Antiochus Epiphanes conquers Egypt The younger Ptolemy declares himself king, as Euergetes II. The brothers join their forces against Antiochus Antiochus again enters Egypt; retreats at the command of Popilius Judas Maccabeus makes Judæa independent He asks the Jews of Egypt to join him in celebrating the feast 164 Philometor goes to Rome for help against his brother, and is ib. ib. ib. Philometor's death; his family 145 PTOLEMY EUPATOR murdered by his uncle PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.; his cruelties His coronation; second marriage; his person The collar, the badge of office, is being placed on the governor of a province. THE HISTORY OF EGYPT. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION; THE EARLY KINGS; THE INVASION BY THE SHEPHERDS, AND THEIR EXPULSION, THE RISE OF THEBES. lib. ii. 17. But as (1) EGYPT, during the greater part of its history, had the same boundaries as it has now. It is little more than the strip of country that is every year overflowed by the waters of the Nile, between its seven mouths at the Mediterranean Sea on the north, and the cataracts or rapids which stop the navigation at Syene, on the south. This valley is shut in on both sides by the desert, and divided into two gardens by the river. The eastern bank formed part of Arabia, and the western bank part of Libya; and, before Herodotus, rivers were crossed in wicker boats, the Nile may have been the boundary between the two tribes. soon as men were bold enough to trust themselves to a plank, rivers ceased to divide nations; and at the beginning of this history we find both banks of the Nile, or of the Ægyptus, as it was also called, held by a people lib. iv. who, taking their name from the river, are called Egyptians. The country was then naturally divided as it is now. Upper Egypt is that part of the valley which is closely pressed in between two ranges of hills; while Lower Egypt is the open plain, where the more level and less rocky soil allows the river to divide itself into several streams, and which, from its triangular form, was by the Greeks named the Delta. To this we must add a few ports on the Red Sea, which, as they were separated from the Nile by a three or four days' journey over the sands, had but few VOL. I. 1 B Odyssey, 477. advantages for trade, and also two or three green spots in the western desert, made fertile by their own springs, such as the Great Oasis, the Little Oasis, and the Oasis of Ammon. Egypt could only attack its neighbours, or be attacked, through narrow and difficult passes. Of these one is on the south, at the first cataract, where the valley above the granite rocks at Syene takes the name of Lower Ethiopia or Nubia. A second is on the west, between the desert and the sea, along the coast of the Mediterranean, where it was afterwards bounded by the little Greek state of Cyrene. And the third is on the east, also along the coast, towards Syria and Arabia Nabatea, where the salt lakes and marshes almost join the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. When the kingdom, under its more powerful sovereigns, was lengthened southward, it was still limited by one or other of the granite ranges which cross the valley and cause the cataracts in Ethiopia. Of these the second, or first above Syene, covers a long district from Wady Halfa to the Island of Saye; the third is at the Island of Tombos; and the fourth above the city of Napata. Each of these ranges of granite in its turn formed the boundary of the kingdom. (2) In endeavouring to make use of the early notices of history we are often puzzled at finding that a wandering tribe carried its name into the land to which it Genesis, removed, as the name belonged to the people rather ch. x. 7. than to the country in which they dwelt. Thus a difficulty hangs over the names by which the several parts f Egypt have at various times been called. In every case the name changed its place from north to south, and so we must believe that the tribes had at some early time moved southward from the head of the Red Sea; which Laertius, gradual movement may have formed part of a great Vit. De migration from central Asia. Upper Egypt had once been called Meroë, which name was afterwards carried southward almost to Abyssinia. At another time, Upper Egypt was named Cush or Ethiopia, till that name was in the same way moved southward beyond Theog. the cataracts, and sometimes even to Abyssinia 985. In the language of the country, Egypt was named Chemi, a word the same as Ham or Cham; in Hebrew it was named the land of Mizraim, one of the tribes Diogenes mocriti. Hesiodi of the children of Ham; and from the Greeks it received the name of Ægyptus, Egypt, or the land of Copts; and these last two names, having once meant the Delta, were afterwards stretched southward to include the whole of the country. (3) We learn from the book of Genesis that the Egyptians were a tribe from Asia, called the children of Ham; and their physical character, and their habits of life, both show that they were more nearly allied to Asiatics than to the less civilised tribes of the Arabian and Libyan deserts. Like their corn and rice and cattle, they had arrived in the valley from abroad; the natives of the neighbourhood, whether men, animals, or plants, were badly suited for cultivation. From the colour given to the women in their paintings, we learn that their skin was yellow, like that of the Mongol Tartars, who have given their name to the Mongolian variety of the human race; the darker brown of the men may arise from their having been more in the sunshine. The single lock of hair on the young nobles reminds us also of the Tartars; while the religious dread of the sea, the sacred bull, and the refusal to eat flesh, are what we meet with among the Hindoos. Their worship of the bull reminds us also of the Chinese, for whom Confucius wrote: "Thou shalt not slaughter the labouring ox;" and they were like the Chinese in their syllabic writing, and in dutifully setting out food at the graves of their forefathers. Their pious custom of embalming the dead can hardly have had its rise in Egypt, as the mineral pitch which the priests used was brought by foreign traders from the Dead Sea. But the sculptures give us more exact information, and tell us of two races of men, known by the form of skull; one seen in the statues of Lower Egypt, and the other in those of the Thebaid. Of these we find good grounds for believing that the former skull belonged to the original inhabitants of the valley, and the latter, the Theban, to a race of foreigners who afterwards, though at some very early period, gained a settlement there. The older and less intellectual skull we note in the head of the Great Sphinx, the earliest sculpture existing, and in the head of the modern Fellah (see Fig. 1), the present labourer on the soil. Between these, the earliest and latest examples, we also note it in the intermediate time in the heads of the kings |