show the dam, the Kiosk in process of conservation and underpinning (1902), and the shores of the island as they now appear in the month of November, with the water nearly up to the level of the quays. A view is also given of the island of Konosso, with its inscriptions, as it is now. The island is simply a huge granite boulder of the kind characteristic of the neighbourhood of Shellâl (Phila?) and Aswan.

On the island of Elephantine, opposite Aswan, an interesting discovery has lately been made by Mr. Howard Carter. This is a remarkable well, which was supposed by the ancients to lie immediately on the tropic. It formed the basis of Eratosthenes' calculations of the measurement of the earth. Important finds of documents written in Aramaic have also been made here; they show that there was on the island in Ptolemaic times a regular colony of Syrian merchants.

South of Aswan and Philse begins Nubia. The Nubian language, which is quite different from Arabic, is spoken by everybody on the island of Elephantine, and its various dialects are used as far south as Dongola, where Arabic again is generally spoken till we reach the land of the negroes, south of Khartum. In Ptolemaic and Roman days the Nubians were a powerful people, and the whole of Nubia and the modern North Sudan formed an independent kingdom, ruled by queens who bore the title or name of Candace. It was the eunuch of a Candace who was converted to Christianity as he was returning from a mission to Jerusalem to salute Jehovah. "Go and join thyself unto his chariot" was the command to Philip, and when the Ethiopian had heard the gospel from his lips he went on his way rejoicing. The capital of this Candace was at Meroë, the modern Bagarawiya, near Shendi. Here, and at Naga not far off, are the remains of the temples of the Can-daces, great buildings of semi-barbaric Egyptian style. For the civilization of the Nubians, such as it was, was of Egyptian origin. Ever since Egyptian rule had been extended southwards to Jebel Barkal, beyond Dongola, in the time of Amenhetep II, Egyptian culture had influenced the Nubians. Amenhetep III built a temple to Amen at Napatà, the capital of Nubia, which lay under the shadow of Mount Barkal; Akhunaten erected a sanctuary of the Sun-Disk there; and Ramses II also built there.

452.jpg the Rook of Konosso in January, 1902, Before The
Building of the Dam and Formation Of The Reservoir.

The place in fact was a sort of appanage of the priests of Amen at Thebes, and when the last priest-king evacuated Thebes, leaving it to the Bubastites of the XXIId Dynasty, it was to distant Napata that he retired. Here a priestly dynasty continued to reign until, two centuries later, the troubles and misfortunes of Egypt seemed to afford an opportunity for the reassertion of the exiled Theban power. Piankhi Mera-men returned to Egypt in triumph as its rightful sovereign, but his successors, Shabak, Shabatak, and Tirha-kah, had to contend constantly with the Assyrians. Finally ITrdamaneh, Tirhakah's successor, returned to Nubia, leaving Egypt, in the decadence of the Assyrian might, free to lead a quiet existence under Psametik I and the succeeding monarchs of the XXVIth Dynasty. When Cambyses conquered Egypt he aspired to conquer Nubia also, but his army was routed and destroyed by the Napatan king, who tells us in an inscription how he defeated "the man Kambasauden," who had attacked him. At Napata the Nubian monarchs, one of the greatest of whom in Ptolemaic times was Ergam-enes, a contemporary of Ptolemy Philopator, continued to reign. But the first Roman governor of Egypt, Ælius Gallus, destroyed Napata, and the Nubians removed their capital to Meroë, where the Candaces reigned.

The monuments of this Nubian kingdom, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nure close by, the pyramids of Bagarawiya, the temples of Wadi Ben Naga, Mesawwarat en-Naga, and Mesawwarat es-Sufra ("Mesawwarat" proper), were originally investigated by Cailliaud and afterwards by Lepsius. During the last few years they and the pyramids excavated by Dr. E. A. Wallis-Budge, of the British Museum, for the Sudan government, have been again explored. As the results of his work are not yet fully published, it is possible at present only to quote the following description from Cook's Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan (by Dr. Budge), p. 6, of work on the pyramids of Jebel Barkal: "the writer excavated the shafts of one of the pyramids here in 1897, and at the depth of about twenty-five cubits found a group of three chambers, in one of which were a number of bones of the sheep which was sacrificed there about two thousand years ago, and also portions of a broken amphora which had held Rho-dian wine. A second shaft, which led to the mummy-chamber, was partly emptied, but at a further depth of twenty cubits water was found. The high-water mark of the reservoir when full is ——— and, as there were no visible means for pumping it out, the mummy-chamber could not be entered." With regard to the Bagarawîya pyramids, Dr. Budge writes, on p. 700 of the same work, à propos of the story of the Italian Ferlini that he found Roman jewelry in one of these pyramids: "In 1903 the writer excavated a number of the pyramids of Meroë for the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir F. R. Wingate, and he is convinced that the statements made by Ferlini are the result of misapprehension on his part. The pyramids are solid throughout, and the bodies are buried under them. When the details are complete the proofs for this will be published." Dr. Budge has also written upon the subject of the orientation of the Jebel Barkal and Nure pyramids.

454.jpg the Isle of Konosso, With Its Inscriptions

It is very curious to find the pyramids reappearing in Egyptian tomb-architecture in the very latest period of Egyptian history. We find them when Egyptian civilization was just entering upon its vigorous manhood, then they gradually disappear, only to revive in its decadent and exiled old age. The Ethiopian pyramids are all of much more elongated form than the old Egyptian ones. It is possible that they may be a survival of the archaistic movement of the XXVIth Dynasty, to which we have already referred.

These are not the latest Egyptian monuments in the Sudan, nor are the temples of Naga and Mesawwarat the most ancient, though they belong to the Roman period and are decidedly barbarian as to their style and, especially, as to their decoration. The southernmost as well as latest relic of Egypt in the Sudan is the Christian church of Soba, on the Blue Mie, a few miles above Khartum. In it was found a stone ram, an emblem of Amen-Râ, which had formerly stood in the temple of Naga and had been brought to Soba perhaps under the impression that it was the Christian Lamb. It was removed to the garden of the governor-general's palace at Khartum, where it now stands.

The church at Soba is a relic of the Christian kingdom of Alua, which succeeded the realm of the Candaces. One of its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the goddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so down to the twelfth century, when the soldiers of Islam conquered the country.

Of late pagan and early Christian Egypt very much that is new has been discovered during the last few years. The period of the Lower Empire has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in his Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, especially the letters of Flavius Abinæus, a military officer of the fourth century. The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown titles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes. "Glorious Dukes of the Thebaïd," "most magnificent counts and lieutenants," "all-praiseworthy secretaries," and the like strut across the pages of the letters and documents which begin "In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the God and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction." It is an extraordinary period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now entered, with its bizarre combination of the official titulary of the divine and eternal Cæsars Imperatores Augusti with the initial invocation of Christ and the Trinity. It is the transition from the ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.

In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the "Melkites" or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory put forward by Mr. Butler, in his Arab Conquest of Egypt, it is Cyril the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or "Great and Magnificent One," who played so doubtful a part in the epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually this Mukaukas has been regarded as a "noble Copt," and the Copts have generally been credited with having assisted the Islamites against the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.

In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual increase of Arab names after the conquest, more especially in those of the Archduke Rainer 's collection from the Fayyûm, which was so near the new capital city, Fustât. In Upper Egypt the change was not noticeable for a long time, and in the great collection of Coptic ostraka (inscriptions on slips of limestone and sherds of pottery, used as a substitute for paper or parchment), found in the ruins of the Coptic monastery established, on the temple site of Dêr el-Bahari, we find no Arab names. These documents, part of which have been published by Mr. W. E. Crum for the Egypt Exploration Fund, while another part will shortly be issued for the trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Hall, date to the seventh and eighth centuries. Their contents resemble those of the earlier papyri from Oxyrrhynchus, though they are not of so varied a nature and are generally written by persons of less intelligence, i.e. the monks and peasants of the monasteries and villages of Tjême, or Western Thebes. During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Dêr el-Bahari, more of these ostraka were found, which will be published for the Egypt Exploration Fund by Messrs. Naville and Hall. Of actual buildings of the Coptic period the most important excavations have been those of the French School of Cairo at Bâwît, north of Asyût. This work, which was carried on by M. Jean Clédat, has resulted in the discovery of very important frescoes and funerary inscriptions, belonging to the monastery of a famous martyr, St. Apollo. With these new discoveries of Christian Egypt our work reaches its fitting close. The frontier which divides the ancient from the modern world has almost been crossed. We look back from the monastery of Bâwît down a long vista of new discoveries until, four thousand years before, we see again the Great Heads coming to the Tomb of Den, Narmer inspecting the bodies of the dead Northerners, and, far away in Babylonia, Narâm-Sin crossing the mountains of the East to conquer Elam, or leading his allies against the prince of Sinai.

THE END.

PART 13D.

Main Index

Previous Part

HISTORY OF EGYPT

CHALDEA, SYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND ASSYRIA IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERY

BY L. W. KING and H. R. HALL Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum Containing over 1200 colored plates and illustrations. Copyright 1906

(Part 13d)

Contents

List of Illustrations

CHAPTER VII—TEMPLES AND TOMBS OF THEBES

CHAPTER VIII—THE ASSYRIAN AND NEO-BABYLONIAN EMPIRES IN THE LIGHT OF

CHAPTER IX—THE LAST DAYS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

CHALDEA, SYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND ASSYRIA
IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERY

BY L. W. KING and H. R. HALL

Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum

Containing over 1200 colored plates and illustrations.

Copyright 1906