Art. III. RECENT LIGHTS ON ANCIENT EGYPT. -- 1. A History of Egypt from the End of the Neolithic Period to the Death of Cleopatra VII. By E. A. Wallis Budge. Eight vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1902. 2. A History of Egypt. Six vols. Vol. I (fifth edition): From the Earliest Kings to the 16th Dynasty. Vol. II (second edition): The 17th and 18th Dynasties. By W. M. Flinders Petrie. London: Methuen, 1897-1903. 3. The Dawn of Civilisation: Egypt and Chaldæa. By G. Maspero. Edited by A. H. Sayce; translated by M. L. McClure. Fourth edition. London: S. P. C. K., 1901. 4. Manual of Egyptian Archæology. By G. Maspero. Translated by Amelia B. Edwards. Fifth edition. London: Grevel, 1902. 5. Methods and Aims in Archæology. By W. M. Flinders Petrie. London: Macmillan, 1904. 6. The Gods of the Egyptians. By E. A. Wallis Budge. Two vols. London: Methuen, 1904. 7. The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia. (Gifford Lectures.) By A. H. Sayce. Edinburgh: Clark, 1902. AMONG all the branches of knowledge pursued in spite of the absence of any utilitarian advantages to recommend them, there are few that prove more generally attractive than Egyptology. The prestige of Old Egypt, the extraordinary range of its history into the remote past, the perfect preservation of many early and most perishable relics, the massiveness of its greatest monuments, the part played by the land and people in biblical history and in the development of civilisation, appeal to every educated man. In spite of protestations that Egypt would be a very pleasant country if it were not for the antiquities, it is certain that the multitude of visitors drawn to the banks of the Nile in the search for health or amusement, or driven thither by the imperious command of Fashion, furnishes a stream of recruits to the ranks of Egyptologists, both professional and amateur. Apart from private archæological undertakings, which in some cases are on a large scale, the Egypt Exploration Fund-an archæological society with two flourishing branches-is entirely supported by subscriptions raised in England and America. Nor is the Anglo-Saxon by any means alone in feeling the charms of Egyptology. To the French, Egypt has, for more than a century, had a peculiar attraction, scientific, political, and sentimental; the German gelehrter has made this branch of learning, like every other, his own; and the Governments of France and Germany spend large sums in the encouragement of Egyptian research. Champollion's triumphs in the first interpretation of hieroglyphs were won between 1820 and 1831; and since that time there has been no cessation of labour on the philological side in defining the values of the hieroglyphic signs, the meaning of the words, and the general sense of the inscriptions. Every successful attempt at decipherment brought with it some new contribution to knowledge, establishing the existence or the succession of kings, their monumental or warlike activity, the age of tombs and temples, or throwing light on the beliefs and practices illustrated by the texts. Archæological exploration and discovery, begun a century ago, are now proceeding more rapidly than ever; and decipherment has progressed so fast that ordinary texts are read with fluency if not with complete accuracy, and even those that are difficult may generally, in the hands of the best scholars, be compelled to yield up their secrets. Many and various have been the histories of ancient Egypt written since Champollion's time. At first, like the brief account of Sharpe and the bulky work of Bunsen, they were founded on the statements of classical authors, with scraps of half-understood monumental evidence worked in. In 1859 the great Egyptologist, Heinrich Brugsch, wrote in French a history of Egypt down to the conquest by Alexander, based upon the inscriptions. In 1876 he was able to boast on the title-page of a recast edition in German that it was derived entirely from the monuments,' though it must be admitted that the later portion is extremely meagre as a result of excluding the literary authorities. Brugsch's History dispensed with footnotes or other citations of the sources, and was therefore of little value as a work of reference. These were abundantly supplied in 1884 by Wiedemann, whose Ægyptische Geschichte' is mainly an elaborate and Vol. 200.-No. 399, E 6 critical catalogue of material relating to the successive kings, both published and unpublished. The authority of classical writers has received a rude shock from the comparison of their statements with the facts recorded in monumental inscriptions. That their lights were misleading is a saying that might be expected to apply in regard to their knowledge and perception of past history. One must say it with regret that it is hardly less true of their observations of contemporary affairs. One historical writer in Greek has stood the test well, and that is Manetho the Sebennyte, an Egyptian priest of Heliopolis employed by either Ptolemy Soter or Philadelphus to compile an account of the king's predecessors on the throne of Egypt. His lists of kings' names, and the divisions into dynasties, are, in the main, corroborated by the monuments; the figures recording the lengths of the reigns are not trustworthy; but perhaps this is owing to the corruptions of copyists. Beyond these lists very little of Manetho's great work has survived. If one may judge by the long passages which Josephus professes to have excerpted from Manetho, and the short notices of the kings preserved by Africanus, some of which must have actually been taken from the work of the Egyptian priest, the historical narratives in Manetho were of a semi-mythical character, and were probably founded on such tales as were told by the storytellers in the bazaars. While clay tablets of annals in cuneiform script from Babylonia and Assyria have long been known, it has generally been an accepted belief that the Egyptians kept no systematic chronicles. One of the latest discoveries, however, has shown that this idea is by no means correct. At Palermo there is preserved a fragment of a slab, finely carved on back and front with hieroglyphic writing, which, when it was complete, gave a view of the kings' reigns down to the time of its erection in the fifth dynasty, some twenty or thirty centuries As interpreted by its German editors," the first line gave simply a long list of names of the kings of Upper Egypt and of Lower Egypt who ruled in the dark pre B.C. * Joh. Heinrich Schäfer, 'Ein Bruchstück altägyptischer Annalen,' mit beiträgen von Ludwig Borchardt und Kurt Sethe. Berlin, 1902. historic period before the two kingdoms were united under Menes. These names are all new to science; and it is to be feared that Egyptologists will never have the good fortune to find them inscribed on contemporary monuments. The subsequent lines contained regular annals of the successive dynasties, from the 'first' dynasty onwards, recording under each year the height of the Nile, festivals celebrated, victories won, buildings founded and endowments given. If these chronicles were compiled under the fifth dynasty there seems no reason why they should not have been kept up, in one form or another, till the age of the Ptolemies. A famous papyrus at Turin, of about the age of Rameses II in the nineteenth dynasty (c. 1300 B.C.), must, when complete, have given a list of all the dynastic kings who had reigned down to that time, together with the lengths of their reigns, and apparently summarised the prehistoric kings as a dynasty of Spirits (the vékves of Manetho), as if they had been demigods reigning between the true deities and the human dynasty of Menes. The Turin list we can now recognise with probability to have been derived from full and authentic annals; and it seems not beyond hope that those annals themselves may one day be forthcoming. But the almost complete absence of authentic historical information from the fragments of Manetho's history justifies the apprehension that the old annals had long been lost sight of in his day, and the later ones very inadequately kept. Persistency in such an unessential matter is hardly to be looked for; the handiwork of the Egyptian scribe shows that to devise and carry out a system was abhorrent to the character of the people. A good custom initiated by an intelligent and enterprising ruler might soon fall into desuetude after his personal influence ceased, perhaps to be revived again irregularly from time to time. The number of inscriptions and papyri now available for the Egyptologist is immense, and increases substantially year by year. From this mass proceeds a gradual broadening and consolidation of the narrative obtained by a more or less painful accumulation and comparison of facts. But now and again there rises from the soil of the Nile valley, as if by magic, an entire chapter of unsuspected history-it may be that it lies in the evidence of a single find or in simultaneous discoveries over a wider area. In 1886 was found the diplomatic correspondence of kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni in Mesopotamia, and Alashiya (Cyprus?), together with reports of the governors of Syria and Palestine, addressed to Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV, Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The find consisted of some three hundred tablets in cuneiform writing, but many of them were abominably broken or rubbed down by the unhandy fellahin finders in their attempts to secure and sell them. Flinders Petrie examined the spot at El Amarna in 1892 and found a few more tablets. The site proved to be a group of chambers close to the palace of the heretic king, Amenhotep IV (who called himself Akhenaten), evidently set aside specially for the decipherment, writing, and storage of despatches in foreign languages and cuneiform script, fragments of glossaries being found along with the letters. The letters of El Amarna have thrown a flood of light on the relations of Egypt with Syria and the great Asiatic powers beyond-a subject previously obscure to the last degree-and have provided a most important synchronism in Babylonian and Egyptian history.* Again, until 1894, the year in which Heinrich Brugsch died, the history of Egypt for practical purposes began with the last king of the third dynasty. It seemed wellnigh hopeless to look for any earlier antiquities. Now archæologists find their most fruitful field in the prehistoric remains, and decipherers some of their most attractive problems in the archaic writings of the first three dynasties. The cultivation of systematic archæology and of scientific excavation, under the leadership of Professor Flinders Petrie, is responsible for the great success achieved in this department. Curiously enough, Lower and Middle Egypt have as yet contributed little; and it was not until Petrie, working southward in successive years from the Delta through the Faiyum and El Amarna, at length reached Koptos that scientific workers struck the earliest strata. Immediately afterwards, in 1896, the simultaneous discoveries of De Morgan and Petrie in * This synchronism, about 1400 B.C., gives a fixed point in the chronology of the Cretan and Mycenæan' civilisations, archæology having clearly proved the letters contemporaneous with the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty., |