Groupe de divines épouses. 5. Binpu. 6. Uaz-mès, fils de Thotmès. 8. Neb-n-khal, fils de Thotmès. 9. Aâh-mès. 10. Khebit-nefru (?), fille de Thotmès Ir. 11. Maut-nefert (?), femme de Thotmès ler, mère de Thotmès II. 12. Ta-khrodit, inconnue. 13. Détruit. Telles sont les observations que je livre à l'examen de mes confrères. Toutes mes propositions ne seront peutêtre pas adoptées, mais je serai encore satisfait si du moins leur critique fait révéler des faits nouveaux, propres à mieux faire connaître l'histoire réelle d'Égypte dont notre immortel Champollion a pu le premier tracer les grandes lignes d'après la lecture des hiéroglyphes. THE PEOPLES OF THE SEA. A CHAPTER OF THE HISTORY OF EGYPTOLOGY, BY H. R. HALL. French scholarship has always specially interested itself in the identification of the foreign peoples mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions, from the time of Champollion, who was the first to signalize the « Pholosté" as a foreign people conquered or defeated by the Egyptians, and to identify them with the Philistines, and even boldly found Ionians among the enemies of Egypt in the reign of Rameses II (1). The names too, of E. de Rougé, Chabas, and Maspero are indissolubly connected with the problem of the identification of the Peoples of the Sea", with which were also associated in the beginning the Englishman Birch and the German Brugsch. The French savants were the protagonists of the view that the Peoples of the Sea" were veritably tribes coming from western Asia Minor, Greece, and even Italy, a view which was followed, with some hesitation and occasional backsliding, by German students, and doubtfully admitted by English Egyptologists, but rejected by English classical scholars. The cultured Englishman was in those days still (Grammaire, p. 180, 151; Dictionnaire, p. 314, 66. The early Egyptologists in England, Osburn and Hincks, accepted the identification of the Philistines (MASPERO, Hist. Anc. Or. Class, II, p. 463, n. 1). by nature a sceptic, as he had been in the eighteenth century, but he was now less intelligent than he had been in the eighteenth century, and his mind found it difficult to absorb new and unprecedented ideas. Hence the phenomenon, even as late as the 'sixties, of Sir George Cornewall Lewis refusing to believe even that Young and Champollion had read any Egyptian hieroglyphs at all, and maintaining that the whole science of Egyptology was imaginary. Cornewall Lewis was dealt with by Renouf. But even though it might be admitted, grudgingly, that Egyptian could be read, the idea that Greeks and Italians, or peoples of Greece and Italy anterior to the Greeks and Romans they had known at school and at the University, should be recognized in Egyptian inscriptions of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B. C. was received by many scholars with incredulity. The support of Gladstone gave no help to the ordinary scholars he was thoroughly unsound: the Egyptologist might well say, ruefully, non tali auxilio. More harm than good was done by Juventus Mundi, in spite of its author's characteristic adaptability and receptivity, and contempt for convention in knowledge as in everything else. In the 'seventies British scholars would believe anything in the way of Indian sun-myths, dawn-maidens, etc., in Greece and in Italy, but to what Egypt had to tell them they turned a deaf ear. In 1876, a fateful date, Schliemann excavated My cenae. It took a long time for Mycenae to get into the schoolbooks, and it may fairly be said that Sir Charles Oman's admirable History of Greece» (1890) was the first in England in which the new knowledge adequately appeared, and in which the Akaiwaša and their peers appeared as Greeks. And even then there were still sceptics. The trouble was that the pass had been sold by the Germans. Brugsch had not only accepted the identification with the Mediterranean peoples (Histoire d'Égypte, 1859), but had himself been one of the pioneers of this identification. Ten years before E. de Rougé, he had in his Geographische Inschriften accepted Champollion's identification of the & Pholosté » (Pursť'a) with the Philistines, and the comparison of Kefti with Kaphtor, already made by Birch (1), had himself compared the «Zakuri», S'akals'a, Daanauna, etc. with the seekundigen, durch Sagen und Wanderungen mit Libyen, Aegypten und Vorderasien in Verbindung gesetzten Karern», and had identified the Tuirša with the Thracians, rejecting the much more probable identification with the Tuponvol (Tursce). But ten years after E. de Rougé had published his epoch-making article in the Revue archéologique in 1867, Brugsch, in his Geschichte Aegyptens unter den Pharaonen, came out with an uncontrollable desire to banish all these tribes to Colchis and the Caucasus, and produced a series of far-fetched and improbable identifications which did his reputation in historical matters almost as much harm as his equally unlucky attempt to prove the XXIInd Dynasty to be of Assyrian origin (2). Naturally the sceptical Englishman concluded that if the solid, deepthinking Germany » (of the ruling Carlylean creed) which he admired, did not agree with E. de Rougé and Chabas, in the first place nobody knew anything about the matter at all, and in the second the Germans were more likely to be right than the French ex hypothesi. In fact, « tant pis pour Rougé et Chabas"! The facts have decided against him. First Schliemann's discoveries and then the archaeological work of the 'nineties in Egypt as well as Greece shook the confidence of the defenders of the citadel of traditionalism, and then Sir Arthur Evans finally took it by assault with the excavation of Knossos. There is now nobody to dispute the general probability (1) Mémoire sur une patère égyptienne du musée du Louvre» (1857); pub'd. Mem. Soc. Imp. Ant. Fr., XXIV (1858). (2) These faux pas should not be forgotten, even if only to shew that none of us is infallible. of the French identifications of the «Peoples of the Sea". On minor points of identity opinions may differ, but that they were all peoples of Southern and Western Asia Minor and the Western Isles there is now no question. It may be of interest to sketch the course of study, and the history of Egyptological opinion with regard to them, in the light of the now enormously developed knowledge of the archaeology of the Isles of the Sea. In his Geographische Inschriften (1857) besides adumbrating for the first time the view adopted by Rougé as to the geographical position of these tribes, Brugsch had fixed the Libyan origin of such tribes as the Mašauaša, Libu, and Kehak, who attacked Egypt in the reign of Meneptah in company with Tuirša and Akaiwaša. The identity of the ethnic name Libu (Rebu) with that of the Libyans, and the probable identity of the Mašauaša with the MáEves, was settled and generally admitted. It was no longer necessary to seek for the Rebu» on the shores of the Caspian. At the same time Brugsch saw that the Tuirša, Šairdana, Šakalša, Akaiwaša, etc., were not Libyans but Mediterranean peoples. It is odd that, if he adopted the most hazardous identification of Tuirša with Opa, he did not hail the Akaiuaša as Axaol, and the Danauna as ▲avaoí. To call the Sairdana Sardinians he evidently did not dare, and his rejection of the Tuponvol in favour of the Opaxes as candidates for identification with the Tuirša was probably largely due to fear of going too far afield. Thrace did not seem so far from Egypt as Sardinia or Etruria! As to the identity of Keftiu-Kaphtor (already considered by Birch (1) to be Cyprus), he expressed no decided opinion, merely stating that some considered it to be Cyprus, others Crete, and that he preferred the second alternative, while at the same time he was troubled in mind by the fact that, in a Theban tomb, the Keftiu-folk were depicted between the men of Naharin and those of Mennus and Upper-Retnu, so that they ought Mémoire sur une patère égyptienne, p. 25. |