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There, too, in front of the temple of Vulcan were the statues of Sesostris and his wife, thirty cubits high, in presence of which the priests would not allow Darius the great king to set up his less worthy image. But highest, and biggest, and oldest of all, the THREE PYRAMIDS stood on the low Libyan hills at the edge of the desert, marking the western boundary of the city, which stretched away five or six miles to the river, and over the river by the bridge to Babylon (the Memphite "Borough "), and rambled on to Heliopolis, as London rambles down to Sydenham. The whole plain was crowded with temples, gateways, and statues of gigantic proportions; and out in the streets, as if the mean houses were too little to hold them, in the face of their sun-god, millions of swart men and women ate and drank, and worked and played, in startling opposition to all established usages of Greek civilization.

heads, the women on their shoulders. In Egypt by the divine king Proteus, till her other countries, the priests of the gods wear husband, after burning Ilium for nothing, long hair; in Egypt they have it shaved. came and carried her peaceably home to With other men it is customary in mourning Sparta. to have their heads shorn; the Egyptians, on occasions of death, let their hair and beards grow. Other men live apart from beasts, but the Egyptians live with them. They knead dough with their feet, but mix clay with their hands. Other men fasten the rings and sheets of their sails outside, but the Egyptians inside. The Greeks write and cipher from left to right, but the Egyptians from right to left."* It was the western extremity of the old world's civilization, as China is still the castern. The difference was, that while nothing ever came out of China but silk and tea, the Greeks believed all their arts and religious rites to have originated in Egypt. In this belief, every story which the priests could palm off upon the credulous "outer barbarians," was swallowed with ludicrous avidity. Herodotus was often imposed upon like the rest; much oftener, however, he tells the tale as it was told to him, with the addition of some such quiet remark as, “Let every one judge for himself -to me, indeed, it seems improbable; but I am of opinion that, on some points, one man-in similar contradiction to the habits of knows as much as another." This simple philosophy might still dispose of nine-tenths of what we hear about Ancient Egypt.

Memphis was the city at which Herodotus stopped longest. It was the capital of "Menes, the first king,"—just as Rome was the city of Romulus, and London of King Lud. It held the temple of the fire-god Phthah (in whom the Greeks were told to recognize the original of their own Hephaistus), built, of course, by Menes in the beginning of time, and enriched with numerous porticoes by succeeding monarchs. It was a city fifteen miles in circumference, fortified by the famous" White Wall," behind which the Persians bad but just before resisted all the forces of insurgent Egypt, aided by the Athenians themselves. There was the gilded hall of the bull Apis, with its magnificent court, surrounded by collossal Pharaohs in place of pillars. There were the temples of Isis, and Osiris the Lord of Hades, and Serapis with the bull's head, and the foreign Venus, thought to be Helen, who, in spite of Homer, never was in Troy, but was kept in *Herod. lib. ii. 36.

Through the midst of them, smiling graciously on either hand like a god, as he was, flowed the largest river in the world, which

every other river-persisted in rising during the dog-days, and diminishing in winter. Of a practice so palpably unscientific, Herodotus could obtain no sort of explanation. Venturing on a theory of his own-as travellers will when they are not likely to be found out -he has got preciously laughed at by our philosophers who know everything. Another thing, and that the very thing he most of all wanted to know, was a deeper mystery still. "Touching the sources of the Nile"-(he complains) "it was never my lot in all my intercourse with Egyptians, Libyans, or Greeks, to meet with more than one man who pretended to know anything." So much the better for them, since they would only have made a mess of it, like all the world besides, till MAGA enlightened mankind with her friend Captain Speke's discovery of the Victoria Nyanza! * That one pretender in Egypt, the bursar of Neith College, told Herodotus that the Nile had its sources in the two mountains, Crophi and Mophi, between Syene and Elephantine, where it boiled up from a bottomless pit, casting its stream See Blackwood's Magazine, Sept. and Oct. 1859.

half to the north and the other half to the Of all the wonders of Egypt, however, none south. This story Herodotus, with his usual could surpass the first that he encountered as politeness, told to the marines; but what he sailed from Naucratis, across the inunwould he have given for such a map as now dated plain, and came upon the Pyramids. lies before us, with the signature of the gal-"Who built them? and when?" were his inlant Speke, and the date 26th Feb. 1863- stantaneous questions, and we should be parsolving the long problem of ages, and open- ticularly obliged to any gentleman, priestly ing to every eye the "Mountains of the Moon" that Ptolemy must have dreamt of? There, on the very equator, 3,553 feet above the sea, lies the royal lake, filled by the tropical rains, from whose northern shore burst the" Ripon Falls," and the" Luajerè River," and the "Murchison Frith," which, uniting, form the White, i.e. the True Nile. It was a joke with the wits of Greece and Rome to bid a troublesome inquirer Niliquærere fontes. Captain Speke and Grant found it no joke either to reach them or to get away; but the laugh is forever on their side. Their perseverance and sufferings have enabled them to add a new distinction to the Indian Service. Herodotus would have been delighted to introduce them at the Panathenæa. In the absence of the Father of History, MAGA, the Mother of Letters and of Travel, bids them" priests, all shaven and shorn;" they bathed welcome to immortality!

Marvelling much, and persistently questioning, the Father of History sailed up the wonderful river to the cataract, and thus profoundly speculated as he went: The deposit was black, which showed that the river came from the country of the black people; it was raising the level of the fields every year; perhaps the whole valley had been thus raised out of the sea, of which it was once only a gulf; at any rate, the time must come when the fields would rise above the river, and, preventing the annual inundation, cause the country to relapse into sterility. Ah! good Herodotus, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing you forgot that the valley must always have had a floor for the river to lay its deposit upon, and that its own bed rises faster than the adjacent fields, and so keeps enlarging, not diminishing, the area of inundation.*

The deposit is naturally thickest on the bed of the river and its immediate neighborhood; hence the floor of the valley is arched upward, the river flowing along the crown, and the country sloping down to the desert. Hence the more the deposit increases, the further might the water be conducted, if the canals by which it is led off were properly extended. It is to the neglect of these canals, and their consequent filling up from the sand of the desert, that the diminished area of cultivation is owing.

or secular, who would favor us with that information at the present moment. Great changes have taken place at Memphis, since Herodotus propounded those two simple questions to the white-robed priests of Vulcanlearned men in their way-very, though perhaps unnecessarily scrupulous in the article of beans, and far from favoring the beard movement. If the truth must be told, they shaved every hair off their bodies, and instead of Spenser's imaginative "long locks comely kemd," wore cauliflower wigs, like the late Archbishop of Canterbury; queer sights, perhaps, when seen above the leopard skin with the tail hanging down, which constituted their sacrificing garment, but indisputably promoting cleanliness, which is always akin to godliness. Yes, daintily clean were those

in cold water four times in the twenty-four hours; wore nothing but the whitest of linen, and were scented (let us hope not too fragrantly) with the most exquisite perfumes.

Well! they are all gone! with their grand processions and stately ceremonial, their golden chalices and incense-breathing altars, their veiled mysteries and their awful funerals; priests and people, temples, idols, statues, have long since disappeared. About eleven miles above Cairo, on the opposite or western bank of the Nile, near the village of Mitrahenny, the fields rise into high mounds, shaded with a few palm trees: on its face in a hollow, with the huge back showing over the standing corn, lies the colossal statue of Sesostris, that is to say, of Rameses the Great. This is all that remains of Memphis, save that on the low western horizon still stand the Pyramids, and far away across the river eastward, a single obelisk in a garden marks the site of Heliopolis.

On the intervening plain Father Time has written and blotted out, and entered over again, the living characters of many histories, since those old monuments began to look towards each other. Pharaohs and Persian Kings, and Ptolemies and Cæsars, heathen * "Faerie Queene," Book v. Cant. vii. 4.

and Christian, Caliphs, Viziers, Sultans, and They were faced with slabs' of stone carefully Grand Seignors, have there raised their suc- formed, and presenting a smooth inaccessible cessive thrones. Idolatry, Philosophy, Chris- surface from top to bottom. There was an tianity, Islamism, secured in turn its intel-inscription on the side of the First Pyramid lectual obedience. Hardly any great charac- from which Herodotus's guide read to him ter anywhere, but has in some shape been that 1600 talents of silver had been expended connected with Egypt. It sheltered Abra- in buying radishes, onions, and garlic for the ham and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and workmen. Jeremiah and The Saviour Himself. Alexander, Pompey, Cæsar, Antony, Augustus, Saladin, and Napoleon, won (or lost) laurels there. Copts, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Turks, Mamelukes, French, and English, here fought and conquered by turns, for (it may be) forty centuries, while the pyramids looked on. Every one gazed and wondered and asked-" Who built them? and when?" But no one answered. They have been measured and stripped and entered, and ransacked in every possible way, yet the ques-years in building, and was formed of polished tion remains very much as it was, when simple, garrulous, shrewd Herodotus opened the discussion at the Feast of Panathenæa, B.C. 445.

No other writing is mentioned, and this has long since disappeared with the casing stones, which the Arabs stripped off the Pyramids to use in building their city of MasrelGahireh (Misraim the Victorious), by unbelievers ignorantly called Cairo. Herodotus learnt that this stone was brought from the Arabian mountains on the other side of the Nile, and drawn upon a causeway, erected for the purpose, from the river to the edge of the desert. This causeway, which took ten

stones, sculptured with animals,* was, in his opinion, a work little inferior to the Pyramid itself.

Cheops and Cephrenes (he was further told) were impious tyrants, who reduced the people to misery, closing the temples and interdicting the sacrifices during the whole one hundred and six years of their united reigns. The former was interred in a subterranean

being surrounded by water introduced by a secret canal from the Nile. The memory of both was accursed, and their very names were

This was the account of the priests.

The Pyramids-i.e., the three which monopolize the name (for some sixty or seventy more of inferior size exist in Lower Egypt) -stand in a diagonal line from north-east to south-west, with the sides of each exactly facing the four cardinal points. The north-chamber under the Great Pyramid, his tomb crnmost is the largest, and usually called the First, though some conceive the Second, or middle one, to be in truth the oldest. These two differ little in size and construction, cov-pronounced with reluctance and abhorrence. ering each some twelve acres of ground, and rising to a height of four hundred feet. They are now the only surviving remnants of the famous Seven Wonders of the World, and are without doubt the oldest as well as the largest edifices extant. The Third is but half their size, but of superior construction.† All three, as Herodotus was informed, were executed by the kings whose names they bore, for their own sepulchres: the First by Cheops, who reigned fifty years; the Second by his brother Cephrenes, who reigned fifty-six years; and the Third by Mycerinus, son of Cheops.

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With the common people the tradition was, that the larger Pyramids were built by the shepherd Philition when he fed his flocks in the plains of Memphis." Now thereby hangs a tale or two. This "shepherd Philition" is plainly a popular impersonation of the Philistines, from whom the country beyond the Isthmus acquired the name of Palestine. Many wonderful things have been said and conjectured about these shepherds, as that they were sons of Ham, who, being ejected from the plains of Shinar, successively invaded Egypt and Syria, whence they were again driven out as objects of divine justice, and under the names of Cyclopes, Pelasgi, Phœnicians, etc., were chased out of Greece and Tyre and Carthage, with every other colony and city of the Old World, till they plunged

The Second Pyramid is in some points of inferior into America, where traces of their stupen

workmanship to the Great one.

* Query, animal letters?-i.e., Hieroglyphics.

dous architecture, and of their costume, as | transaction is recorded; not a monument, not depicted on the Fgyptian monuments, are even a grave (for the pyramids he thinks older still found.*

only dipped his head into a bucket and took it out again, but the force of imagination conjured a whole life into the interval.

still) remains! The monuments indeed repThis extraordinary movement may, in fact, resent Amenemha, the last of the old Egyphave had its beginning in Egypt, since the tian rulers, as being succeeded by Amosis, Philistim and the Caphtorim (or Copts) are the first of the New Monarchy. This, we both enumerated among the descendants of are to believe, was only a regal fiction, like Mizraim. The former, however, had removed Charles II. coming next to his father on the into the south of Palestine as early as Abra- throne of England; in reality, there was an ham's time, leaving the ancestral country to interregnum-an interval as long as from be called Egypt, the land of the Copt." "Alfred the Great to Queen Victoria—when This separation seems to have been a promi- Egypt was subject to a foreign race; after nent event in primitive history, and the which she expelled the usurpers en masse, and Egyptian monuments show that war continued not the slightest assimilation having taken to be waged for many a long year between the place between them-quietly returned to the Copts and the Philistines. former state of things! Such a miracle in These Phoenicians, like the latter Arabs, history is only to be paralleled from the roamed alike the sea and the desert; they were" Arabian Nights," where the vizier, in fact, at once mariners and sheep-owners, the two occupations most detested by the Egyptians. When the herbage of the wilderness failed them, the marauders drove their flocks into the fertile fields of the Delta. Similar depredations were experienced from the sons of Shem on the Arabian side of the desert, hence "every shepherd was an abomination unto the Egyptians." There was a tradition which Josephus has preserved out of Manetho, that on one occasion the strangers seized Memphis itself, and made themselves masters of all Egypt; levying tribute from the native rulers, much as the Mongols did in later times from the Russian princes. These were the Hyksos, or "Shepherd Kings," described as cruel enemics both to the people and the gods of Egypt, -burning the temples, slaying the priests, and driving those who refused their yoke into the Upper Valley where, a stand being made, a force was collected, the shepherds were at last expelled, and Egypt was united into a monarchy under the King of Thebes.

The date and duration of this struggle are wholly unknown. Manetho assigns five of his dynasties to it (13th-17th), but can only name six rulers, none of whose names are found on any monument. Out of this tradition, however, Baron Bunsen has built up a "Middle Empire" of shepherd-kings ruling Egypt from the year B.C. 2567 to B.C. 1625. This is a period equal in length to the entire history of England, in all which not a single *See Bryant's Ancient History and Mythology.' Gen. x. 14; 1 Chron. i. 12. Amos ix. 7.

Gen. xlvi. 34.
Gen. xxi. 32, 34.

To return to Herodotus, whom Baron Bunsen compassionates for his credulity;-he heard less about Cephrenes than Cheops, but he is great on Mycerinus. He was a good and pious king, an orthodox idolater, who reopened the temples, restored the sacrifices, and consulted the oracles. He was snatched away by the gods as too good for the wickedness of the times, though not at all to his own satisfaction, nor without a very decided reclamation on his part. There was indeed another story about the Third or Red * Pyramid, which Herodotus treated as a ridiculous anachronism. Still people said that it was raised by Rhodopis, a Greek beauty, once a slave in the same house with Esop the writer of fables, who, having gained her freedom, settled at Naucratis, and acquired great riches, but no way sufficient for such a monument; besides she was of the time of King Amasis, B.C. 566, and Herodotus calculated Cheops to have reigned about B.C. 800.

Such was the information collected by the Father of History. Very little was added by the inquirics of the after Greek and Roman visitors. Diodorus, four and a half centuries later, wrote Chembes in place of Cheops, and Chabryis for Cephrenes, adding that neither was actually interred in his pyramid, for the populace, enraged at their tyranny, had threatened to tear up their corpses, to avoid

*So called from being faced with the fine red Syenite, which Herodotus calls "Ethiopian granite." It is the well-known material of the obelisks, statues, etc., of Theban Art.

which they were secretly buried by their reputation-and he was called a lesser Plato friends in some unknown place. Diodorus-could not float his Egyptian history to posnoticed an ascent cut in the side of the Second terity. Josephus has preserved a few scraps Pyramid. It had no inscription. The Third of Manetho, cooked to the Hebrew taste; and had the name of Mycerinus carved on the northern face some, however, still called it the sepulchre of Rhodopis, and indeed there was absolutely no agreement as to any of the founders-some assigning the Great Pyramid to Armæus, the Second to Amosis, the Third to Inaron.*

Strabo, who was there shortly after Diodorus, also gives the Third Pyramid to Rhodopis, by Sappho called Doricha.t Pliny repeats the same story, which by his time seems to have become the favorite tradition; but he concludes that all authorities were at fault, and that the real authors of these idle and foolish exhibitions of wealth had been overtaken by a well-merited oblivion.‡

a list of his "Dynasties" was included in the Chronology of Julius Africanus, a bishop of the third century. Africanus was rehashed and served up again by Eusebius. But alas? the two Christian prelates soon shared the fate of their heathen predecessors. They survive only in the pages of George, a Greck monk, who had the honor of being Syncellus (or cell companion) to Tarasius, Master of the Horse to the amiable Irene, and Patriarch of Constantinople at the second Council of Nicæa (A.D. 780.) An Armenian translation of Eusebius, however, lately discovered, and translated into Latin, confirms the substantial fidelity of Syncellus. Eratosthenes all that remains is a list of Theban kings, copied by Syncellus out of Apollodorus of Athens. It begins with "Menes the first king," but knows nothing of the Thirty Dynasties, and has so little in common with Manetho that it was never thought possible to reconcile them, till Bunsen put both into his alembic, with many other ingredients, and, by the aid of a powerful imagination, distilled them into his "New Extract of Chronology."

Of

Later still, when the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt, and took every means of flattering the national pride, it was resolved to try the effect of a book in establishing the antiquities. Manetho, a priest of Sebennytus, undertook to write a history of Egypt from the days of Menes-ay, and of the gods before him. He distributed the kings from Menes to Nectanebus, the last of the native Pharaohs, into Thirty Dynasties. His book was written in Greek, with the avowed purpose of correcting the mistakes of Herodotus, but it seems to have found little favor abroad or at home. The Greeks took no notice of it, perhaps they did not believe in the antediluvian " pillars in the Syriadic land," from which he pretended" Manetho (writes this George without the to copy his information. Perhaps they supposed that, after two centuries of foreign rule, including several changes of masters, with the usual accompaniments of revolution and civil war, the priests were not likely to know more of their antiquities than was known to their predecessors, when Egypt was first opened to extraneous inquiry.

At any rate, Manetho had little success; and another Ptolemy employed Eratosthenes to write another history. Both have been long as dead as Cheops. All Eratosthenes's

*Diod. Sic., i. 63. + Strabo, lib, xvii.

Nat. Hist., xxxvi. 16.

These learned Thebans tell us little of the Pyramids, and it grieves us to read of an ecclesiastic, though of the idolatrous persuasion, the terms in which that little is introduced by Syncellus, who knew his author best.

drag-on), high-priest of the detestable Egyptian Mysteries, as great a liar as Berosus!” Gently, good monk, gently! There may be reason for your indignation, and in the days of General Councils your word would certainly have carried the day. But we have changed all that now; we no longer believe in monks; we prefer a heathen priest to an inspired prophet, and can swallow any miracle, provided it be not recorded in Holy Writ. So beware of personalities, good Syncellus, or you will find to your cost that two can play at that game.

Well! Manetho, as reported by Africanus, as reported by Eusebius, as reported by Syn

In Herodotus's time the Egyptian priests ridi-cellus, says, that the pyramid which Herodoculed the notion of a god ever having lived upon tus ascribed to Cheops, was built by Suphis, earth; but Manetho did not choose to be behind the

Greeks, and gives us whole dynasties of gods reign- a ruler of his Fourth Dynasty," who was a ing and having children in Egypt. despiser of the gods, and wrote a sacred

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