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

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In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of
which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis. Cambyses
had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs
had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt
existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes. Hadrian saw
many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done.
On the site of Heliopolis, now green with wheat-fields, only a single
obelisk has remained upright, which is considered as the oldest of all,
and was erected in the twelfth dynasty by Usirtasen I.

The royal assemblage had arrived in the course of their journey at Besa,
a place on the right bank of the river, opposite Hermopolis, when a
strange event occurred. This was the death of Hadrian's favourite,
Antinous, a young Greek from Claudiopolis, who had been degraded to the
position of Ganymede to the emperor on account of his beauty. It is not
known where the emperor first came across the youth; possibly in his
native land, Bithynia. Not till he came to Egypt did he become his
inseparable companion, and this must have been a deep offence to
his wife. The unfortunate queen was delivered in Besa from his hated
presence, for Antinous was drowned there in the Nile.

His death was surrounded by mystery. Was it accident? Was he a victim?
Hadrian's humanity protects him from the suspicion that he sacrificed
his victim in cold blood, as Tiberius had once sacrificed the beautiful
Hypatus in Capri. Had the fantastic youth sacrificed himself of his own
free will to the death divinities in order to save the emperor's life?
Had the Egyptian priests foreseen in the stars some danger threatening
Hadrian, only to be averted by the death of his favourite? Such an idea
commended itself to the superstition of the time, especially in
this land and by the mysterious Nile. It corresponded, too, with the
emperor's astrological arts. Was Antinous certain when he plunged into
the waves of the Nile that he would arise from them as a god? Hadrian
asserts in his memoirs that it was an accident, but no one believed him.
The divine honours which he paid to the dead youth lead us to suppose
that they formed the reward of a self-sacrifice, which, according to the
custom of those times, constituted a highly moral action, and was looked
upon as heroic devotion. At any rate, we will assume that this sacrifice
sank into the Nile without Hadrian's will. Hadrian mourned for Antinous
with unspeakable pain and "womanly tears." Now he was Achilles by the
corpse of Patroklus, or Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus.
He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa. This most extraordinary
intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new
god, and art with its last ideal form. Probably, also, during the
burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining
in Egypt's midnight sky, and then Hadrian saw it himself.

In the mystical land of Egypt, life might still be poetical even in the
clear daylight of Roman universal history in the reign of Hadrian. The
death of the young Bithynian seems to have occurred in October, 130.
The emperor continued his journey as soon as he had given orders for
a splendid town to be erected on the site of Besa, in honour of his
friend. In November, 130, the royal company is to be found amongst the
ruins of Thebes.

Thebes, the oldest town in Egypt, had been first put in the shade
by Memphis, and then destroyed by Cambyses. Since the time of the
Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its
place as capital of the Thebaid. Already in Strabo's time it was split
up. It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and
palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day
amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.

[Illustration: 095.jpg COMMEMORATIVE COIN OF ANTINOUS]

In Hadrian's time the Rameseum, the so-called grave of Osymandias, on
the western bank of the Nile, the wonderful building of Ramses II.,
must still have been in good repair. These pylons, pillars, arcades, and
courts, these splendid halls with their sculpture-covered walls, appear
even to have influenced the Roman art in the time of the emperors. Their
reflex influence has been even seen in Trajan's forum, in which the
chief thing was the emperor's tomb.

In Alexandria the emperor mixed freely with the professors of the
museum, asking them questions and answering theirs in return; and he
dropped his tear of pity on the tomb of the great Pompey, in the form of
a Greek epigram, though with very little point. He laid out large sums
of money in building and ornamenting the city, and the Alexandrians were
much pleased with his behaviour. Among other honours that they paid
him, they changed the name of the month December, calling it the month
Hadrian; but as they were not followed by the rest of the empire the
name soon went out of use. The emperor's patronage of philosophy was
rather at the cost of the Alexandrian museum, for he enrolled among its
paid professors men who were teaching from school to school in Italy and
Asia Minor. Thus Polemon of Laodicea, who taught oratory and philosophy
at Rome, Laodicea, and Smyrna, and had the right of a free passage for
himself and his servants in any of the public ships whenever he chose to
move from city to city for the purposes of study or teaching, had at
the same time a salary from the Alexandrian museum. Dionysius of Miletus
also received his salary as a professor in the museum while teaching
philosophy and mnemonicsat Miletus and Ephesus. Pancrates, the
Alexandrian poet, gained his salary in the museum by the easy task of a
little flattery. On Hadrian's return to Alexandria from the Thebaid, the
poet presented to him a rose-coloured lotus, a flower well known in
India, though less common in Egypt than either the blue or white lotus,
and assured him that it had sprung out of the blood of the lion slain by
his royal javelin at a lion-hunt in Libya.

[Illustration: 097.jpg ROSE-COLOURED LOTUS]

The emperor was pleased with the compliment, and gave him a place in the
museum; and Pancrates in return named the plant the lotus of Antinous.
Pancrates was a warm admirer of the mystical opinions of the Egyptians
which were then coming into note in Alexandria. He was said to have
lived underground in holy solitude or converse with the gods for
twenty-three years, and during that time to have been taught magic by
the goddess Isis, and thus to have gained the power of working miracles.
He learned to call upon the queen of darkness by her Egyptian name
Hecate, and when driving out evil spirits to speak to them in the
Egyptian language. Whether these Greek students of the Eastern mysticism
were deceivers or deceived, whether they were led by a love of notoriety
or of knowledge, is in most cases doubtful, but they were surrounded by
a crowd of credulous admirers, who formed a strange contrast with the
sceptics and critics of the museum.

Among the Alexandrian grammarians of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus,
so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on
rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other
branches of grammar. In the few pages that remain of his numerous
writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing
among some of the philosophers. He tells us many remarkable stories,
which he collected rather as a judicious inquirer than as a credulous
believer; such as of second sight; an account of a lad who fell asleep
in the field while watching his sheep, and then slept for fifty-seven
years, and awoke to wonder at the strangeness of the changes that had
taken place in the meanwhile; and of a man who after death used from
time to time to leave his body, and wander over the earth as a spirit,
till his wife, tired of his coming back again so often, put a stop to it
by having his mummy burnt. He gives us for the first time Eastern tales
in a Greek dress, and we thus learn the source from which Europe gained
much of its literature in the Middle Ages. The Alexandrian author of
greatest note at this time was the historian Appian, who tells us that
he had spent some years in Rome practising as a lawyer, and returned to
Egypt on being appointed to a high post in the government of his native
city. There he wrote his Roman history.

In this reign the Jews, forgetful of what they had just suffered under
Trajan, again rose against the power of Rome; and, when Judaea rebelled
against its prefect, Tinnius Rufus, a little army of Jews marched out of
Egypt and Libya, to help their brethren and to free the holy land
(130 A.D.). But they were everywhere routed and put down with resolute
slaughter.

[Illustration: 099.jpg VOCAL STATUE OF AMENHOTHES]

Travellers, on reaching a distant point of a journey, or on viewing any
remarkable object of their curiosity, have at all times been fond of
carving or scribbling their names on the spot, to boast of their
prowess to after-comers; and never had any place been more favoured with
memorials of this kind than the great statue of Amenhothes at Thebes.
This colossal statue, fifty-three feet high, was famed, as long as
the Egyptian priesthood lasted, for sending forth musical sounds
every morning at sunrise, when first touched by the sun's rays; and no
traveller ever visited Thebes without listening for these remarkable
notes. The journey through Upper Egypt was at this time perfectly open
and safe, and the legs and feet of the statue are covered with names,
and inscriptions in prose and verse, of travellers who had visited it
at sunrise during the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines. From these
curious memorials we learn that Hadrian visited Thebes a second time
with his queen, Sabina, in the fifteenth year of his reign. When the
empress first visited the statue she was disappointed at not hearing
the musical sounds; but, on her hinting threats of the emperor's
displeasure, her curiosity was gratified on the following morning.
This gigantic statue of hard gritstone had formerly been broken in half
across the waist, and the upper part thrown to the ground, either by the
shock of an earthquake or the ruder shock of Persian zeal against the
Egyptian religion; and for some centuries past the musical notes had
issued from the broken fragments. Such was its fallen state when
the Empress Sabina saw it, and when Strabo and Juvenal and Pausanias
listened to its sounds; and it was not till after the reign of Hadrian
that it was again raised upright like its companion, as travellers now
see it.

[Illustration: 100b..jpg The Slumber Song]

From the painting by P. Grot. Johann

From this second visit, and a longer acquaintance, Hadrian seems to have
formed a very poor opinion of the Egyptians and Egyptian Jews; and the
following curious letter, written in 134 A.D. to his friend Servianus,
throws much light upon their religion as worshippers of Serapis, at
the same time that it proves how numerous the Christians had become in
Alexandria, even within seventy years of the period during which the
evangelist Mark is believed to have preached there:

"Hadrian Augustus to Servianus, the consul, greeting:

"As for Egypt, which you were praising to me, dearest Servianus, I have
found its people wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath
of a report. Those who worship Serapis are Christians, and those who
call themselves bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis. There is
no ruler of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no presbyter of the
Christians, who is not a mathematician, an augur, and a soothsayer. The
very patriarch himself, when he came into Egypt, was by some said to
worship Serapis, and by others to worship Christ. As a race of men, they
are seditious, vain, and spiteful; as a body, wealthy and prosperous,
of whom nobody lives in idleness. Some blow glass, some make paper, and
others linen. There is work for the lame and work for the blind; even
those who have lost the use of their hands do not live in idleness.
Their one god is nothing; Christians, Jews, and all nations worship him.
I wish this body of men was better behaved, and worthy of their number;
for as for that they ought to hold the chief place in Egypt. I have
granted everything unto them; I have restored their old privileges, and
have made them grateful by adding new ones."

Among the crowd of gods that had formerly been worshipped in Egypt,
Serapis had latterly been rising above the rest. He was the god of
the dead, who in the next world was to reward the good and punish the
wicked; and in the growing worship of this one all-seeing judge we
cannot but trace the downfall of some of the evils of polytheism. A
plurality in unity was another method now used to explain away the
polytheism.

[Illustration: 102.jpg EGYPTIAN ORACLE]

The oracle when consulted about the divine nature had answered, "I am
Ra, and Horus, and Osiris;" or, as the Greeks translated it, Apollo,
and Lord, and Bacchus; "I rule the hours and the seasons, the wind and
the storms, the day and the night; I am king of the stars and myself an
immortal fire." Hence arose the opinion which seems to have been given
to Hadrian, that the Egyptians had only one god, and his mistake in
thinking that the worshippers of Serapis were Christians. The emperor,
indeed, himself, though a polytheist, was very little of an idolater;
for, though he wished to add Christ to the number of the Roman gods,
he on the other hand ordered that the temples built in his reign should
have no images for worship; and in after ages it was common to call
all temples without statues Hadrian's temples. But there were other and
stronger reasons for Hadrian's classing the Christians with the Egyptian
astrologers. A Christian heresy was then rising into notice in Egypt in
that very form, taking its opinions from the philosophy on which it was
engrafted. Before Christianity was preached in Alexandria, there were
already three religions or forms of philosophy belonging to the three
races of men who peopled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy;
which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians;
and lastly, the religion of the Jews. These were often more or less
mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judae; and in
the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed
in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the
writers before their conversion. The first Christian teachers, the
apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of
the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and
Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste,
and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the
latter an abstract speculative theology. It is of the Egyptian Jews that
Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already
converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of
Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, or Science, for the name means no more, was not then new
in Alexandria, nor were its followers originally Christians. It was the
proud name claimed for their opinions by those who studied the Eastern
philosophy of the Magi; and Egypt seems to have been as much its native
soil as India. The name of Gnostic, says Weber, was generally given to
those who distinguished between belief on authority and gnosis, i.e.,
between the ordinary comprehension and a higher knowledge only granted
to a few gifted or chosen ones. They were split up into different sects,
according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the
platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its
symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant. The "creed of those
who know" never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one
personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and
rules over everything with unlimited wisdom and love. The god of
the Gnostics is a dark, mysterious being which can only arrive at a
consciousness of itself through a manifold descending scale of forces,
which flow from the god himself. The visible world was created out of
dead and evil matter by Demiurgos, the divine work-master, a production
and subordinate of the highest god. Man, too, is a production of this
subordinate creator, a production subject to a blind fate, and a prey to
those powers which rule between heaven and earth, without free-will,
the only thing which makes the ideas of sin and responsibility possible.
Matter is the seat of evil, and as long as man stands under the
influence of this matter, he is in the hands of evil and knows no
freedom. Redemption can only reach him through those higher beings of
light, which free man from the power of matter and translate him into
the kingdom of light. According to the Gnostic teaching, Christ is
one of these beings of light; he is one of the highest who appeared on
earth, and is transformed into a mythical, allegorical being, with
his human nature, his sufferings and death completely suppressed. The
redeemed soul is then as a kind of angel, or ideal being, brought in
triumph into the idealistic realm of light as soon as it has purified
itself to the nature of a spirit, by means of penitence, chastisements,
and finally the death of the physical body. Hence the Gnostics attached
little importance to the means of mercy in the Church, to the Bible, or
the sacraments; they allowed the Church teaching to exist as a necessary
conception for the people, but they placed their own teachings far above
it as mysterious or secret teachings. As regards their morals and
mode of life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to
Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It
preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up
entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own
hollowness and eccentricity.

We still possess the traces of the Gnostic astrology in a number of
amulets and engraved gems, with the word _Abraxas_ or rather _Abrasax_
and other emblems of their superstition, which they kept as charms
against diseases and evil spirits. The word _Abrasax_ may be translated
_Hurt me not_. To their mystic rites we may trace many of the reproaches
thrown upon Christianity, such as that the Christians worshipped the
head of an ass, using the animal's Koptic name _Eeo_, to represent the
name of IAn, or Jahveh. To the same source we may also trace some of
the peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling
Jesus "the good scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto
un-shapen mud of our bodies;" a thought which seems to have been
borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect's habits; and
perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous
to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word _only begotten_. We
trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin
rolling before him a wheel, the emblem of eternity. He sits like a
conqueror on horseback, trampling under foot the serpent of old, the
spirit of sin and death. His horse is in the form of a ram, with an
eagle's head and the crowned asp or basilisk for its tail. Before him
stands the figure of victory giving him a crown; above are written the
words Alpha and Omega, and below perhaps the word [IAH], Jahveh.

So far we have seen the form which Christianity at first took among the
Egyptians; but, as few writings by these Gnostics have come down to
our time, we chiefly know their opinions from the reproaches of their
enemies. It was not till the second generation of Gnostic teachers were
spreading their heresies that the Greek philosophers began to embrace
Christianity, or the Christians to study Greek literature; but as soon
as that was the case we have an unbroken chain of writings, in which
we find Christianity more or less mixed with the Alexandrian form of
platonism.

[Illustration: 106.jpg KOPTIC CHARM AND SCARABEUS]

The philosopher Justin, after those who had talked with the apostles,
is the earliest Christian writer whose works have reached us. He was a
Greek, born in Samaria; but he studied many years in Alexandria under
philosophers of all opinions. He did not, however, at once find in
the schools the wisdom he was in search for. The Stoic could teach him
nothing about God; the Peripatetic wished to be paid for his lessons
before he gave them; and the Pythagorean proposed to begin with music
and mathematics.

[Illustration: 107.jpg GNOSTIC GEM]

Not content with these, Justin turned to the platonist, whose purer
philosophy seemed to add wings to his thoughts, and taught him to mount
aloft towards true wisdom. While turning over in his mind what he had
thus learned in the several schools, dissatisfied with the philosopher's
views, he chanced one day to meet with an old man walking on the
seashore near Alexandria, to whom he unbosomed his thoughts, and by whom
he was converted to Christianity. Justin tells us that there were no
people, whether Greeks or barbarians, or even dwellers in tent and
waggons, among whom prayers were not offered up to the heavenly father
in the name of the crucified Jesus. The Christians met every Sunday for
public worship, which began with a reading from the prophets, or from
the memoirs of the apostles called the gospels. This was followed by
a sermon, a prayer, the bread and wine, and a second prayer. Justin's
quotations prove that he is speaking of the New Testament, which within
a hundred years of the crucifixion wras read in all the principal cities
in which Greek was spoken. Justin died as a martyr in 163 A.D.

The platonic professorship in Alexandria had usually been held by an
Athenian, and for a short time Athenagoras of Athens taught that branch
of philosophy in the museum; but he afterwards embraced the Christian
religion, and then taught Christianity openly in Alexandria. He enjoys
with Justin the honour of being one of the first men of learning who
were converted, and, like Justin, his chief work is an apology for the
Christians, addressed to the emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

[Illustration: 108.jpg GEMS SHOWING SYMBOL OF DEATH AND THE WORD [IAH]
JAVEH]

Athenagoras confines himself in his defence to the resurrection from
the dead and the unity of the Deity, the points chiefly attacked by the
pagans.

Hadrian's Egyptian coins are remarkable both for number and variety. In
the sixth year of the reign we see a ship with spread sails, most likely
in gratitude for the emperor's safe arrival in Egypt. In the eighth year
we see the head of the favourite Antinous, who had been placed among the
gods of the country. In the eleventh year, when the emperor took up the
tribunitial power at Rome for a second period of ten years, we find a
series of coins, each bearing the name of the nome or district in which
it was coined. This indeed is the most remarkable year of the most
remarkable reign in the whole history of coinage; we have numerous coins
for every year of this reign, and, in this year, for nearly every nome
in Egypt. Some coins are strongly marked with the favourite opinion of
the Gnostics as to the opposition between good and evil.

[Illustration: 109.jpg Hadrian's Egyptian coins]

On one we have the war between the serpent of good and the serpent of
evil, distinguished by their different forms and by the emblems of Isis
and Serapis; on others the heads of Isis and Serapis, the principles of
love and fear; while on a third these two are united into a trinity by
Horus, who is standing on an eagle instead of having an eagle's head, as
represented on previous coins.

The beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138) was remarkable
as being the end of the Sothic period of one thousand four hundred and
sixty years; the movable new year's day of the calendar had come round
to the place in the natural year from which it first began to move in
the reign of Menophres or Thutmosis III.; it had come round to the day
when the dog-star rose heliacally. If the years had been counted from
the beginning of this great year, there could have been no doubt when it
came to an end, as from the want of a leap year the new year's day
must have been always moving one day in four years; but no satisfactory
reckoning of the years had been kept, and, as the end of the period was
only known by observation, there was some little doubt about the exact
year. Indeed, among the Greek astronomers, Dositheus said the dog-star
rises heliacally twenty-three days after midsummer, Meton twenty-eight
days, and Euctemon thirty-one days; they thus left a doubt of thirty-two
years as to when the period should end, but the statesmen placed it in
the first year of the reign of Antoninus. This end of the Sothic period
Avas called the return to the phoenix, and had been looked forward to by
the Egyptians for many years, and is well marked on the coins of this
reign. The coins for the first eight years teem with astronomy. There
are several with the goddess Isis in a boat, which we know, from the
zodiac in the Memnonium at Thebes, was meant for the heliacal rising of
the dog-star. In the second and in the sixth year we find on the coins
the remarkable word aion, _the age_ or _period_, and an ibis with a
glory of rays round its head, meant for the bird phoenix. In the seventh
year we see Orpheus playing on his lyre while all the animals of the
forest are listening, thus pointing out the return of the golden age.
In the eighth year we have the head of Serapis circled by the seven
planets, and the whole within the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on
another coin we have the sun and moon within the signs of the zodiac. A
series of twelve coins for the same year tells us that the house of the
sun, in the language of the astrologers, is in the lion, that of the
moon in the crab, the houses of Venus in the scales and the bull, those
of Mars in the scorpion and the ram, those of Jupiter in the archer
and the fishes, those of Saturn in the sea-goat and aquarius, those of
Mercury in the virgin and the twins. On the coins of the same year we
have the eagle and thunderbolt, the sphinx, the bull Apis, the Nile and
crocodile, Isis nursing the child Horus, the hawk-headed Aroeris, and
the winged sun. On coins of other years we have a camelopard, Horus
sitting on the lotus-flower, and a sacrifice to Isis, which was
celebrated on the last day of the year.

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