by the favourable conditions of their land, the tribe which settled on the Lower Nile quickly left their kinsmen far behind. Indeed the latter hardly rose above a pastoral life. The descendants of these old inhabitants of the valley of the Nile, in spite of the numerous layers which the course of centuries has subsequently laid upon the soil of the land, still form the larger part of the population of Egypt, and the ancient language is preserved in the dialect of the Copts.[2]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bunsen, "Ægypten," 5, 1, 75 ff.; Ebers, "Ægypten and die Bücher Moses," p. 43; Renan ("Histoire générale et système comparé des langues Sémitiques") will not admit this close connection.
[2] Brugsch ("Histoire d'Egypte," pp. 5, 6) explains the name Egypt by ha-ka-ptah, i.e. "the precinct of Ptah." As Ptah was more especially the god of Memphis, this name would have come from Memphis. The attempt has been repeatedly made to derive the civilisation of Egypt from Ethiopia and Meroe. But the problem of the origin of a given civilisation is not solved by removing it from the locality where it exists in full bloom to another, and as a rule more unknown, district. In the case before us this assumption is met by the peculiar difficulty, that the culture of Egypt is influenced essentially by the nature of the land, and therefore can hardly have had an external origin. It cannot be removed from a highly favoured locality into a district extremely hot, and fruitful only in detached oases, without making the explanation of its origin much more difficult. Moreover, the lower valley of the Nile has always ruled over the upper: even in mediæval and modern times. The inscriptions of Sargon, king of Assyria (722–705 B.C.), mention the king of Meroe (Miluhhi); those of Sennacherib (705–681 B.C.) tell us, "The kings of Egypt have summoned the archers, the chariots, the horses of the king of Miluhhi." The inscriptions of Esarhaddon (681–668 B.C.) speak of the "King of Egypt and Miluhhi," whom they also name "King of Egypt and Cush;" and the successor of Esarhaddon directed his first campaign against "Tarku" (Thirhaka) "of Egypt and Miluhhi." The word Meroe, therefore, as the name of a kingdom lying above Egypt on the Nile, must have been in use in Syria, even in the eighth century B.C. Hence the Greeks denote by this name an island, and also a city of the Upper Nile. According to Herodotus (2, 29) the great city Meroe, "which ought to be the chief city of the rest of the Ethiopians" (i.e. of those of whom the Egyptians were not the immediate neighbours), was forty days' journey and twelve days' sail (i.e. over 15,000 stadia) above Syene. Later authorities, Eratosthenes, Artemidorus, Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy reduce the distance by nearly one-half; they regard the distance between Meroe and Syene as nearly equal to the distance from Syene to Alexandria, and fix the whole distance from Alexandria to Meroe at 10,000 to 12,000 stadia. As the town and island of Meroe must be south of the junction of the Astaboras (Atbara), (Strabo, p. 786), we must look for the island between the Atbara and the Blue Nile, and for the city in the ruins at the modern Begerauieh. Yet the chief town of the kingdom of Meroe, when it takes an active part in history, is not Begerauieh. King Thirhaka's residence lay near the modern Meraui under Mount Barkal. The name in inscriptions is Neb, and, consequently, in Greek and Latin Napata. Even under the Sesurtesen and Amenemha, Egypt ruled over Nubia as far as Semne and Kumna, under Amenophis III. as far as Soleb, and under Ramses II. as far as Mt. Barkal. The oldest ruins at this spot belong to a temple dedicated by this king to Ammon (Lepsius, "Reisebriefe," s. 238); next come the ruins of the buildings of Thirhaka, which differ as little from Egyptian buildings as those which he and his two Ethiopian predecessors erected in Egypt. Moreover, the later ruins found at Napata, especially some twenty small pyramids, are feeble imitations of Egyptian art. The same character of imitation is stamped upon the monuments of Begerauieh, though here it is mingled with foreign elements. This place, further removed from Egypt, and therefore more secure, was beyond doubt the residence of the kings of Meroe, at least from the time of Cambyses, and it was named after the country. Herodotus points out that Zeus and Dionysus, i.e. Osiris, were worshipped here, and that the oracle of Zeus, i.e. of Ammon, extended its authority over the Ethiopians: the further accounts which Diodorus preserves of this priesthood give a poor idea of their cultivation (3, 3 ff. Strabo, pp. 827, 828). At the time of the second Ptolemy, this priesthood was destroyed by the King, Ergamenes, whose name (Arkamen) Lepsius has discovered on ruins at Mt. Barkal, as well as Begerauieh, and an independent monarchy was established. Hence we must entirely give up the idea of deriving the supposed supremacy of the priesthood in Egypt, a supremacy which never existed here, from the priesthood formed at Begerauieh after the time of Thirhaka and Psammetichus (in the days of Psammetichus, Herodotus tells us that a king of the Ethiopians received strangers without an oracle, and gave them land, 2, 30); that is, in the sixth century B.C., which continued to exist till 250 B.C. Still less reason is there to suppose that the so-called Indian supremacy of the priesthood came through Meroe into Egypt. Rather we may feel ourselves justified in assuming that the elements of civilisation which took root on the middle Nile passed from Egypt to that district. In the inscriptions of Begerauieh the name Meroe occurs as Meru, and Merua, i.e. "White rock"; Lepsius, l. c. 205–232. As the banks of the Nile, here and also at Mt. Barkal, consist of whitish-yellow chalk rocks, the name of the land and its southern metropolis, of which the existence since the sixth century B.C. is demonstrated, may have been named from this peculiarity of the land.
CHAPTER II.
THE ANTIQUITY OF THE CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY
OF THE NILE.
In the eighteenth century B.C., according to their reckoning, the tradition of the Hebrews presents us with a complete picture of court and civic life in the valley of the Nile, and it tells us of the building of cities in the east of the Delta, which, according to the same computation, must have been founded about the year 1550 B.C. The Homeric poems contain accounts of the land of Ægyptus, of the fair-flowing Zeus-born river of the same name, of the very beautiful fields and cities of Egypt, of princes who fought from their chariots, and finally of "Egyptian Thebes, where in the palaces lie the greatest treasures; a city with a hundred gates, from each of which go forth two hundred men with horses and chariots." They also add "that the fruitful earth bears abundance of drugs in Egypt, some mingled for good, others for evil, and there every one is a physician and has acquaintance with men; they are all sprung from the god of healing."[3]
According to the account given by the Greeks the Egyptians boasted to be the oldest of mankind, and to possess the most ancient traditions.[4] Their priests believed that they could compute the history of Egypt by thousands of years. When Herodotus was in Egypt about the middle of the fifth century B.C., the priests at Thebes read to him from a book the names of 331 kings who had reigned from Menes, the first ruler of Egypt, and the founder of Memphis, down to Moeris inclusive; among these were eighteen Ethiopians, and one queen; the rest were Egyptians. After Moeris came Sesostris, Pheron, Proteus, Rhampsinitus, Cheops and Chephren, Mycerinus, Asychis, Anysis, Sabakon, and Sethos, so that from Menes to Sethos 341 kings had reigned over Egypt in as many generations. Herodotus remarks that the priests assured him that they had an accurate knowledge of what they said, for the years were always enumerated and put down. To convince him they carried him into the great temple at Thebes and showed him there 345 wooden colossi of the chief priests who had presided over the temple through as many generations, in regular succession from father to son; for every chief priest placed his statue here during his own life-time. Before these kings and chief priests the gods had ruled over Egypt; first the Eight Gods, then the Twelve, then Osiris the Greek Dionysus, after him Typhon, and, last of all, Horus. From the time of King Amasis
