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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The Hellenistic Jews, while suffering under severe political
disabilities, had taken up a high literary position in Alexandria, and
had forced their opinions into the notice of the Greeks. The glowing
earnestness of their philosophy, now put forward in a platonic dress,
and heir improved style, approaching even classic elegance, laced their
writings on a lofty eminence far above anything which the cold, lifeless
grammarians of the museum were then producing. Apion, who went to Rome
to plead against Philo, was a native of the Great Oasis, but as he was
born of Greek parents, he claimed and received the title and privileges
of an Alexandrian, which he denied to the Jews who were born in the
city. He had studied under Didymus and Apollonius and Euphranor, and was
one of the most laborious of the grammarians and editors of Homer. All
his writings are now lost. Some of them were attacks upon the Jews and
their religion, calling in question the truth of the Jewish history
and the justice of that nation's claim to high antiquity; and to these
attacks we owe Josephus' _Answer_, in which several valuable fragments
of history are saved by being quoted against the pagans in support of
the Old Testament. One of his works was his _AEgyptiaca_, an account of
what he thought most curious in Egypt. But his learned trifling is now
lost, and nothing remains of it but his account of the meeting between
Androclus and the lion, which took place in the amphitheatre at Rome
when Apion was there on his embassy. Androclus was a runaway slave, who,
when retaken, was brought to Rome to be thrown before an African lion
for the amusement of the citizens, and as a punishment for his flight.
But the fierce and hungry beast, instead of tearing him to pieces,
wagged his tail at him, and licked his feet. It seems that the slave,
when he fled from his master, had gained the friendship of the lion in
the Libyan desert, first by pulling a thorn out of his foot, and then
by living three years with him in a cave; and, when both were brought
in chains to Rome, Androclus found a grateful friend in the amphitheatre
where he thought to have met with a cruel death.

We may for a moment leave our history, to bid a last farewell to the
family of the Ptolemies. Augustus, after leading Selene, the daughter
of Cleopatra and Antony, through the streets of Rome in his triumph, had
given her in marriage to the younger Juba, the historian of Africa; and
about the same time he gave to the husband the kingdom of Mauritania,
the inheritance of his father. His son Ptolemy succeeded him on the
throne, but was soon turned out of his kingdom. We trace the last of
the Ptolemies in his travels through Greece and Asia Minor by the
inscriptions remaining to his honour. The citizens of Xanthus in Lycia
set up a monument to him; and at Athens his statue was placed beside
that of Philadelphus in the gymnasium of Ptolemy, near the temple of
Theseus, where he was honoured as of founder's kin. He was put to death
by Caligula. Drusilla, another grandchild of Cleopatra and Antony,
married Antonius Felix, the procurator of Judaea, after the death of his
first wife, who was also named Drusilla. These are the last notices that
we meet with of the royal family of Egypt.

As soon as the news of Caligula's death (A.D. 41) reached Egypt, the
joy of the Jews knew no bounds. They at once flew to arms to revenge
themselves on the Alexandrians, whose streets were again the seat of
civil war. The governor did what he could to quiet both parties, but
was not wholly successful till the decree of the new emperor reached
Alexandria. In this Claudius granted to the Jews the full rights of
citizenship, which they had enjoyed under the Ptolemies, and which had
been allowed by Augustus; he left them to choose their own high priest,
to enjoy their own religion without hindrance, and he repealed the laws
of Caligula under which they had been groaning. At this time the Jewish
alabarch in Egypt was Demetrius, a man of wealth and high birth, who had
married Mariamne, the daughter of the elder Agrippa.

[Illustration: 041.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING-MACHINE]

The government under Claudius was mild and just, at least as far as
a government could be in which every tax-gatherer, every military
governor, and every sub-prefect was supposed to enrich himself by his
appointment. Every Roman officer, from the general down to the lowest
tribune, claimed the right of travelling through the country free of
expense, and seizing the carts and cattle of the villagers to carry him
forward to the next town, under the pretence of being a courier on the
public service. But we have a decree of the ninth year of this reign,
carved on the temple in the Great Oasis, in which Cneius Capito, the
prefect of Egypt, endeavours to put a stop to this injustice. He orders
that no traveller shall have the privilege of a courier unless he has a
proper warrant, and that then he shall only claim a free lodging; that
clerks in the villages shall keep a register of all that is taken on
account of the public service; and that if anybody make an unjust claim
he shall pay four times the amount to the informer and six times the
amount to the emperor. But royal decrees could do little or nothing
where there were no judges to enforce them; and the people of Upper
Egypt must have felt this law as a cruel insult when they were told that
they might take up their complaints to Basilides, at Alexandria. The
employment of the informer is a full acknowledgment of the weakness
of this absolute government, and that the prefect had not the power
to enforce his own decrees; and, when we compare this law with that
of Alexander on his conquest of the country, we have no difficulty in
seeing why Egypt rose under the Ptolemies and sunk under the selfish
policy of Augustus.

Claudius was somewhat of a scholar and an author; he wrote several
volumes both in Greek and in Latin. The former he might perhaps think
would be chiefly valued in Alexandria; and when he founded a new college
in that city, called after himself the Claudian Museum, he ordered that
on given days every year his history of Carthage should be publicly
read in one museum, and his history of Italy in the other; thus securing
during his reign an attention to his writings which their merits alone
would not have gained.

Under the government of Claudius the Egyptians were again allowed to
coin money; and in his first year begins that historically important
series in which every coin is dated with the year of the emperor's
reign. The coins of the Ptolemies were strictly Greek in their
workmanship, and the few Egyptian characters that we see upon them are
so much altered by the classic taste of the die-engraver that we hardly
know them again. But it is far otherwise with the coins of the emperors,
which are covered with the ornaments, characters, and religious
ceremonies of the native Egyptians; and, though the style of art is
often bad, they are scarcely equalled by any series of coins whatever in
the service they render to the historian.

It was in this reign that the route through Egypt to India first became
really known to the Greeks and Romans. The historian Pliny, who died in
79 A.D., has left us a contemporary account of these early voyages. "It
will not be amiss," he says in his _Natural History_, "to set forth the
whole of the route from Egypt, which has been stated to us of late, upon
information on which reliance may be placed and is here published for
the first time. The subject is one well worthy of our notice, seeing
that in no year does India drain our empire of less than five hundred
and fifty millions of sesterces [or two million dollars], giving back
her own wares in exchange, which are sold among us at fully one hundred
times their cost price.

"Two miles distant from Alexandria is the town of Heliopolis. The
distance thence to Koptos, up the Nile, is three hundred and eight
miles; the voyage is performed, when the Etesian winds are blowing, in
twelve days. From Koptos the journey is made with the aid of camels,
stations being arranged at intervals for the supply of fresh water. The
first of these stations is called Hydreuma, and is distant twenty-two
miles; the second is situate on a mountain at a distance of one day's
journey from the last; the third is at a second Hydreuma, distant from
Koptos ninety-five miles; the fourth is on a mountain; the next to that
is another Hydreuma, that of Apollo, and is distant from Koptos one
hundred and eighty-four miles; after which there is another on a
mountain; there is then another station at a place called the New
Hydreuma, distant from Koptos two hundred and thirty miles; and next
to it there is another called the Old Hydreuma, where a detachment
is always on guard, with a caravansary that affords lodging for two
thousand persons. The last is distant from the New Hydreuma seven
miles. After leaving it, we come to the city of Berenice, situate upon
a harbour of the Red Sea, and distant from Koptos two hundred and
fifty-seven miles. The greater part of this distance is generally
travelled by night, on account of the extreme heat, the day being spent
at the stations; in consequence of which it takes twelve days to perform
the whole journey from Koptos to Berenice.

"Passengers generally set sail at midsummer before the rising of the
Dog-star, or else immediately after, and in about thirty days arrive
at Ocelis in Arabia, or else at Cane, in the region which bears
frankincense. To those who are bound for India, Ocelis is the best place
for embarkation. If the wind called Hippolus happens to be blowing,
it is possible to arrive in forty days at the nearest mart of India,
Muziris by name [the modern Mangalore]. This, however, is not a very
desirable place for disembarkation, on account of the pirates which
frequent its vicinity, where they occupy a place, Mtrias; nor, in fact,
is it very rich in articles of merchandise. Besides, the roadstead for
shipping is a considerable distance from the shore, and the cargoes
have to be conveyed in boats, either for loading or discharging. At the
moment that I am writing these pages," continues Pliny, "the name of
the king of the place is Caelobotras. Another part, and a much more
convenient one, is that which lies in the territory of the people called
Neacyndi, Barace by name. Here King Pandian used to reign, dwelling at a
considerable distance from the mart in the interior, at a city known
as Modiera. The district from which pepper is carried down to Barace
in boats hollowed out of a single tree, is known as Cottonara. None of
these names of nations, ports, and cities are to be found in any of
the former writers, from which circumstance it would appear that the
localities have since changed their names. Travellers set sail from
India on their return to Europe, at the beginning of the Egyptian month
Tybus, which is our December, or, at all events, before the sixth day of
the Egyptian month Mechir, the same as our ides of January: if they do
this, they can go and return in the same year. They set sail from
India with a south-east wind, and, upon entering the Red Sea, catch the
south-west or south."

The places on the Indian coast which the Egyptian merchant vessels then
reached are verified from the coins found there; and as we know the
course of the trade-wind by which they arrived, we also know the part of
Africa where they left the shore and braved the dangers of the ocean.
A hoard of Roman gold coins of these reigns has been dug up in our own
days near Calicut, under the roots of a banyan-tree. It had been there
buried by an Alexandrian merchant on his arrival from this voyage, and
left safe under the cover of the sacred tree to await his return from a
second journey. But he died before his return, and his secret died with
him. The products of the Indian trade were chiefly silk, diamonds, and
other precious stones, ginger, spices, and some scents. The state of
Ethiopia was then such that no trade came down the Nile to Syene;
and the produce of southern Africa was brought by coasting vessels to
Berenice. These products were ivory, rhinoceros teeth, hippopotamus
skins, tortoise shell, apes, monkeys, and slaves, a list which throws
a sidelight both on the pursuits of the natives and the tastes of the
ultimate purchasers.

[Illustration: 047.jpg AN ARAB GIRL]

The Romans in most cases collected the revenues of a province by means
of a publican or farmer, to whom the taxes were let by auction; but such
was the importance of Egypt that the same jealousy which made them think
its government too great to be trusted to a man of high rank, made them
think its revenues too large to be trusted to one farmer. The smaller
branches of the Egyptian revenue were, however, let out as usual, and
even the collection of the customs of the whole of the Red Sea was not
thought too much to trust to one citizen. Annius Plocamus, who farmed
them in this reign, had a little fleet under his command to collect them
with; and, tempted either by trade or plunder, his ships were sometimes
as far out as the south coast of Arabia. On one occasion one of his
freedmen in the command of a vessel was carried by a north wind into
the open ocean, and after being fifteen days at sea found himself on the
coast of Ceylon. This island was not then wholly new to the geographers
of Egypt and Europe. It had been heard of by the pilots in the voyage of
Alexander the Great; Eratosthenes had given it a place in his map; and
it had often been reached from Africa by the sailors of the Red Sea in
wickerwork boats made of papyrus; but this was the first time it had
been visited by a European.

In the neighbourhood of the above-mentioned road from Koptos to Berenice
were the porphyritic quarries and the emerald mines, which were briskly
worked under the Emperor Claudius. The mountain was now named the
Claudian Mountain.

As this route for trade became known, the geographers began to
understand the wide space that separates India from Africa. Hitherto,
notwithstanding a few voyages of discovery, it had been the common
opinion that Persia was in the neighbourhood of Ethiopia. The Greeks had
thought that the Nile rose in India, in opposition to the Jews, who said
that it was the river Gibon of the garden of Eden, which made a circuit
round the whole of the land of Cush, or Ethiopia. The names of these
countries got misused accordingly; and even after the mistake was
cleared up we sometimes find Ethiopia called India.

The Egyptian chemists were able to produce very bright dyes by methods
then unknown to Greece or Rome. They dipped the cloth first into a
liquid of one colour, called a mordant, to prepare it, and then into
a liquid of a second colour; and it came out dyed of a third colour,
unlike either of the former. The ink with which they wrote the name of
a deceased person on the mummy-cloth, like our own marking-ink, was made
with nitrate of silver. Their knowledge of chemistry was far greater
than that of their neighbours, and the science is even now named from
the country of its birth. The later Arabs called it Alchemia, _the
Egyptian art_, and hence our words alchemy and chemistry. So also
Naphtha, or _rock oil_, from the coast of the Red Sea; and Anthracite,
or _rock fuel_, from the coast of Syria, both bear Egyptian names.
To some Egyptian stones the Romans gave their own names; as the black
glassy obsidian from Nubia they called after Obsidius, who found it;
the black Tiberian marble with white spots, and the Augustan marble with
regular wavy veins, were both named after the emperors. Porphyry was
now used for statues for the first time, and sometimes to make a kind of
patchwork figure, in which the clothed parts were of the coloured stone,
while the head, hands, and feet were of white marble. And it was thought
that diamonds were nowhere to be found but in the Ethiopian gold mines.

Several kinds of wine were made in Egypt; some in the Arsinoite nome on
the banks of the lake Mceris; and a poor Libyan wine at Antiplme on the
coast, a hundred miles from Alexandria. Wine had also been made in
Upper Egypt in small quantities a very long time, as we learn from the
monuments; but it was produced with difficulty and cost and was not
good; it was not valued by the Greeks. It was poor and thin, and drunk
only by those who were feverish and afraid of anything stronger. That
of Anthylla, to the east of Alexandria, was very much better. But better
still were the thick luscious Taeniotic and the mild delicate Mareotic
wines. This last was first grown at Plinthine, but afterwards on all the
banks of the lake Mareotis. The Mareotic wine was white and sweet and
thin, and very little heating or intoxicating. Horace had carelessly
said of Cleopatra that she was drunk with Mareotic wine; but Lucan, who
better knew its quality, says that the headstrong lady drank wine far
stronger than the Mareotic. Near Sebennytus three kinds of wine were
made; one bitter named Peuce, a second sparkling named AEthalon, and
the third Thasian, from a vine imported from Thasus. But none of these
Egyptian wines was thought equal to those of Greece and Italy. Nor were
they made in quantities large enough or cheap enough for the poor; and
here, as in other countries, the common people for their intoxicating
drink used beer or spirits made from barley.

[Illustration: 051.jpg FARMING IN EGYPT]

The Egyptian sour wine, however, made very good vinegar, and it was then
exported for sale in Rome. During this half-century that great national
work, the lake of Moeris, by which thousands of acres had been flooded
and made fertile, and the watering of the lower country regulated, was,
through the neglect of the embankments, at once destroyed. The latest
traveller who mentions it is Strabo, and the latest geographer Pomponius
Mela. By its means the province of Arsinoe was made one of the most
fruitful and beautiful spots in Egypt. Here only does the olive grow
wild. Here the vine will grow. And by the help of this embanked lake the
province was made yet more fruitful. But before Pliny wrote, the bank
had given way, the pentup waters had made for themselves a channel into
the lake now called Birket el Kurun, and the two small pyramids, which
had hitherto been surrounded by water, then stood on dry ground. Thus
was the country slowly going to ruin by the faults of the government,
and ignorance in the foreign rulers. But, on the other hand, the
beautiful temple of Latopolis, which had been begun under the Ptolemies,
was finished in this reign; and bears the name of Claudius with those of
some later emperors on its portico and walls.

In the Egyptian language the word for a year is _Bait_, which is also
the name of a bird. In hieroglyphics this word is spelt by a palm-branch
_Bai_ and the letter T, followed sometimes by a circle as a picture of
the year. Hence arose among a people fond of mystery and allegory a mode
of speaking of the year under the name of a palm-branch or of a bird;
and they formed a fable out of a mere confusion of words. The Greeks,
who were not slow to copy Egyptian mysticism, called this fabulous bird
the _Phoenix_ from their own name for the palm-tree. The end of any long
period of time they called the return of the phonix to earth. The Romans
borrowed the fable, though perhaps without understanding the allegory;
and in the seventh year of this reign, when the emperor celebrated the
secular games at Rome, at the end of the eighth century since the city
was built, it was said that the phoenix had come to Egypt and was thence
brought to Rome. This was in the consulship of Plautius and Vitellius;
and it would seem to be only from mistakes in the name that Pliny
places the event eleven years earlier, in the consulship of Plautius
and Papinius, and that Tacitus places it thirteen years earlier in the
consulship of Fabius and Vitellius. This fable is connected with some
of the remarkable epochs in Egyptian history. The story lost nothing by
travelling to a distance. In Rome it was said that this wonderful bird
was a native of Arabia, where it lived for five hundred years, that on
its death a grub came out of its body which in due time became a perfect
bird; and that the new phonix brought to Egypt the bones of its parent
in the nest of spices in which it had died, and laid them on the altar
in the temple of the sun in Heliopolis. It then returned to Arabia to
live in its turn for five hundred years, and die and give life again
to another as before. The Christians saw in this story a type of the
resurrection; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, quotes it as such in his
Epistle to the Corinthians.

We find the name of Claudius on several of the temples of Upper Egypt,
particularly on that of Apollinopolis Magna, and on the portico of the
great temples of Latopolis, which were being built in this reign.

In the beginning of the reign of Nero, 55 A.D., an Egyptian Jew,
who claimed to be listened to as a prophet, raised the minds of his
countrymen into a ferment of religious zeal by preaching about the
sufferings of their brethren in Judaea; and he was able to get together
a body of men, called in reproach the Sicarii, or _ruffians_, whose
numbers are variously stated at four thousand and thirty thousand,
whom he led out of Egypt to free the holy city from the bondage of the
heathen. But Felix, the Roman governor, led against them the garrison of
Jerusalem, and easily scattered the half-armed rabble. By such acts of
religious zeal on the part of the Jews they were again brought to blows
with the Greeks of Alexandria. The Macedonians, as the latter still
called themselves, had met in public assembly to send an embassy to
Rome, and some Jews who entered the meeting, which as citizens they had
a full right to do, were seized and ill-treated by them as spies. They
would perhaps have even been put to death if a large body of their
countrymen had not run to their rescue. The Jews attacked the assembled
Greeks with stones and lighted torches, and would have burned the
amphitheatre and all that were in it, if the prefect, Tiberius
Alexander, had not sent some of the elders of their own nation to calm
their angry feelings. But, though the mischief was stopped for a time,
it soon broke out again; and the prefect was forced to call out the
garrison of two Roman legions and five thousand Libyans before he
could re-establish peace in the city. The Jews were always the greatest
sufferers in these civil broils; and Josephus says that fifty thousand
of his countrymen were left dead in the streets of Alexandria. But this
number is very improbable, as the prefect was a friend to the Jewish
nation, and as the Roman legions were not withdrawn to the camp till
they had guarded the Jews in carrying away and burying the bodies of
their friends.

It was a natural policy on the part of the emperors to change a prefect
whenever his province was disturbed by rebellion, as we have seen in the
case of Flaccus, who was recalled by Caligula. It was easier to send a
new governor than to inquire into a wrong or to redress a grievance; and
accordingly in the next year C. Balbillus was sent from Rome as prefect
of Egypt. He reached Alexandria on the sixth day after leaving the
Straits of Sicily, which was spoken of as the quickest voyage known. The
Alexandrian ships were better built and better manned than any others,
and, as a greater number of vessels sailed every year between that port
and Puteoli on the coast of Italy than between any other two places, no
voyage was better understood or more quickly performed. They were out of
sight of land for five hundred miles between Syracuse and Cyrene. Hence
we see that the quickest rate of sailing, with a fair wind, was at that
time about one hundred and fifty miles in the twenty-four hours. But
these ships had very little power of bearing up against the wind; and
if it were contrary the voyage became tedious. If the captain on sailing
out of the port of Alexandria found the wind westerly, and was unable to
creep along the African coast to Cyrene, he stood over to the coast of
Asia Minor, in hopes of there finding a more favourable wind. If a storm
arose, he ran into the nearest port, perhaps in Crete, perhaps in Malta,
there to wait the return of fair weather. If winter then came on, he had
to lie by till spring. Thus a vessel laden with Egyptian wheat, leaving
Alexandria in September, after the harvest had been brought down to the
coast, would sometimes spend five months on its voyage from that port to
Puteoli. Such was the case with the ship bearing the children of Jove
as its figurehead, which picked up the Apostle Paul and the historian
Josephus when they had been wrecked together on the island of Malta; and
such perhaps would have been the case with the ship which they before
found on the coast of Lycia, had it been able to reach a safe harbour,
and not been wrecked at Malta.

[Illustration: 056.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING MACHINE]

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