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)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

The Alexandrians were sadly disappointed in Vespasian. They had been
among the first to acknowledge him as emperor while his power was yet
doubtful, and they looked for a sum of money as a largess; but to their
sorrow he increased the taxes, and re-established some which had fallen
into disuse. They had a joke against him, about his claiming from one of
his friends the trifling debt of six oboli; and, upon hearing of their
witticisms, he was so angry that he ordered this sum of six oboli to be
levied as a poll-tax upon every man in the city, and he only remitted
the tax at the request of his son Titus. He went to Rome, carrying with
him the nickname of Cybiosactes, _the scullion_, which the Alexandrians
gave him for his stinginess and greediness, and which they had before
given to Seleucus, who robbed the tomb of Alexander the Great, at
Alexandria, of its famous golden sarcophagus.

Titus saw the importance of pleasing the people; and his wish to humour
their ancient prejudices, at the ceremony of consecrating a new bull
as Apis, brought some blame upon him. He there, as became the occasion,
wore the state crown, and dazzled the people of Memphis with his regal
pomp; but, while thus endeavouring to strengthen his father's throne, he
was by some accused of grasping at it for himself.

The great temple of Kneph, at Latopolis, which had been the work of many
reigns and perhaps many centuries, was finished under Vespasian. It is
a building worthy of the best times of Egyptian architecture. It has a
grand portico, upheld by four rows of massive columns, with capitals in
the form of papyrus flowers. On the ceiling is a zodiac, like that at
Tentyra; and, though many other kings' names are carved on the walls,
that of Vespasian is in the dedication over the entrance.

Of the reign of Titus in Egypt we find no trace beyond his coins struck
each year at Alexandria, and his name carved on one or two temples which
had been built in former reigns.

Of the reign of Domitian (81--96 A.D.) we learn something from the poet
Juvenal, who then held a military post in the province; and he gives
us a sad account of the state of lawlessness in which the troops lived
under his commands. All quarrels between soldiers and citizens were
tried by the officers according to martial law; and justice was very
far from being even-handed between the Roman and the poor Egyptian.
No witness was bold enough to come forward and say anything against a
soldier, while everybody was believed who spoke on his behalf. Juvenal
was at a great age when he was sent into Egypt; and he felt that the
command of a cohort on the very borders of the desert was a cruel
banishment from the literary society of Rome. His death in the camp was
hastened by his wish to return home. As what Juvenal chiefly aimed at
in his writings was to lash the follies of the age, he, of course, found
plenty of amusement in the superstitions and sacred animals of Egypt.
But he sometimes takes a poet's liberty, and when he tells us that man's
was almost the only flesh that they ate without sinning, we need not
believe him to the letter. He gives a lively picture of a fight which he
saw between the citizens of two towns. The towns of Ombos and Tentyra,
though about a hundred miles apart, had a long-standing quarrel
about their gods. At Ombos they worshipped the crocodile and the
crocodile-headed god Savak, while at Tentyra they worshipped the goddess
Hathor, and were celebrated for their skill in catching and killing
crocodiles. So, taking advantage of a feast or holiday, they marched out
for a fight. The men of Ombos Avere beaten and put to flight; but one of
them, stumbling as he ran away, was caught and torn to pieces, and,
as Juvenal adds, eaten by the men of Tentyra. Their worship of beasts,
birds, and fishes, and even growing their gods in the garden, are
pleasantly hit off by him; they left nothing, said he, without worship,
but the goddess of chastity. The mother goddess, Isis, the queen of
heaven, was the deity to whom they bowed with the most tender devotion,
and to swear by Isis was their favourite oath; and hence the leek, in
their own language named Isi, was no doubt the vegetable called a god by
the satiric Juvenal.

At the same time also the towns of Oxyrrhynchos and Cynopolis, in
the Heptanomos, had a little civil war about the animals which
they worshipped. Somebody at Cynopolis was said to have caught an
oxyrrhynchus fish in the Nile and eaten it; and so the people of
Oxyrrhynchos, in revenge, made an attack upon the dogs, the gods of
Cynopolis. They caught a number of them, killed them in sacrifice to
their offended fish-god, and ate them. The two parties then flew to arms
and fought several battles; they sacked one another's cities in turns,
and the war was not stopped till the Roman troops marched to the spot
and punished them both.

But we gain a more agreeable and most likely a more true notion of the
mystical religion and philosophy of the Egyptians in these days from the
serious enquiries of Plutarch, who, instead of looking for what he could
laugh at, was only too ready to believe that he saw wisdom hidden
under an allegory in all their superstitions. Many of the habits of
the priests, such as shaving the whole body, wearing linen instead of
cotton, and refusing some meats as impure, seem to have arisen from a
love of cleanliness; their religion ordered what was useful. And it
also forbade what was hurtful; so to stir the fire with a sword was
displeasing to the gods, because it spoilt the temper of the metal.
None but the vulgar now looked upon the animals and statues as gods; the
priests believed that the unseen gods, who acted with one mind and with
one providence, were the authors of all good; and though these, like the
sun and moon, were called in each country by a different name, yet, like
those luminaries, they were the same over all the world.

[Illustration: 078b.jpg SCENE IN A SEPUUCHRAL CHAMBER]

Outward ceremonies in religion were no longer thought enough without a
good life; and, as the Greeks said, that beard and cloak did not make a
philosopher, so the Egyptians said that white linen and a tonsure
would not make a follower of Isis. All the sacrifices to the gods had a
secondary meaning, or, at least, they tried to join a moral aim to the
outward act; as on the twentieth day of the month, when they ate honey
and figs in honour of Thot, they sang "Sweet is truth." The Egyptians,
like most other Eastern polytheists, held the doctrine which was
afterwards called Manicheism; they believed in a good and in a wicked
god, who governed the world between them. Of these the former made
himself threefold, because three is a perfect number, and they adopted
into their religion that curious metaphysical opinion that everything
divine is formed of three parts; and accordingly, on the Theban
monuments we often see the gods in groups of three. They worshipped
Osiris, Isis, and Horus under the form of a right-angled triangle, in
which Horus was the side opposite to the right angle. The favourite
part of their mythology was the lamentation of Isis for the death of
her husband Osiris. By another change the god Horus, who used to be a
crowned king of manly stature, was now a child holding a finger to his
mouth, and thereby marking that he had not yet learned to talk. The
Romans, who did not understand this Egyptian symbol for youthfulness,
thought that in this character he was commanding silence; and they gave
the name of Harpocrates, _Horus the powerful_, to a god of silence.
Horus was also often placed as a child in the arms of his mother Isis;
and thus by the loving nature of the group were awakened the more tender
feelings of the worshipper. The Egyptians, like the Greeks, had always
been loud in declaring that they were beloved by their gods; but they
received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that
they felt any love towards the gods in return. But after the time of the
Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.
We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to
think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and
child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction
these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion.
As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows
and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was
the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child
Horus and its mother.

[Illustration: 080.jpg HARPOCRATES]

The deep earnestness of the Egyptians in the belief of their own
religion was the chief cause of its being adopted by others. The Greeks
had borrowed much from it. Though in Rome it had been forbidden by law,
it was much cultivated there in private; and the engraved rings on the
fingers of the wealthy Romans which bore the figures of Harpocrates and
other Egyptian gods easily escaped the notice of the magistrate. But the
superstitious Domitian, who was in the habit of consulting astrologers
and Chaldaean fortune-tellers, allowed the Egyptian worship. He built
at Rome a temple to Isis, and another to Serapis; and such was the
eagerness of the citizens for pictures of the mother goddess with her
child in her arms that, according to Juvenal, the Roman painters all
lived upon the goddess Isis. For her temple in the Campus Martius, holy
water was even brought from the Nile to purify the building and the
votaries; and a regular college of priests was maintained there by their
zeal and at their cost, with a splendour worthy of the Roman capital.
Domitian, also, was somewhat of a scholar, and he sent to Alexandria for
copies of their books, to restore the public library at Rome which had
been lately burnt; while his garden on the banks of the Tiber was
richer in the Egyptian winter rose than even the gardens of Memphis and
Alexandria.

During this century the coinage continues one of the subjects of chief
interest to the antiquary. In 92 A.D., in the eleventh year of his
reign, when Domitian took upon himself the tribunitian power at Rome
for a second period of ten years, the event was celebrated in Alexandria
with a triumphal procession and games in the hippodrome, of all which we
see clear traces on the Egyptian coins.

[Illustration: 081.jpg COINS OF DOMITIAN]

The coinage is almost the only trace of Nerva (96--98 A.D.) having
reigned in Egypt; but it is at the same time enough to prove the
mildness of his government. The Jews who by their own law were of old
required to pay half a shekel, or a didrachm, to the service of their
temple, had on their conquest been made to pay that sum as a yearly
tribute to the Ptolemies, and afterwards to the emperors. It was a
poll-tax levied on every Jew throughout the empire. But Nerva had the
humanity to relieve them from this insulting tribute, and well did he
deserve the honour of having it recorded on the coins struck in his
reign.

The coinage of the eleventh year of his successor, Trajan (98-117
A.D.), is very remarkable for its beauty, its technical skill, and
variety, even more so than that of the eleventh year of Domitian.

[Illustration: 082.jpg COIN OF NERVA]

The coins have hitherto proclaimed, in a manner unmistakably plain to
those who study numismatics, the games and conquests of the emperors,
the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and sometimes the worship of
Serapis; but we now enter upon the most brilliant and most important
period of the Egyptian coinage, and find a rich variety of fables taken
both from Egyptian and Greek mythology. The coins of Rome in this and
the following reigns show the wealth, good taste, and learning of the
nation, but they are surpassed by the coins of Egypt. While history
is nearly silent, and the buildings and other proofs of Roman good
government have perished, the coins alone are quite enough to prove
the well-being of the people. Among the Egyptian coins those of Trajan,
Hadrian, and the Antonines equal in number those of all the other
emperors together, while in beauty they far surpass them. They are
mostly of copper, of a small size, and thick, weighing about one hundred
and ten grains, and some larger of two hundred and twenty grains; the
silver coins are less common, and of mixed metal.

Though the Romans, while admiring and copying everything that was Greek,
affected to look upon the Egyptians as savages, who were only known to
be human beings by their power of speech, still the Egyptian physicians
were held by them in the highest repute. The more wealthy Romans often
sailed to Alexandria for the benefit of their advice. Pliny the Elder,
however, thought that of the invalids who went to Egypt for their
health more were cured by the sea voyage than by the physicians on their
arrival.

[Illustration: 083.jpg TRINITY OF ISIS, HORUS AND NEPHTHYS]

One of Cicero's physicians was an Egyptian. Pliny the Younger repaid his
Egyptian oculist, Harpocrates, by getting a rescript from the emperor
to make him a Roman citizen. But the statesman did not know under what
harsh laws his friend was born, for the grant was void in the case of an
Egyptian, the emperor's rescript was bad as being against the law; and
Pliny had again to beg the greater favour that the Egyptian might first
be made a citizen of Alexandria, without which the former favour was
useless. Thus, even in Alexandria, a conquered province governed by
the despotic will of a military emperor, there were still some laws or
principles which the emperor found it not easy to break. The courts of
justice, those to whom the edicts were addressed and by whom they were
to be explained and carried into effect, claimed a power in some cases
above the emperor; and the first article in the Roman code was that an
imperial rescript, by whomsoever or howsoever obtained, was void if it
was against the law. As the lawyers and magistrates formed part of the
body of citizens, the Alexandrians had so far a share in the government
of their own affairs; but this was an advantage that the Egyptians lost
by being under the power of the Greek magistrates.

[Illustration: 084.jpg COINS OF TRAJAN]

Trajan always kept in the public granaries of Rome a supply of Egyptian
grain equal to seven times the _canon_, or yearly gift to the poor
citizens; and in this prudent course he was followed by all his
successors, until the store was squandered by the worthless Elagabalus.
One year, when the Nile did not rise to its usual height, and much of
the grain land of the Delta, instead of being moistened by its waters
and enriched by its mud, was left a dry, sandy plain, the granaries of
Rome were unlocked to feed the city of Alexandria. The Alexandrians then
saw the unusual sight of ships unloading their cargoes of wheat in their
harbour, and the Romans boasted that they took the Egyptian tribute
in grain, not because they could not feed themselves, but because the
Egyptians had nothing else to send them.

Alexandria under the Romans was still the centre of the trading world,
not only having its own great trade in grain, but being the port through
which the trade of India and Arabia passed to Europe, and at which the
Syrian vessels touched in their way to Italy. The harbour was crowded
with masts and strange prows and uncouth sails, and the quays always
busy with loading and unloading; while in the streets might be seen men
of all languages and all dresses, copper-coloured Egyptians, swarthy
Jews, lively, bustling Greeks, and haughty Italians, with Asiatics from
the neighbouring coasts of Syria and Cilicia, and even dark Ethiopians,
painted Arabs, Bactrians, Scythians, Persians, and Indians, all gay with
their national costumes. Alexandria was a spot in which Europe met Asia,
and each wondered at the strangeness of the other.

Of the Alexandrians themselves we receive a very unfavourable account
from their countryman, Dion Chrysostom. With their wealth, they
had those vices which usually follow or cause the loss of national
independence. They were eager for nothing but food and horse-races. They
were grave and quiet in their sacrifices and listless in business, but
in the theatre or in the stadium men, women, and children were alike
heated into passion, and overcome with eagerness and warmth of feeling.
A scurrilous song or a horse-race would so rouse them into a quarrel
that they could not hear for their own noise, nor see for the dust
raised by their own bustle in the hippodrome; while all those acts of
their rulers, which in a more wholesome state of society would have
called for notice, passed by unheeded.

[Illustration: 086.jpg EGYPTIAN WIG (BRITISH MUSEUM)]

They cared more for the tumble of a favourite charioteer than for the
sinking state of the nation. The ready employment of ridicule in the
place of argument, of wit instead of graver reason, of nicknames
as their most powerful weapon, was one of the worst points in the
Alexandrian character. Frankness and manliness are hardly to be looked
for under a despotic government where men are forbidden to speak their
minds openly; and the Alexandrians made use of such checks upon their
rulers as the law allowed them. They lived under an absolute monarchy
tempered only by ridicule. Though their city was four hundred years old,
they were still colonists and without a mother-country. They had very
little faith in anything great or good, whether human or divine. They
had few cherished prejudices, no honoured traditions, sadly little love
of fame, and they wrote no histories. But in luxury and delicacy they
set the fashion to their conquerors. The wealthy Alexandrian walked
about Rome in a scarlet robe, in summer fanning himself with gold, and
displaying on his fingers rings carefully suited to the season; as his
hands were too delicate to carry his heavier jewels in the warm weather.
At the supper tables of the rich, the Alexandrian singing boys were
much valued; the smart young Roman walked along the Via Sacra humming
an Alexandrian tune; the favourite comic actor, the delight of the
city, whose jokes set the theatre in a roar, was an Alexandrian; the
Retiarius, who, with no weapon but a net, fought against an armed
gladiator in the Roman forum, and came off conqueror in twenty-six such
battles, was an Alexandrian; and no breed of fighting-cocks was thought
equal to those reared in the suburbs of Alexandria.

In the reign of Augustus the Roman generals had been defeated in their
attacks on Arabia; but under Trajan, when the Romans were masters of all
the countries which surround Arabia Nabataea, and when Egypt was so
far quiet that the legions could be withdrawn without danger to the
provinces, the Arabs could hold out no longer, and the rocky fastness
of Petra was forced to receive a Roman garrison. The event was as usual
commemorated on the coins of Rome; and for the next four hundred years
that remarkable Arab city formed part of the Roman empire; and Europeans
now travelling through the desert from Mount Sinai to Jerusalem are
agreeably surprised at coming upon temples, carved out of the solid
rock, ornamented with Corinthian columns of the age of the Antonines.

In the twelfth year of this reign, when Lucius Sulpicius Simius was
prefect, some additions which had been made to the temple at Panopolis
in the Thebaid were dedicated in the name of the emperor; and in the
nineteenth year, when Marcus Rutilius Lupus was prefect, a new portico
in the oasis of Thebes was in the same manner dedicated to Serapis and
Isis. A small temple, which had been before built at Denderah, near the
great temple of Venus, was in the first year of this reign dedicated to
the Empress Plotina, under the name of the great goddess, the Younger
Venus.

The canal from the Nile near Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, which had
been first made by Necho, had been either finished or a second time
made by Philadelphus; and in this reign that great undertaking was again
renewed. But the stream of the Nile was deserting the Bubastite branch,
which was less navigable than formerly; and the engineers now changed
the greater part of the canal's bed. They thought it wiser to bring
water from a higher part of the Nile, so that the current in the canal
might run into the Red Sea instead of out, and its waters might still
be fresh and useful to agriculture. It now began at Babylon opposite
Memphis and entered the Red Sea at a town which, taking its name from
the locks, was called Clysmon, about ten miles to the south of Arsinoe.
This latter town was no longer a port, having been separated from the
sea by the continual advance of the sands. We have no knowledge of how
long the care of the imperial prefects kept this new canal open and in
use. It was perhaps one of the first of the Roman works that went to
decay; and, when we find the Christian pilgrims sailing along it seven
centuries later, on their way from England to the holy sepulchre, it had
been again opened by the Muhammedan conquerors of Egypt.

[Illustration: 089.jpg ANTONINIAN TEMPLE NEAR SINAI]

Writings which some now regard as literary forgeries appeared in
Alexandria about this time. They prophesied the re-establishment of
the Jews at Jerusalem, and, as the wished-for time drew near, all the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire were disturbed by rebellious
risings of the Jews. Moved by the religious enthusiasm which gave birth
to the writings, the Jews of Egypt in the eighteenth year of this
reign (116 A.D.) were again roused into a quarrel with their Greek
fellow-citizens; and in the next year, the last of the reign, they rose
against their Roman governors in open rebellion, and they were not put
down till the prefect Lupus had brought his forces against them. After
this the Jews of Cyrene marched through the desert into Egypt, under the
command of Lucuas, to help their brethren; and the rebellion took the
regular form of a civil war, with all its usual horrors. The emperor
sent against the Jews an army followed by a fleet, which, after numerous
skirmishes and battles, routed them with great slaughter, and drove
numbers of them back into the desert, whence they harassed the village
as robbers. By these unsuccessful appeals to force, the Jews lost all
right to those privileges of citizenship which they always claimed, and
which had been granted by the emperors, though usually refused by the
Alexandrians. The despair and disappointment of the Jews seem in many
cases to have turned their minds to the Christian view of the Old
Testament prophecies; henceforth, says Eusebius, the Jews embraced the
Christian religion more readily and in greater numbers.

In A.D. 122, the sixth year of the reign of Hadrian, Egypt was honoured
by a visit from the emperor. He was led to Egypt at that time by some
riots of a character more serious than usual, which had arisen between
two cities, probably Memphis and Heliopolis, about a bull, as to whether
it was to be Apis or Mnevis. Egypt had been for some years without a
sacred bull; and when at length the priests found one, marked with the
mystic spots, the inhabitants of those two cities flew to arms, and
the peace of the province was disturbed by their religious zeal, each
claiming the bull as their own.

Hadrian also undertook a voyage up the Nile from Alexandria in order to
explore the wonders of Egypt. This was the fashion then, for the ancient
monuments and the banks of this mysterious river offered just as many
attractions at that time as they have done to all nations since
the expedition of Napoleon. That animal-worship, which had remained
unchanged for centuries, a riddle of human religion, was bound to excite
the curiosity of strangers. In this divinisation of animals lay the
greatest contempt for human understanding, and it was a bitter satire
on the apotheosis of kings and emperors. For what was the divinity
of Sesostris, of Alexander, of Augustus, or Hadrian compared with
the heavenly majesty of the ox Apis, or the holy cats, dogs, kites,
crocodiles, and god-apes? Egypt was at this epoch already a museum of
the Pharaoh-time and its enbalamed culture. Strange buildings, rare
sculptures, hieroglyphics, and pictures still filled the ancient towns,
even though these had lost their splendour. Memphis and Heliopolis,
Bubastis, Abydos, Sais, Tanis, and the hundred-gated Thebes had long
fallen into ruin, although still inhabited.

The emperor's escort must have been an extraordinary sight as it steered
up the stream on a fleet of dahabiehs. The emperor was accompanied by
students of the museum, interpreters, priests, and astrologers. Amongst
his followers were Verus and the beautiful Antinous.

The Empress Sabina also accompanied him; she had the poetess Julia
Balbilla amongst her court ladies. They landed wherever there was
anything of interest to be seen, and there was more in those days than
there is now. They admired the great pyramids, the colossal sphinx, and
the sacred town of Memphis. This city, the ancient royal seat of the
Pharaohs, and even in Strabo's time the second town in Egypt, was not
yet buried under the sand of the desert; its disappearance had, however,
already begun. Under the Ptolemies it had given much of the material of
her temples and palaces for the building of Alexandria. The great palace
of the Pharaohs had long been destroyed, but there still remained
many notable monuments, such as the temple of Phtah, the pyramids, the
necropolis, and the Serapeum, and they retained their ancient cult.
The town was still the chief seat of the Egyptian hierarchy and the
residence of Apis; for this very reason the Roman government had
destined it to be one of her strong military stations, for here a legion
was quartered. The emperor could walk through the time-worn avenues of
sphinxes which led to the wonderful vaults where the long succession of
divine animals was buried, each like a Pharaoh, in a magnificent granite
sarcophagus. Hadrian could admire the beautifully sculptured tomb of Di,
an Egyptian officer of the fifth dynasty, with less trouble than we
must experience now; for now the palaces, the pictures of the gods,
and almost all the pyramids are swallowed up in sand. Miserable Arab
villages, such as Saqqara, have fixed themselves in the ruins of
Memphis, and from a thick palm grove one can look with astonishment
upon the torso of the powerful Ramses II. lying solitary there, the last
witness to the glory of the temple of Phtah, before which this colossus
once had its stand. In the neighbourhood of Memphis lay Heliopolis, the
town of the sun-god, with its ancient temple, and a school of Egyptian
wisdom, in which Plato is supposed to have studied.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22