S. Rappoport - History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

S >> S. Rappoport >> History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

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No change was made in the Egyptian religion by this change of masters;
and, though the means of the priests were lessened, they still carried
forward the buildings which were in progress, and even began new ones.
The small temple of Isis, at Tentyra, behind the great temple of Hathor,
was either built or finished in this reign, and it was dedicated to the
goddess, and to the honour of the emperor as Jupiter Liberator, in a
Greek inscription on the cornice, in the thirty-first year of the reign,
when Publius Octavius was prefect of the province.

[Illustration: 018.jpg A KOPTIC MAIDEN]

The large temple at Talmis, in Nubia, was also then built, though not
wholly finished; and we find the name of Augustus at Philae, on some of
the additions to the temple of Isis, which had been built in the reign
of Philadelphus. In the hieroglyphical inscriptions on these temples,
Augustus is called Autocrator Caesar, and is styled Son of the Sun, King
of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the other titles which had always been
given by the priests to the Ptolemies and their own native sovereigns
for so many centuries. These claims were evidently unknown in Rome,
where the modesty of Augustus was almost proverbial.

The Greeks had at all times been forward in owning the Egyptians as
their teachers in religion; and in the dog Cerberus, the judge Minos,
the boat of Charon, and the river Styx of their mythology, we see a
clear proof that it was in Egypt that the Greeks gained their faint
glimpse of the immortality of the soul, a day of judgment, and a future
state of rewards and punishments; and, now that Rome was in close
intercourse with Egypt, the Romans were equally ready to borrow thence
their religious ceremonies. They brought to Rome the Egyptian opinions
with the statues of the gods. They ran into the new superstition to
avoid the painful uneasiness of believing nothing, and, though the
Romans ridiculed their own gods, they believed in those of Egypt. So
fashionable was the worship of Isis and Serapis becoming in Italy, that
Augustus made a law that no Egyptian ceremonies should enter the city
or even the suburbs of Rome. His subjects might copy the luxuries, the
follies, and the vices of the Alexandrians, but not the gloomy devotion
of the Egyptians. But the spread of opinions was not so checked;
even Virgil taught the doctrine of the Egyptian millennium, or the
resurrection from the dead when the thousand years were ended; and the
cripple asking for alms in the streets of Rome would beg in the name of
the holy Osiris.

Egypt felt no change on the death of Augustus. The province was well
governed during the whole of the reign of Tiberius, and the Alexandrians
completed the beautiful temple to his honour, named the Sebaste, or
Caesar's Temple. It stood by the side of the harbour, and was surrounded
with a sacred grove. It was ornamented with porticoes, and fitted up
with libraries, paintings, and statues, and was the most lofty building
in the city. In front of this temple they set up two ancient obelisks,
which had been made by Thutmosis III. and carved by Ramses II., and
which, like the other monuments of the Theban kings, have outlived
all the temples and palaces of their Greek and Roman successors. These
obelisks are now generally known as "Cleopatra's Needles." One of them,
in 1878, was taken to London and set up on the Thames Embankment; the
other was soon afterward brought to New York, and is now in Central Park
in that city. It is sixty-seven feet high to its sharpened apex, and
seven feet, seven inches in diameter at its base. On its face are
deeply incised inscriptions in hieroglyphic character, giving the names
Thutmosis III., Ramses II., and Seti II.

[Illustration: 022b.jpg FRAGMENTS IN WOOD PAINTED]

The harsh justice with which Tiberius began his reign was at Rome soon
changed into a cruel tyranny; but in the provinces it was only felt as
a check to the injustice of the prefects. On one occasion, when AEmilius
Rectus sent home from Egypt a larger amount of taxes than was usual,
he hoped that his zeal would be praised by Tiberius. But the emperor's
message to the prefect was as stern as it was humane: "I should wish my
sheep to be sheared, but not to be flayed." On the death of one of
the prefects, there was found among his property at Rome a statue of
Menelaus, carved in Ethiopian obsidian, which had been used in the
religious ceremonies in the temple of Heliopolis, and Tiberius returned
it to the priests of that city as its rightful owners. Another proof of
the equal justice with which this province was governed was to be seen
in the buildings then carried on by the priests in Upper Egypt. We find
the name of Tiberius carved in hieroglyphics on additions or repairs
made to the temples at Thebes, at Aphroditopolis, at Berenice, on the
Red Sea, at Philae, and at the Greek city of Parembole, in Nubia. The
great portico was at this time added to the temple at Tentyra, with an
inscription dedicating it to the goddess in Greek and in hieroglyphics.
As a building is often the work of years, while sculpture is only the
work of weeks, so the fashion of the former is always far less changing
than that of the latter. The sculptures on the walls of this beautiful
portico are crowded and graceless; while, on the other hand, the
building itself has the same grand simplicity and massive strength that
we find in the older temples of Upper Egypt.

We cannot but admire the zeal of the Egyptians by whom this work
was then finished. They were treated as slaves by their Greek
fellow-countrymen; their houses were ransacked every third year by
military authority in search of arms; they could have had no help from
their Roman masters, who only drained the province of its wealth; and
the temple had perhaps never been heard of by the emperor, who could
have been little aware that the most lasting monument of his reign was
being raised in the distant province of Egypt.

[Illustration: 024.jpg TEMPLE AT TENTYRA, ENLARGED BY ROMAN ARCHITECTS]

The priests of the other parts of the country sent gifts out of their
poverty in aid of this pious work; and among the figures on the walls
we see those of forty cities, from Semneh, at the second cataract, to
Memphis and Sais, in the Delta, each presenting an offering to the god
of the temple.

In the third year of this reign Germanicus Caesar, who, much against his
will, had been sent into the East as governor, found time to leave his
own province, and to snatch a hasty view of the time-honoured buildings
of Egypt. Descending the river to Thebes, and, while gazing on the
huge remains of the temples, he asked the priests to read to him the
hieroglyphical writing on the walls. He was told that it recounted the
greatness of the country in the time of King Ramses, when there were
seven hundred thousand Egyptians of an age to bear arms; and that
with these troops Ramses had conquered the Libyans, Ethiopians, Medes,
Persians, Bactrians, Scythians, Syrians, Armenians, Cappadocians,
Bithynians, and Lycians. He was also told the tributes laid upon each
of those nations; the weight of gold and silver, the number of chariots
and horses, the gifts of ivory and scents for the temples, and the
quantity of grain which the conquered provinces sent to feed the
population of Thebes. After listening to the musical statue of
Amenhothes, Germanicus went on to Elephantine and Syene; and, on his
return, he turned aside to the pyramids and the Lake of Mceris, which
regulated the overflow of the Nile on the neighbouring fields. At
Memphis, Germanicus consulted the sacred bull Apis as to his future
fortune, and met with an unfavourable answer. The manner of consulting
Apis was for the visitor to hold out some food in his hand, and the
answer was understood to be favourable if the bull turned his head
to eat, but unfavourable if he looked another way. When Germanicus
accordingly held out a handful of grain, the well-fed animal turned his
head sullenly towards the other side of his stall; and on the death of
this young prince, which shortly followed, the Egyptians did not
forget to praise the bull's foresight. This blameless and seemingly
praiseworthy visit of Germanicus did not, however, escape the notice
of the jealous Tiberius. He had been guilty of gaining the love of the
people by walking about without guards, in a plain Greek dress, and of
lowering the price of grain in a famine by opening the public granaries;
and Tiberius sternly reproached him with breaking the known law of
Augustus, by which no Roman citizen of consular or even of equestrian
rank might enter Alexandria without leave from the emperor.

There were at this time about a million of Jews in Egypt. In Alexandria
they seem to have been about one-third of the population, as they
formed the majority in two wards out of the five into which the city was
divided. They lived under their own elders and Sanhedrim, going up at
their solemn feasts to worship in their own temple at Onion; but, from
their mixing with the Greeks, they had become less strict than their
Hebrew brethren in their observance of the traditions. Some few of them,
however, held themselves in obedience to the Sanhedrim in Jerusalem, and
looked upon the temple of Jerusalem as the only Jewish temple; and these
men were in the habit of sending an embassy on the stated solemn feasts
of the nation to offer the appointed sacrifices and prayers to Jahveh
in the holy city on their behalf. But though the decree by Caesar, which
declared that the Jews were Alexandrian citizens, was engraved on a
pillar in the city, yet they were by no means treated as such, either by
the government, or by the Greeks, or by the Egyptians.

[Illustration: 027.jpg ON THE BANKS OF THE NILE.]

When, during the famine, the public granaries seemed unable to supply
the whole city with food, even the humane Germanicus ordered that the
Jews, like the Egyptians, should have no share of the gift. They were
despised even by the Egyptians themselves, who, to insult them, said
that the wicked god Typhon had two sons, Hierosolymus and Judaeus, and
that from these the Jews were descended.

In the neighbourhood of Alexandria, on a hill near the shores of the
Lake Mareotis, was a little colony of Jews, who, joining their own
religion with the mystical opinions and gloomy habits of the Egyptians,
have left us one of the earliest known examples of the monastic life.
They bore the name of Therapeutae. They had left, says Philo, their
worldly wealth to their families or friends; they had forsaken wives,
children, brethren, parents, and the society of men, to bury themselves
in solitude and pass their lives in the contemplation of the divine
essence. Seized by this heavenly love, they were eager to enter upon the
next world, as though they were already dead to this. Every one, whether
man or woman, lived alone in his cell or monastery, caring for neither
food nor raiment, but having his thoughts wholly turned to the Law and
the Prophets, or to sacred hymns of their own composing. They had their
God always in their thoughts, and even the broken sentences which they
uttered in their dreams were treasures of religious wisdom. They prayed
every morning at sunrise, and then spent the day in turning over the
sacred volumes, and the commentaries, which explained the allegories,
or pointed out a secondary meaning as hidden beneath the surface of even
the historical books of the Old Testament. At sunset they again prayed,
and then tasted their first and only meal. Selfdenial indeed was the
foundation of all their virtues. Some made only three meals in the week,
that their meditations might be more free; while others even attempted
to prolong their fast to the sixth day. During six days of the week they
saw nobody, not even one another. On the seventh day they met together
in the synagogue. Here they sat, each according to his age; the women
separated from the men. Each wore a plain, modest robe, which covered
the arms and hands, and they sat in silence while one of the elders
preached. As they studied the mystic powers of numbers, they thought the
number seven was a holy number, and that seven times seven made a great
week, and hence they kept the fiftieth day as a solemn festival. On that
day they dined together, the men on one side and the women on the other.
The rushy papyrus formed the couches; bread was their only meat, water
their drink, salt the seasoning, and cresses the delicacy. They would
keep no slaves, saying that all men were born equal. Nobody spoke,
unless it was to propose a question out of the Old Testament, or to
answer the question of another. The feast ended with a hymn of praise.

[Illustration: 029.jpg BEDOUIN TENT IN THE DESERT]

The ascetic Jews of Palestine, the Essenes on the banks of the Dead Sea,
by no means, according to Philo, thus quitted the active duties of life;
and it would seem that the Therapeutas rather borrowed their customs
from the country in which they had settled, than from any sects of the
Jewish nation. Some classes of the Egyptian priesthood had always held
the same views of their religious duties. These Egyptian monks slept on
a hard bed of palm branches, with a still harder wooden pillow for the
head; they were plain in their dress, slow in walking, spare in diet,
and scarcely allowed themselves to smile. They washed thrice a day, and
prayed as often; at sunrise, at noon, and at sunset. They often fasted
from animal food, and at all times refused many meats as unclean.
They passed their lives alone, either in study or wrapped in religious
thought. They never met one another but at set times, and were seldom
seen by strangers. Thus, leaving to others the pleasures, wealth, and
lesser prizes of this life, they received from them in return what most
men value higher, namely, honour, fame, and power.

The Romans, like the Greeks, feeling but little partiality in favour
of their own gods, were rarely guilty of intolerance against those of
others; and would hardly have checked the introduction of a new religion
unless it made its followers worse citizens. But in Rome, where
every act of its civil or military authorities was accompanied with a
religious rite, any slight towards the gods was a slight towards the
magistrate; many devout Romans had begun to keep holy the seventh day;
and Egypt was now so closely joined to Italy that the Roman senate made
a new law against the Egyptian and Jewish superstitions, and, in A.D.
19, banished to Sardinia four thousand men who were found guilty of
being Jews.

Egypt had lost with its liberties its gold coinage, and it was now
made to feel a further proof of being a conquered country in having its
silver much alloyed with copper. But Tiberius, in the tenth year of his
reign, altogether stopped the Alexandrian mint, as well as those of the
other cities which occasionally coined; and after this year we find no
more coins, but the few with the head and name of Augustus Caesar, which
seem hardly to have been meant for money, but to commemorate on some
peculiar occasions the emperor's adoption by his stepfather. The Nubian
gold mines were probably by this time wholly deserted; they had been so
far worked out as to be no longer profitable. For fifteen hundred years,
ever since Ethiopia was conquered by Thebes, wages and prices had been
higher in Egypt than in the neighbouring countries. But this was now no
longer the case. Egypt had been getting poorer during the reigns of the
latter Ptolemies; and by this time it is probable that both wages and
prices were higher in Rome.

It seems to have been usual to change the prefect of Egypt every few
years, and the prefect-elect was often sent to Alexandria to wait
till his predecessor's term of years had ended. Thus in this reign of
twenty-three years AEmilius Rectus was succeeded by Vetrasius Pollio;
and on his death Tiberius gave the government to his freedman Iberus.
During the last five years Egypt was under the able but stern government
of Flaccus Avillius, whose name is carved on the temple of Tentyra with
that of the emperor. He was a man who united all those qualities of
prudent forethought, with prompt execution and attention to business,
which was so necessary in controlling the irritable Alexandrians, who
were liable to be fired into rebellion by the smallest spark. Justice
was administered fairly; the great were not allowed to tyrannise over
the poor, nor the people to meet in tumultuous mobs; and the legions
were regularly paid, so that they had no excuse for plundering the
Egyptians.

On the death of Tiberius, in A.D. 37, the old quarrel again broke out
between Jews and Greeks. The Alexandrians were not slow in learning the
feelings of his successor, Caius, or Caligula, towards the Jews, nor
in turning against them the new law that the emperor's statue should
be honoured in every temple of the empire. They had very unwillingly
yielded a half-obedience to the law of Augustus that the Jews should
still be allowed the privileges of citizenship; and, as soon as they
heard that Caligula was to be worshipped in every temple of the empire,
they denounced the Jews as traitors and rebels, who refused so to honour
the emperor in their synagogues. It happened, unfortunately, that their
countryman, King Agrippa, at this time came to Alexandria. He had full
leave from the emperor to touch there, as being the quickest and most
certain way of making the voyage from Rome to the seat of his own
government. Indeed, the Alexandrian voyage had another merit in the eyes
of a Jew; for, whereas wooden water-vessels were declared by the Law to
be unclean, an exception was made by their tradition in favour of the
larger size of the water-wells in the Alexandrian ships. Agrippa had
seen Egypt before, on his way to Rome, and he meant to make no stay
there; but, though he landed purposely after dark, and with no pomp or
show, he seems to have raised the anger of the prefect Flaccus, who felt
jealous at any man of higher rank than himself coming into his province.
The Greeks fell into the prefect's humour, and during the stay of
Agrippa in Alexandria they lampooned him in songs and ballads, of which
the raillery was not of the most delicate kind. They mocked him by
leading about the streets a poor idiot dressed up with a paper crown and
a reed for a sceptre, in ridicule of his rather doubtful right to the
style of royalty.

As these insults towards the emperor's friend passed wholly unchecked
by the prefect, the Greeks next assaulted the Jews in the streets and
market-place, attacked their houses, rooted up the groves of trees
around their synagogues, and tore down the decree by which the
privileges of citizenship had been confirmed to them. The Greeks then
proceeded to set up by force a statue of the emperor in each Jewish
synagogue, as if the new decree had included those places of worship
among the temples, and, not finding statues enough, they made use of the
statues of the Ptolemies, which they carried away from the gymnasium
for that purpose. During the last reign, under the stern government
of Tiberius, Flaccus had governed with justice and prudence, but under
Caligula he seemed to have lost all judgment in his zeal against the
Jews. When the riots in the streets could no longer be overlooked,
instead of defending the injured party, he issued a decree in which
he styled the Jews foreigners; thus at one word robbing them of their
privileges and condemning them unheard. By this the Greeks were hurried
forward into further acts of injustice, and the Jews of resistance. But
the Jews were the weaker party: they were overpowered, and all driven
into one ward, and four hundred of their houses in the other wards were
plundered, and the spoil divided as if taken in war. They were stoned,
and even burnt in the streets, if they ventured forth to buy food for
their families. Flaccus seized and scourged in the theatre thirty-eight
of their venerable councillors, and, to show them that they were no
longer citizens, the punishment was inflicted by the hands of Egyptian
executioners. While the city was in this state of riot, the Greeks gave
out that the Jews were concealing arms; and Flaccus, to give them a
fresh proof that they had lost the rights of citizenship, ordered that
their houses should be forcibly entered and searched by a centurion and
a band of soldiers.

During their troubles the Jews had not been allowed to complain to the
emperor, or to send an embassy to Rome to make known their grievances.
But the Jewish King Agrippa, who was on his way from Rome to his
kingdom, forwarded to Caligula the complaints of his countrymen, the
Jews, with an account of the rebellious state of Alexandria. The riots,
it is true, had been wholly raised by the prefect's zeal in setting up
the emperor's statue in the synagogues to be worshipped by the Jews, and
in carrying into effect the emperor's decree; but, as he had not been
able to keep his province quiet, it was necessary that he should
be recalled, and punished for his want of success. To have found it
necessary to call out the troops was of course a fault in a governor;
but doubly so at a time and in a province where a successful general
might so easily become a formidable rebel. Accordingly, a centurion,
with a trusty cohort of soldiers, was sent from Rome for the recall
of the prefect. On approaching the flat coast of Egypt, they kept
the vessel in deep water till sunset, and then entered the harbour of
Alexandria in the dark. The centurion, on landing, met with a freedman
of the emperor, from whom he learned that the prefect was then at
supper, entertaining a large company of friends. The freedman led the
cohort quietly into the palace, into the very room where Flaccus was
sitting at table; and the first tidings that he heard of his government
being disapproved of in Rome was his finding himself a prisoner in his
own palace. The friends stood motionless with surprise, the centurion
produced the emperor's order for what he was doing, and as no resistance
was attempted all passed off quietly; Flaccus was hurried on board the
vessel then at anchor in the harbour on the same evening and immediately
taken to Rome.

It so happened that on the night that Flaccus was seized, the Jews
had met together to celebrate their autumnal feast, the feast of the
Tabernacles: not as in former years with joy and pomp, but in fear,
in grief, and in prayer. Their chief men were in prison, their nation
smarting under its wrongs and in daily fear of fresh cruelties; and it
was not without alarm that they heard the noise of soldiers moving to
and fro through the city, and the heavy tread of the guards marching by
torchlight from the camp to the palace. But their fear was soon turned
into joy when they heard that Flaccus, the author of all their wrongs,
was already a prisoner on board the vessel in the harbour; and they
gave glory to God, not, says Philo, that their enemy was going to be
punished, but because their own sufferings were at an end.

The Jews then, having had leave given them by the prefect, sent
an embassy to Rome, at the head of which was Philo, the platonic
philosopher, who was to lay their grievances before the emperor, and to
beg for redress. The Greeks also at the same time sent their embassy,
at the head of which was the learned grammarian Apion, who was to accuse
the Jews of not worshipping the statue of the emperor, and to argue that
they had no right to the same privileges of citizenship with those who
boasted of their Macedonian blood. But, as the Jews did not deny the
charge that was brought against them, Caligula would hear nothing that
they had to say; and Philo withdrew with the remark, "Though the emperor
is against us, God will be our friend."

We learn the sad tale of the Jews' suffering under Caligula from the
pages of their own historian only. But though Philo may have felt and
written as one of the sufferers, his truth is undoubted. He was a man
of unblemished character, and the writer of greatest learning and of the
greatest note at that time in Alexandria; being also of a great age, he
well deserved the honour of being sent on the embassy to Caligula. He
was in religion a Jew, in his philosophy a platonist, and by birth an
Egyptian: and in his numerous writings we may trace the three sources
from which he drew his opinions. He is always devotional and in earnest,
full of pure and lofty thoughts, and often eloquent. His fondness for
the mystical properties of numbers, and for finding an allegory or
secondary meaning in the plainest narrative, seems borrowed from the
Egyptians. According to the Eastern proverb every word in a wise book
has seventy-two meanings; and this mode of interpretation was called
into use by the necessity which the Jews felt of making the Old
Testament speak a meaning more agreeable to their modern views of
religion. In Philo's speculative theology he seems to have borrowed less
from Moses than from the abstractions of Plato, whose shadowy hints he
has embodied in a more solid form. He was the first Jewish writer
that applied to the Deity the mystical notion of the Egyptians, that
everything perfect was of three parts. Philo's writings are valuable as
showing the steps by which the philosophy of Greece may be traced
from the writings of Plato to those of Justin Martyr and Clemens
Alexandrinus. They give us the earliest example of how the mystical
interpretation of the Scriptures was formed into a system, by which
every text was made to unfold some important philosophic or religious
truth to the learned student, at the same time that to the unlearned
reader it conveyed only the simple historic fact.

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