The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos Part 8

And yet here and there we come across notices of Upper Egypt, some of which have been written by an eye-witness. But the eye-witness was not Herodotos himself, and in giving them he generally gives an indication of the fact. Thus he describes Khemmis or Ekhmim as "near Neapolis," the modern Qeneh, although the distance between the two towns is really ninety-five miles, a voyage of at least three days, and Neapolis was but an insignificant city by the side of Khemmis itself, or of other towns like This and Abydos that were nearer to it. Even Tentyris or Denderah, with its ancient temple of Hathor opposite Neapolis, was more important and better-known, while Thebes itself was only forty-five miles higher up the river.

But the account given by Herodotos of Khemmis and its temple is a mere product of the imagination. Indeed, he implies that he received it from certain "people of Khemmis" whom he had questioned, probably through his interpreter. They told him that the temple, of which a few remains are still visible, and which was really dedicated to Min or Amon-Khem, was that of the Greek hero Perseus-a name suggested, it may be, by its likeness to that of the sacred persea tree. Each year, it was further alleged, gymnastic games in the Greek fas.h.i.+on were celebrated in honour of the foreign deity, who at times appeared to his wors.h.i.+ppers, leaving behind him his sandal famous in Greek mythology. But the inventive powers of the informants of the Greek traveller did not stop here. He further a.s.sures us that the pylon of the temple bore on the summits of its two towers two images of the deity. The statement is of itself sufficient to discredit the whole story and to prove that Herodotos could never have seen the temple with his own eyes. The watch-towers that guarded the entrance of an Egyptian temple never had, and never could have, images on their roofs. They were needed for other purposes, and the very idea of their supporting statues was contrary to the first principles of Egyptian architecture and religion. It was a conception wholly Greek.

Equally wide of the truth is what Herodotos has to tell us about the First Cataract. Like other travellers to Egypt before and since he was anxious to learn something about the sources of the Nile. But neither "the Egyptians nor the Libyans nor the Greeks" whom he met could give him any information. Perhaps had he sailed as far as a.s.suan some of the Ethiopians who lived there might have been more communicative. At last, however, he was introduced to one of the sacred scribes in the temple of Neit at Sais-the only Egyptian priest, in fact, of higher rank, whom he seems to have conversed with-and the scribe humoured the curiosity of the traveller to the utmost of his desires, though even Herodotos suspected that he was being made fun of. However, as in duty bound, he gravely writes down what he was told. "Two mountains are there with pointed tops, between Syene, a city of the Thebais, and Elephantine, which are called Krophi and Mophi.

Out of the heart of these mountains flow the sources of the Nile, which are bottomless, half the water running towards Egypt and the north, while the other half goes to Ethiopia and the south. That the sources are bottomless was proved by Psammetikhos, the king of Egypt, for after letting down into them a rope several hundred thousand fathoms in length, he did not find the bottom." Herodotos adds that this was probably because there were violent eddies in the water which carried the rope away.

Egyptian priests did not, as a rule, know Greek, and they avoided any kind of intercourse with the "unclean" foreigner. Even to have conversed with him would have caused pollution. Consequently "the priests" to whom Herodotos so frequently alludes were merely the "beadles" of the day, who took the tourist over the temples and showed him the princ.i.p.al objects of interest. The sacred scribe of Sais was an exception to the general rule.

Since the days of Psammetikhos, Sais had been accustomed to Greek visitors, and the prejudices against them were less strong there than in other Egyptian towns. It is quite possible, therefore, that the scribe whom Herodotos met was acquainted with the Greek language, and that no dragoman was required to interpret his words.

There is a reason for thinking that such was the case. The story of Krophi and Mophi, in spite of the suspicions of Herodotos, is remarkably correct; even the name of Krophi has not undergone a greater amount of transformation than it might have done if Herodotos had written it down himself from the scribe's mouth. It is the Egyptian Qerti or Qoriti, "the two holes" out of which Egyptian mythology supposed Hapi, the Nile-G.o.d, to emerge at the period of the inundation. The Qerti were at the foot of the granite peaks of Senem, the island of Bigeh, and of the opposite cliff on the southern side of the First Cataract. We can almost fix the exact spot where one of these Qerti was believed to have been. On the western bank of Philae, immediately facing Bigeh, is a portal built in the reign of Hadrian, on the inner north wall of which is a picture of it. We see the granite blocks of Bigeh piled one upon the other up to the summit of the island where Mut the divine mother, and Horus the saviour, sit and keep watch over the waters of the southern Nile. Below is the cavern, encircled by a guardian serpent, within which the Nile-G.o.d is crouched, pouring from a vase in either hand the waters of the river. Though in certain points Herodotos has misunderstood his informant, on the whole the story of Krophi and Mophi is a fairly accurate page from the volume of Egyptian mythology. Even the jingling Mophi may be derived from the Egyptian _moniti_ or "mountains" between which the river ran, though Lauth may be right in holding that Krophi is Qer-Hapi, "the hollow of the Nile," and Mophi Mu-Hapi, "the waters of the Nile."

But in one point the Greek historian has made a serious mistake. It was not between a.s.suan and Elephantine that the sources of the Nile were placed, but between Bigeh and the mainland, on the other side of the Cataract. Between a.s.suan and Elephantine there are no "mountains," only the channel of the river. In saying therefore that Krophi and Mophi were mountains and that they rose between Syene and Elephantine, Herodotos proves beyond all possibility of doubt that he had never been at the spot.

Had he actually visited a.s.suan the words of the sacred scribe would have been reported more correctly.

At Elephantine honours were paid to "the great" G.o.d of the Nile, who rose from his caverns in the neighbourhood. Of this we have been a.s.sured by a mutilated Greek inscription on a large slab of granite which was discovered by English sappers at a.s.suan in 1885. It records the endowments and privileges which were granted to the priests of Elephantine by the earlier Ptolemies, and one line of it refers to the places "wherein is the fountain of the Nile." But long before the days of the Ptolemies and of Greek visitors to Egypt, when the First Cataract was the boundary of Egyptian rule and knowledge, the fountain of the Nile was already placed immediately beyond it. This infantile belief of Egyptian mythology was preserved, like so much else of prehistoric antiquity, in the mythology of later days. In the temple of Redesiyeh, on the road from Edfu to Berenike, an inscription relates how Seti I. dug a well in the desert and how the water gushed up, "as from the depth of the two Qerti of Elephantine." Here the bottomless springs are transferred from Bigeh to Elephantine, thus explaining how Herodotos could have been led into his error of supposing them to be two mountains between Elephantine and a.s.suan. Doubtless the sacred scribe had marked the position of the island of Bigeh by its relation to the better known island of Elephantine.

The very name of the city which stood on the southern extremity of Elephantine implied that here, in the days of its foundation, was placed the source of the Egyptian Nile. It was called Qebhu, the city of "fresh water," a word represented by the picture of a vase from which water is flowing. At times the city was also called Abu, but Abu was more correctly the name of the island on which it stood. Abu, in fact, signified the island "of elephants," of which the Greek Elephantine was but a translation. In that early age, when it first became known to the Egyptians, the African elephant must still have existed there.

Herodotos does not seem to have been aware that Elephantine was an island as well as a city. Except where he is reporting the words of the sacred scribe, he always speaks of it as "a city," sometimes to the exclusion of the more important Syene. It is another sign that his voyage up the Nile did not extend so far.

We need not point out other instances of his ignorance of the country above the Fayyum. Those which have been already quoted are enough. The summer months which he spent in Egypt were more than fully employed in visiting the wonders of Memphis and the chief cities of the Delta, and in exploring the Fayyum. Upper Egypt was closed to him, as it was to the rest of his countrymen for many a long day.

But we are now able to trace his journey with some degree of exactness. He must have arrived about the beginning of July at the mouth of the Kanopic arm of the Nile-the usual destination of Greek s.h.i.+ps-and thus have made his way by Hermopolis or Damanhur to the Greek capital Naukratis. There he doubtless hired his Karian dragoman, with whom he sailed away over the inundated land to Sais. But his expedition to Sais was only an excursion, from which he returned to continue his voyage in a direct line past Prosopitis and the pyramids of Gizeh to Memphis. There he inspected the great temple of Ptah, whom his countrymen identified with their Hephaestos, and from thence he went by water to see the pyramids. It was while he was at Memphis, moreover, that he paid a visit to Heliopolis, with its university and its temple, of which all that is left to-day is the obelisk of Usertesen. Next he made his voyage up the Nile, past the brick pyramids of Dahshur, to Anysis or Herakleopolis, and from thence to the Fayyum.

Then he returned to Memphis, and then again pa.s.sing Heliopolis sailed northward to Bubastis and Buto. It was now probably that he made excursions to Papremis and Busiris, though our ignorance of the precise situation of these places unfortunately prevents us from being certain of the fact. Eventually he found himself at Daphnae, on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. This brought him to Pelusium, where he took s.h.i.+p for Tyre.

CHAPTER VII. IN THE STEPS OF HERODOTOS.

Let us follow Herodotos in his Egyptian journey and meet him where he landed at the Kanopic mouth of the Nile. The place had been known to Greek sailors in days of which tradition alone had preserved a memory. It was here that pirates and traders had raided the fields of the _fellahin_ or exchanged slaves and aegean vases for the precious wares of Egypt in the age when Achaean princes ruled at Mykenae and Tiryns. Guided by the island of Pharos, they had made their way a few miles eastward to the mouth of the great river which is called Aigyptos in the _Odyssey_.

When Egypt was at last opened to Greek trade and enterprise in the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty it was still the Kanopic arm of the Nile towards which their vessels had to steer. Nowhere else were they allowed to land their goods or sail up the sacred stream of the Nile. If stress of weather drove them to some other part of the coast, they were forced to remain there till the wind permitted them to sail to Kanopos or to send their goods in native boats by the same route. From time immemorial the coast of the Delta had been carefully guarded against the piratical attacks of the barbarians of the north. Watch-towers and garrisons were established at fitting intervals along it, which were under the charge of a special officer. The mouth of the Kanopic branch of the river was guarded with more than usual care, and here was the custom-house through which all foreign goods had to pa.s.s.

Kanopos, from which the arm of the river took its name, was a small but wealthy city. It was called in Egyptian Peguath, sometimes also Kah-n-Nub, "the soil of gold" from the yellow sand on which it was built, though Greek vanity believed that this name had been given to it from Kan.o.bos, the pilot of Menelaos, whose tomb was of course discovered there. In later days, when Alexandria had absorbed its commerce and industry, it became, along with the outlying Zephyrion, a fas.h.i.+onable Alexandrine suburb. It was filled with drinking-shops and chapels, to which the pleasure-loving crowds of Alexandria used to make their way by the ca.n.a.l that united the two cities. The sick came also to seek healing in the temple of Serapis, or to ask the G.o.d to tell them the means of cure. The rich, too, had their villas close to the shrine of Aphrodite Arsinoe, on the breezy promontory of Zephyrion, while the rocks on the sh.o.r.e were cut into luxuriously-fitted baths for those who wished to bathe in the sea.

The site of Zephyrion is now occupied by the little village of Abukir, memorable in the annals of England and France. In 1891 Daninos Pasha made some excavations there which brought to light a few scanty remains of the temple of Aphrodite. The foundations of its walls were found, as well as two limestone sphinxes inscribed with the name of Amon-em-hat IV., and three great statues of red granite, one of them upright, the others seated. The upright figure was that of Ramses II. with a roll of papyrus in his hand; while the other two were female, one of them being a representation of Hont-ma-Ra, the Pharaoh's wife. The sphinxes and statues must have been brought from some older building to decorate the shrine of the Alexandrine G.o.ddess, and their discoverer believes that the figure of Ramses II. is older even than the age of that monarch, who has usurped it, and that it goes back to the epoch of the twelfth dynasty. Other relics of the temple-fragments of red granite from some gigantic naos, portions of statues, broken sphinxes, and a colossal human foot-strew the rocks at the foot of the promontory whereon Zephyrion stood and bear witness to the intensity of Christian zeal when paganism was abolished in Egypt.

The Kanopic arm of the Nile has long since been filled up, and the _fellah_ ploughs his field or the water-fowl congregate in the stagnant marsh where Greek trading s.h.i.+ps once sailed. But a large part of the marsh is now in process of being reclaimed, and the engineers who have been draining and was.h.i.+ng it have come across many traces of the ancient Kanopos. It lay to the east of Zephyrion, between the sh.o.r.e and the marshy lake.

Though the journey from Alexandria to Abukir must now be undertaken in a railway carriage and not in a barge, it is still pleasant in the early autumn. We pa.s.s through fertile gardens and forests of fig-trees, past groves of palm with rich cl.u.s.ters of red dates hanging from them, while the cool sea-breeze blows in at the window, and the clear blue sky s.h.i.+nes overhead. But instead of temples and taverns we find at the end of our journey nothing but sand and sea-sh.e.l.ls, broken monuments, and a deserted sh.o.r.e.

The vessel in which Herodotos must have gone from Kanopos to Naukratis was probably native rather than Greek. It would have differed in one important respect from the Nile-boats of to-day. Its sail was square, not triangular like the modern lateen sails which have been introduced from the Levant.

But in other respects it resembled the vessels which are still used on the Nile. Part of the deck was covered with the house in which the traveller lived, and which was divided into rooms, and fitted up in accordance with the ideas of the day. Awnings protected it from the sun, and the sides of the boat as well as the rudder were brilliantly painted.

On the way to Naukratis the voyager pa.s.sed Hermopolis, the modern Damanhur, a name which is merely the old Egyptian _Dema n Hor_, or "City of Horus." It is not surprising, therefore, that Herodotos refers to the city, though the statement he makes in regard to it is not altogether correct. All the dead ibises of Egypt, he says, were carried to Hermopolis to be embalmed and buried. Such might have been the case on the western side of the Delta, but it was true only of that limited district. There was another Hermopolis in the east of the Delta, called Bah in ancient Egyptian, Tel el-Baqliyeh in modern times, where a large burial-place of the sacred ibises was discovered by the _fellahin_ six or seven years ago.

Tel el-Baqliyeh is the second station on the line of railway from Mansurah to Abu Kebir, and from it have come the bronze ibises and ibis-heads which have filled the shops of the Cairene dealers in antiquities. The bronzes were found among the mult.i.tudinous mummies of the sacred bird, like the bronze cats in the cemetery of the sacred cat at Bubastis. Bah was, in fact, the holy city of the "nome of the Ibis." The mound of the old city has now been almost demolished by the hunter for _antikas_, but Dr.

Naville noticed some fragments of inscribed stone in the neighbouring village which led him to believe that Nektanebo II. once intended to erect a temple here to Thoth.

From Hermopolis to Naukratis was a short distance. Naukratis was the capital of the Egyptian Greeks, and its site, which had been lost for centuries, was discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1884, when he was working for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Fund had been formed with the primary intention of finding the sites of Pithom and Naukratis, and it had been hardly two years in existence before that intention was fulfilled.

If we leave the train at Teh el-Barud, the junction of the Upper Egyptian line of railway with that from Alexandria to Cairo, and turn our faces westward, we shall have a pleasant walk of about five miles, part of it under an avenue of trees, to a mound of potsherds which covers several acres in extent and is known to the natives as Kom Qa'if. This mound represents all that is left of Naukratis. To the west of it runs a ca.n.a.l, the modern successor of the ancient Kanopic branch of the Nile.

When Professor Petrie first visited the spot, the diggers for _sebah_ had already been busily at work. _Sebah_ is the nitrous earth from the sites of old cities, which is used as manure, and to the search for it we owe the discovery of many memorials of the past. At Kom Qa'if the larger part of the earth had been removed, and all that remained were the fragments of pottery which had been sifted from it. But the fragments were sufficient to reveal the history of the place. Most of them belonged to the archaic period of the Greek vase-maker's art, and were such as had never before been found in the land of Egypt. It was evident that the great city whose site they covered must have been the Naukratis of the Greeks.

As soon as Professor Petrie had settled down to the excavation of the mound, a few months after his discovery, the evidence of inscriptions was added to the evidence of potsherds. An inscribed stone from the mound was standing at the entrance of the country-house in which he lived, and on turning it over he found it was engraved with Greek letters which recorded the honours paid by "the city of the Naukratians" to Heliodoros the priest of Athena and the keeper of its archives. For two winters first Mr. Petrie and then Mr. Ernest Gardner worked at the ruins, and though more excavations are needed before they can be exhaustively explored, the plan of the old city has been mapped out, the history of its growth and decline has been traced, and a vast number of archaic Greek inscriptions from the dedicated vases of its temples have been secured.

To the south of the town were the fortress and camp of the Greek mercenaries, who were probably settled there by Psammetikhos. The camp was surrounded by a wall, and within it stood the h.e.l.lenion, the common altar of the Ionians from Khios, Teos, Phokaea and Klazomenae, of the Dorians from Rhodes, Knidos, Halikarna.s.sos and Phaselis, and of the aeolians of Mytilene. The great enclosure still remains, as well as the lower chambers of the fort, and Mr. Petrie found that in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when it was no longer needed for purposes of defence, it was provided with a stately entrance, to which an avenue of ruins led from the west.

The traders and settlers built their houses north of the camp. Here too the Greek sailors and merchants, who had taken no part in the erection of the great altar, and who perhaps had no relations among the soldiers of the fort, built special temples for themselves. If we walk across the level ground which separates the fort from the old city, the first heap of rubbish we come to marks the site of the temple and sacred enclosure of Castor and Pollux. A little to the north was the still larger temple and _temenos_ or sacred enclosure of Apollo, and adjoining it, still on the north side, was the temple of Here, whose _temenos_ was the largest of all. The temple of Apollo had been erected by the Milesians, and that it was the oldest in the city may be gathered from the archaic character of the inscriptions on the potsherds discovered in the trench into which the broken vases of the temple were thrown. The Samians were the builders of the temple of Here, and Herodotos tells us that there was another dedicated to Zeus by the aeginetans. The ruins of this, however, have not yet been found, but far away towards the northern end of the ruin a small temple and _temenos_ of Aphrodite have been brought to light. Here Rhodopis wors.h.i.+pped, who had been freed from slavery by the brother of Sappho, and whose charms were still celebrated at Naukratis in the days of Herodotos.

Among the potsherds disinterred from the rubbish-trench of the temple of Apollo were portions of a large and beautiful bowl dedicated to "Phanes, the son of Glaukos." Mr. Gardner is probably right in believing that this is the very Phanes who deserted to Kambyses, and, according to the Greek story, instructed him how to march across the desert into Egypt. It may be that Herodotos saw the bowl when it was still intact, and that the story of the deserter was told him over it; in any case, it was doubtless at Naukratis, and possibly from the priests of Apollo, that he heard it.

To the west of the temple of Apollo and divided from it only by a street, Mr. Petrie found what had been a manufactory of scarabs. They were of the blue and white kind that was fas.h.i.+onable in the Greek world in the sixth century before our era, and the earliest of them bear the name of Amasis.

From Naukratis they were exported to the sh.o.r.es of Europe and Asia along with the pottery for which the Greek city was famous.

On his way to Naukratis Herodotos had pa.s.sed two other Greek settlements, Anthylla and Arkhandropolis. But we do not yet know where they stood. Nor do we know the position of that "Fort of the Milesians" which, according to Strabo, was occupied by Milesian soldiers near Rosetta in the time of Psammetikhos, before they sailed upon the river into "the nome of Sais"

and there founded Naukratis.

The city of Sais was one of the objects of Herodotos's journey. In the period of the inundation it was within an easy distance of Naukratis, so that an excursion to it did not require much time. Sais was the birthplace and capital of the Pharaohs of the twenty-sixth dynasty; it was here that Psammetikhos raised the standard of rebellion against his a.s.syrian suzerain with the help of the Greek mercenaries, and his successors adorned it with splendid and costly buildings. When Herodotos visited it, it had lost none of its architectural magnificence. He saw there the palace from which Apries had gone forth to attack Amasis, and to which he returned a prisoner; the great temple of Neit, with its rows of sphinxes and its sacred lake; and the huge naos of granite which two thousand men spent three whole years in bringing from a.s.suan. It had been left just outside the enclosure within which the temple stood, as well as the tombs of Apries and Amasis, and even of the G.o.d Osiris himself. True, there was a rival sepulchre of Osiris at Abydos, venerated by the inhabitants of Upper Egypt since the days of the Old Empire, but Abydos was far distant from Sais, and when the latter city became the capital of the kingdom there was none bold enough to deny its claim. Herodotos, at all events, who never reached Abydos, was naturally never informed of the rival tomb.

He was told, however, of the mystery-play acted at night on the sacred lake of Sais in memory of the death and resurrection of Osiris, and he was told also of the shameful insult inflicted by Kambyses on the dead Amasis.

It was said that the Pharaoh's mummy had been dragged from its resting-place, and after being scourged was burnt to ashes. The Egyptian priests bore no good-will to Kambyses, and it may be, therefore, that the story is not true.

Sais was under the protection of the G.o.ddess Neit, the unbegotten mother of the sun. When the Greeks first came there, they identified the G.o.ddess with their own Athena, led thereto by the similarity of the names. But this identification led to further results. As Athena was the patron G.o.ddess of Athens, so it was supposed that there was a special connection between Sais and Athens. While Athena was fabled to have come from Libya, Kekrops, the mythic founder of Athens, was transformed into an Egyptian of Sais. It was from a priest of Sais, moreover, that Solon, the Athenian legislator, learned the wisdom of the Egyptians.

The squalid village of Sa el-Hagar, "Sais of the stone," is the modern representative of the capital of Psammetikhos. In these days of railways it is difficult of access, as there is no station in its neighbourhood. In the earlier part of the century, however, when the traveller had to go from Alexandria to Cairo in a dahabiyeh, he was compelled to pa.s.s it, and it was consequently well-known to the tourist. But little is left of the populous city and its stately monuments except mounds of disintegrated brick, a large enclosure surrounded by a crude brick wall seventy feet thick, and the sacred lake. The lake, however, is sacred no longer; shrunken in size and choked with rubbish, it is a stagnant pool in the winter, and an expanse of half-dried mud in the late spring. It is situated within the great wall, which is that of the _temenos_ of Neit.

Stone is valuable in the Delta, and hardly a fragment of granite or limestone survives from all the buildings and colossal monuments that Herodotos saw. But in 1891 a great number of bronze figures of Neit, some of them inlaid with silver, were found there by the _fellahin_. They are of the careful and finished workmans.h.i.+p that marks the age of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and on one of the largest of them is a two-fold inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the letters and language of the Karians. It was dedicated to the G.o.ddess of Sais in the reign of Psammetikhos by a son of a Karian mother and an Egyptian father who bore both an Egyptian and a Karian name. It is an interesting proof of the readiness of some at least among the natives of Sais to mingle with the foreigner, and it shows further that the Karian mercenaries, like the Greeks, brought their wives and daughters along with them.

Herodotos seems to have been at Sais when the festival of "burning lamps"

was celebrated there. On the night of the festival lamps were lighted round about the houses in the open air, the lamps being cups filled with salt and oil, on the surface of which a wick floated. All who could thronged to Sais to take part in the ceremonies; those who could not be there lighted their lamps at home and so observed the rites due to Neit.

The festival took place in the summer, probably at the time of the summer solstice, and the illuminations characteristic of it are still perpetuated in some of the numerous festivals of modern Egypt. The annual festival in honour of Isis was observed all over Egypt in the same way.

As the Greek traveller approached Memphis the pyramids of Gizeh were shown to him towering over the water on his right. His visit to them was reserved to another day, and he continued to sail on to the ancient capital of the country. Memphis was still in all its glory. Its lofty walls of crude brick, painted white, shone in the sun, and its great temple of Ptah still preserved the monuments and records of the early dynasties of Egypt. Built on an embankment rescued from the Nile, it was said, by Menes, the first monarch of the united kingdom, Memphis, though of no great width, extended along the banks of the river for a distance of half-a-day's journey. To the west, in the desert, lay its necropolis, the city of the dead, reaching from Abu Roash on the north to Dahshur on the south. On the opposite side of the Nile, a little to the north, was the fortress of Khri-Ahu, which guarded the approach to the river. Where Cairo now stands Herodotos saw only sand and water. Even Khri-Ahu was merely an insignificant village at the foot of a fortress of mud brick; the strong walls and towers of hewn stone in which the Roman legion afterwards kept ward over Egypt were as yet unbuilt. All who could afford it lived in Memphis and its suburbs, and the rock-hewn tombs at the foot of the citadel of modern Cairo are of the Roman age.

From Memphis to Heliopolis was rather more than twenty miles, or a morning's row on the river. Herodotos, therefore, after having been told at Memphis of the experiment made by Psammetikhos to discover the origin of language, speaks of having "turned into" Heliopolis in order to make further inquiries about the matter, "for the Heliopolitans are said to be the best informed of the Egyptians." We may gather from his words that he made an excursion to Heliopolis while he was staying in Memphis. But he would have pa.s.sed it again on his homeward voyage.

The site of Heliopolis is well-known to every tourist who has been to Cairo. The drive to the garden and ostrich-farm of Matariyeh and the obelisk of Usertesen I. is a pleasant way of filling up an afternoon. But of the ancient city of Heliopolis or On, with its famous temple of Ra, the Sun-G.o.d, its university of learned priests, and its innumerable monuments of the past, there is little now to be seen. The obelisk reared in front of its temple a thousand years before Joseph married the daughter of its high-priest still stands where it stood in his day; but the temple has vanished utterly. So, too, has the sister obelisk which was erected by its side, and of which Arabic historians still have something to say. Nothing is left but the mud-brick wall of the sacred enclosure, and a thick layer of lime-stone chippings which tell how the last relics of the temple of the Sun-G.o.d were burnt into lime for the Cairo of Ismail Pasha. One or two fragments were rescued from destruction by Dr. Grant Bey, the most noticeable of which is a portion of a cornice, originally 30 feet 4 inches in length, which had been erected by Nektanebo II., the last of the native Pharaohs. Blocks with the names of the second and third Ramses are also lying near the western gate of the enclosure, and in the eastern desert are the tombs of the dead. Nothing more remains of the old capital of Egyptian religion and learning. The destruction is indeed complete; the spoiler whom Jeremiah saw in prophetic vision has broken "the images of Beth-Shemesh," and burnt with fire "the houses of the G.o.ds of the Egyptians." If we would see the obelisks and images of On we must now go to the cities and museums of Europe or America. It was from Heliopolis that the huge scarab of stone now in the British Museum was originally brought to Alexandria, and at Heliopolis Cleopatra's Needle was first set up by Thothmes III. in front of the temple of Amon.

Heliopolis was the centre and source of the wors.h.i.+p of the Sun-G.o.d in ancient Egypt, in so far, at all events, as he was adored under the name of Ra. The wors.h.i.+p goes back to prehistoric days. Menes was already a "son of Ra," inheriting his right to rule from the Sun-G.o.d of On. The theology of Heliopolis is incorporated in the earliest chapters of the Book of the Dead, that Ritual of the Departed, a knowledge of which ensured the safe pa.s.sage of the dead man into the world to come. It was in the great hall of its first temple that Egyptian mythology believed Horus to have been cured of his wounds after the battle with Set. The origin of the temple, in fact, like the origin of the school of priests which gathered round it, was too far lost in the mists of antiquity for authentic history to remember.

As befitted its theological character, Heliopolis was rich in sacred animals. The bull Mnevis, in which the Sun-G.o.d was incarnated, was a rival of the bull Apis of Memphis, the incarnation of Ptah. The two bulls point to a community of wors.h.i.+p between the two localities in that primeval age when neither Ra of Heliopolis nor Ptah of Memphis was known, and when the primitive Egyptian population-whoever they may have been-were plunged in the grossest superst.i.tions of African fetichism. Herodotos did not hear of the bull Mnevis. But he was acquainted with the story of another sacred animal of Heliopolis, the _bennu_ or Phnix, the sacred bird of Ra.

Indeed, the fame of the phnix had long before penetrated to Greece.

Hesiod alludes to it, and the account of the marvellous bird given by Herodotos was "stolen," we are told by Porphyry, from his predecessor Hekataeos. Hekataeos says that it was like an eagle, whereas the monuments show that it was a heron, and Herodotos follows him in the blunder. We may argue from this, as Professor Wiedemann does, that Herodotos himself never saw its picture. But otherwise his account is correct. Its wings were red and gold, and it represented the solar cycle of five hundred years.

When Strabo visited Heliopolis in the age of Augustus he found it already half deserted. Its schools and library had been superseded by those of Alexandria, and although the houses in which the priestly philosophers had once lived were still standing, they were now empty. Among them was the house in which Plato and Eudoxos had studied not long after the time when Herodotos was there. In spite, therefore, of the Persian wars Herodotos must have found the ancient university still famous and flouris.h.i.+ng. Just as in the Cairo of to-day the whole circle of Mohammedan science is taught in the University of El-Azhar on the basis of the Qoran, so in the Heliopolis which Herodotos visited all the circle of Egyptian knowledge was still taught and learned on the basis of the doctrines of the Heliopolitan school. The feelings with which the Greek traveller viewed the professors and their pupils-if, indeed, he was allowed to do so-must have been similar to those with which an English tourist now pa.s.ses through the Azhar mosque.