Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/387

 EGYPT

337

EGYPT

I'eached, and the two countries united under one rule, the king took the title of "Lord of Both Lands", or "King of LTpper and Lower Egypt" (never "King of Kimit", i. e. of Egypt), and often wore a double crown consisting of the white crown of the South and the red crown of the North; the arms of the LTnited Kingdom were formed by the union of the lotus and the papyrus, the emblems of the two countries.

The capital of the Northern Kingdom was Buto, under the protection of the serpent goddess of the same name (now Tell-el-FenVin, 20 miles south-west from Rosetta). Nekheb (the modern el-Kab, a few miles north of Edfvi) was the capital of the Southern Kingdom; the vulture-goddess, Nekhabet, was its protecting deity. But at both capitals the hawk- god, Horus, was worshipped as the distinctive patron- deity of both kings. That ancient population of Egypt, referred to in later texts as the " Horus-wor- shippers", have recently emerged from the mythical obscurity to which their kings had been relegated be- fore the days of Manetho, who knows them as the vdKves, "the shades", i. e. the deified ancestors. The Palermo Stone has revealed to us the names of six or seven rulers of the Northern Kingdom; and in Upper Egypt, thousands of sepulchres (none of the kings, unfortunately) have recently been excavated. The bodies, unembalmed, lie sidewise, in what is called the "embryonic" posture, surrounded by pottery or stone jars, where remains of food, drink, and ointment can still be discerned, with toilet utensils, flint weapons, and clay models of various objects which the deceased might need in the life hereafter — boats especially, to cross the waters that surround the Elysian Fields. From those early times date, as to the essentials of concept and expression, the Pyramid Texts alluded to in a former section of this article. We have seen, under Chronology, that the institution of the calendar dates from predynastic times (4241 B. c), and that its original home was in the Northern Kingdom, probably at Memphis or at On (Heliopolis). The computations necessary for that calendar show clearly that we mast trace to predynastic times the hieroglyphic system of writing which we find fully developed in the royal tombs of the first two dynasties (Breasted, "Ancient History of the Egyptians", pp. .35-.39).

Dynastic History. — Since Manetho of Sebennytus (see above) it has been customary to arrange the long series of kings who ruled over ancient Egypt, from the beginning of history until the conquest of Alexander the Great, in thirty dynasties, each of which corre- sponds, or as a rule, seems to correspond, to a break in the succession of legitimate rulers, resulting from in- ternal dissensions or military reverses, the latter almost invariably leading to an invasion and, eventu- ally, the establishment of a foreign dynasty. I\Iane- tho's claim, that his history was compiled from lists of royal ancestry and original documents, is fairly borne out by the monuments — the so-called Tables (royal lists) of Sakkarah, Abydos, Karnak, and especially the famous, but much mutilated, Turin Papyrus and Palermo Stone, as well as annals of individual kings recorded on the walls of temples, tombs, etc.

These thirty dynasties are very unevenly known to us ; of a good many we know next to nothing. This is in particular the case for the Seventh and Eighth dy- nasties (Memphites), the Ninth and Tenth (Her- acleopolites), the Eleventh (Theban — contemporary with the Tenth), the Thirteenth (Theban) and the Fourteenth (Xoite — in part simultaneous), the Fif- teenth, and Sixteenth (Hyksos), and the Seventeenth Dynasty (Theban — partly contemporary with the Sixteenth). Other dynasties are known to us by their monuments, especially their tombs, which are often extremely rich in information as to the institutions, arts, manners, and customs of Egypt during the life- time of their occupants, but almost totally devoid of historical evidence proper. Such is the case, for in- V.— 22

stance, for the first five dynasties, of which all we can say is that they must have ruled successively over the whole land of Egypt and that their kings must have been conquerors as well as builders. We know little or nothing of the peoples they battled with, nor can we detect the political reasons which brought about the rise and fall of the several dynasties. Evidently, in some cases the lack of information on some periods, which must have been very momentous ones in the political life of ancient Egypt, should be attributed to the disappearance of monuments of an historical char- acter, or to the fact that such monuments have not yet been discovered; it is very likely, however, that in many cases no historical evidence was ever handed down to posterity. In Egypt, as in Assyria and Babylonia, it was not customary for kings to place their defeats on record, nor did the chieftain or the soldier of fortvme who after a period of internal dis- sensions succeeded in establishing himself as the founder of a new dynasty, care to take posterity into his confidence as to his origin and previous political career. Manetho, who, as a rule, does not seem to have been much better informed than we are, resorts in such cases to traditions, strongly tinted with legend, which were in the keeping of the priests and belonged, very likely, to the same stock as most of those related by Herodotus on matters that could not fall under his personal observation. Such traditions, until con- firmed by the monuments, or at any rate purified of their legendary elements by comparison with them, must of course be kept in abeyance. For the present the royal names are almost all that we can regard as certain for several of the dynasties. Such is the case for the first two dynasties, which until about a. d. 1888 were considered by most scholars as entirely mythical. „ Their tombs, however, have since been dis- covered at Umm-el-Ga'ab, near Abydos, in the territory of the ancient This (Thinis), and the names of Menes, Zer, LTsaphais, and Miebis have already been found. A good many other kings of Manetho's list cannot be identified with the owners of the tombs discovered, owing to the fact that, while Manetho gives only the proper names of the kings, the monuments contained, as a rule, nothing but their Horus names (Masp^ro, " Histoire Ancienne", 56 sq.). Monuments of these kings have been discovered in I'pper Egj^jt and at Sakkarah, which shows that they must have ruled over the whole land of Egypt. The various articles found in these early royal tombs point to a high de- gree of civilization by no means inferior to that of the immediately following dynasties. Religion in gen- eral, and the funerary ritual in particular, were already fixed, and the hieroglyphic system of writing had reached its last stage of alphabetic development (Masp^ro, loc. cit.; Breasted, "History of Ancient Egyptians", 40 sqq.).

The history of Egypt can be divided into two large periods, the first of which comprises the first seventeen and the second the other thirteen djmasties. In cur- rent literature Dynasties Three to Eleven are often variously referred to as the Old Kingdom (ancien em- pire), Dynasties Twelve to Seventeen as the Middle Kingdom {moyen empire), Dynasties Eighteen to Twenty as the Empire (nouvel empire). The simpler division which we propose here seems to us more ra- tional.

First Period: First to Seventeenth Dynasty. — During this period Egypt and the Asiatic empires never, so far as we know, came into contact, except possibly in a pacific and commercial way; their armies never met in battle. Some of the ancient Babylonian and Chaldean kings, like Sargon I (third millennium B. c), may have occasionally extended their raids as far as the Mediterranean Sea, but it does not seem that they ever established their rule in a permanent way. They were fully occupied with the war waged among themselves, or with the Elamites