Genesis,

party; and we can well understand why the wandering shepherds were an abomination in the sight of the more settled Egyptians. Among their neigh-e bours, civilisation was checked by each man asserting the natural right of all men to all things, and claiming to enjoy and employ for himself his whole force, activity, and liberty; while the Egyptian was earlier in giving up a part of these for the greater advantages of a settled society.

(7) When letters first rose in Greece and Rome, the writers found a rich harvest of fable and tradition, out of which they wove those beautiful tales that we now read as the beginning of Greek and Roman history. The Egyptians were not favoured with historians who could thus fix and hand down to us their traditions; but then, on the other hand, they had from far earlier times carved the names and deeds of their kings on the walls of their temples, and thus have left us less of poetic fable and more of bald reality. In each case the history of the country begins with slight and scattered hints, which some minds seize upon as treasures and others overlook as worthless, but which the historian can neither safely lean upon nor yet wholly fling from him; and this is the case with the history of Egypt, before the reigns of Chofo in Memphis and Osirtesen I. in Thebes. These kings' monuments contain the earliest remaining records of the human race. They were sculptured even before the time when Abraham, according to the Hebrew writers, drove his herds into Egypt in search of food which the drought had made scarce in Canaan.

(8) There seem to be three sources from which the ancient polytheists drew their numerous objects of worship. First, the sun, moon, and stars, or host of heaven, as they are called by the Hebrew writers, were worshipped by men in the rudest state of society; secondly, the visible works of the Almighty, as reason advanced, gave them an allegorical god of the sea, god of fire, goddess of love; and lastly, in some few cases, the conqueror and law-maker, the scourge and friend of mankind, have been raised to that rank. In the first of these classes, were Ra, the Sun, from whose scorching rays the Egyptians hid themselves as from the anger of a powerful enemy; and the Moon, the lovely ruler of night, whom they

thanked for its cool refreshing beams; and the stars, in which, when the glare of daylight was removed, and the heavens opened before their eyes, they saw an evidence of the multitude of the divinities by whom this world is watched. In the same class was Chem, the Land of Egypt, and Hapimou, the River Nile, to whom the husbandman sacrificed for a good harvest; for which, in another climate, he would have prayed to heaven. In the second class were Kneph, the Spirit, Pthah, the god of fire, Thoth, the god of letters, or rather the very pillar on which the letters were carved; Athor, the goddess

lib. i. 13.

of love and beauty; and Pasht, the goddess of Diod. Sic. chastity. To the third class perhaps belonged the favourite goddess Isis, her sister Nephthis, and her husband Osiris, who after being put to death by the wicked Typhon, and avenged by his son Horus, was raised to life again, and made the judge of the dead. The later Vet. Chron. Egyptian historians begin with a certain number of cycles of fourteen hundred and sixty-one years each, during which they said that the gods governed Egypt; and of these Osiris and his son Horus were the last.

ap. Syncel.

Burton's

pl. 2.

(9) Historians do not attempt to fix the year when the gods left off having children and living upon earth, but the first man who reigned in Egypt was Menes, or Mena, the Eternal, whose name would seem to prove that he Excerpta, was not wholly withdrawn from the region of fable; from him the later kings boastfully traced Herodotus, their lineage. According to the Egyptian chronolib. ii. 145. logists, he came to the throne about fifteen hundred years before the Persian invasion, that is to say, two thousand years before the Christian era. He was probably the Menu of the Hindoos, their first of created beings, and holiest of law-makers; and at the same time the Minos of the Greeks, their earliest law-maker and their judge of the dead. Menes was followed by sixteen other kings who Maneth all reigned at This, a city which the Greeks called Abydos. The kingdom of This probably reached from Lycopolis, where the valley is broken and the river is hemmed in by the hills on each side, to Tentyra, where the hills again press in upon the banks and close the valley. The city stood at the foot of the Libyan hills, and was watered by a canal from the river. After these first seven

Dyn. i. ii.

teen kings the power of This fell, and Thebes rose to be the capital of Upper Egypt.

(10) During the first seven hundred years of our history, Thebes alone offers us an unbroken chain of reigns, by the help of which we may date the buildings, and the very few events which are known to us. The kingdom of Thebes may have reached, on both sides of the river, from Tentyra to Silsilis, where the sandstone rocks barely leave a passage for the water; and it held within these natural boundaries the largest plain in the valley of Upper Egypt, which is in some places twenty miles wide. On the east of the river it sometimes reached to Heliopolis. The city of Thebes stood on the east bank in the middle of a plain, and was opposite to a point where the Libyan hills on the other side jut forward to the river's edge. Hence it easily commanded the passage along the valley, whether by land or water, and was in part bounded and guarded by moats or canals. From the plain of Thebes a road, with here and there a spring of water, ran to Enum on the Red Sea, and this gave to the capital the advantages of a port. From the mountains near this road were brought, at a later time, porphyry, and beautiful greenstone, which were so much valued by the sculptors. Emeralds and garnets were also there found; and what was yet more valuable, if the miners knew how to work it, there was some iron ore.

(11) The city of Elephantine, on an island in the Nile, just below the cataract at the southern boundary of Egypt, had also been the capital of a little kingdom; and we know the names, and nothing but the names, of nine Manetho. kings who reigned there. Elephantine no doubt fell when Thebes rose over the city of This. The kingdom of Elephantine may have reached from Silsilis to the cataracts of Syene, or perhaps even to the second cataract at Abou-Simbel, and thus included part of Nubia. Its best known city, Syene, enjoyed the profit of carrying merchandise over the cataracts where the passage of the boats is stopped.

(12) A race of petty kings also reigned for two or three centuries at Heracleopolis, near Memphis; one of whom was Achthoes, who was said to have gone mad, and been killed by a crocodile. This story may have arisen from the warfare always carried on between the citizens of Heracleopolis

and those animals, which in earlier days were common even in the Delta, though they are now seldom seen below Lycopolis. The kingdom of Heracleopolis may have reached from Lycopolis to near Memphis. This is the least fruitful part of Egypt, as here the Libyan hills are so low as scarcely to guard the cultivated valley from the drifting sands.

(13) Joined to Heracleopolis is a rich valley in the western desert, which always receives part of the river's overflow, and was at one time made yet more fruitful by a large reserve of water called the Lake of Moris. To the kings of Heracleopolis the country was no doubt Herodotus, indebted for that great national work, by which lib. ii. 149. thousands of acres were artificially watered and

Linant,

sur le Lac

Moris.

brought into cultivation, and the Nile's overflow was in part regulated for the country on that side of the Delta. This useful work was formed by running a strong dyke or bank from north to south across the valley, through which a part of the waters would otherPliny, wise, and indeed does now, discharge itself nearly lib. v. 9. uselessly, into the Lake of Keiroun on the borders of the desert. By these means a tract of land two hundred and fifty miles round was, on the rise of the Nile, made into a lake, and, on the retreat of the water, was left fertilised by its mud. A royal fishery was established at the floodgates, which in a later age, while the water was running in, yielded a daily revenue of a talent of silver, or one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, and the smaller sum of twenty minæ, or fifty pounds, during those months in which the water was allowed to flow back again into the Nile.

(14) Labaris (see Fig. 5), who built the sacred building

called the Labyrinth, near the Lake of Moris, was probably a king of Heracleopolis, though Manetho calls him a king of Thebes. His name is on the tablet of Karnak, where a later king is worshipping his predecessors of the eight kingdoms into which Egypt had been divided; but it is not on the tablet Fig. 5. of Abydos, which contains a list of one race of Herodotus, kings only. The Labyrinth, with its fifteen hunlib. ii. 148. dred cells, was rather a monastery for a college of priests than a palace for one chief. The rooms underground

no doubt held the bodies after death and embalmment of the priests who had before dwelt in the upper rooms. On the death of Labaris, or one reign later, Heracleopolis sunk under the power of Thebes; and we find upon the walls of the Labyrinth the name of Amunmai Thori III. of that city, who added largely to the sculptures on that gigantic temple.

(15) Memphis was at the same time the principal capital of the level plains of Lower Egypt, where the river flows sluggishly through several large branches and countless canals, which water its cornfields and divide it into provinces. Sixty or seventy pyramids of various sizes on the edge of the desert remind us of the number and wealth of its kings or chief priests who sleep beneath them. Perhaps the tenth of those Memphite sovereigns whose names are known to us was reigning at the time at which the Hebrew writer placed Abraham's visit to Egypt.

(16) Xois, near the middle of the Delta, and about twenty miles from the sea, was another city whose priests were for a time kings over a small district. A chief priest, surrounded by a numerous priesthood, governed each city in Egypt; in those just mentioned he ruled as king, in the others as magistrate under a neighbouring king. They all alike held their rank by hereditary descent, and their power by the force of opinion founded on religion; and when several cities were united into one monarchy, this independence in the magistrate of each city was naturally a cause of weakness to the sovereign, and of freedom to the people.

Dyn. ii.

(17) Before the fall of This the people of Memphis had already built a temple for the bull Apis (see Fig. 6), where they worshipped it as a god, and maintained Manetho, a college of priests to do it honour. In the same way the people of Heliopolis worshipped the rival bull, Amun-Ehe, called by the Greeks Mnevis, and the people of Mendes a goat, named Mando. One favoured animal of every sacred race received worship in its own city; while for the others the people respectfully stepped aside when they met them in the streets or fields. On the banks of the Nile it was easier, said the Greeks, to find a god than a man. It is not easy to understand the feelings which gave rise to this worship of the cats, dogs, crocodiles,