Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 06.djvu/812

* EGYPT. lOi time, no date before tlic eighth century B.C. has been fixed with certainty, and a fairly close ap- pro.xiniatiou is possible only up to about B.C. 1600. .Manetho"s division of all the rulers of EgA'pt from the earliest period down to B.C. 342 into thirty dynasties or groups (not strictly families) has been, in general, confinncd. Dy- nasties One to Six are called the Old Empire; Eleven to Fourteen, the Middle Enii)iro: with Dynasty Eighteen, the New Emptre begins. Egjpt was apparently a civilized .SUile at as early a date as was Babylonia. The jjossibility cannot be denied that Egjptian civilization may have been derived from that ancient centre of culture, but the evidence is not sufficient to de- cide the question. At any rate, long before B.C. 3000, Egypt possessed an indei)cndent culture, at least as high as that of Babylonia. The earliest history is obscure. The later juiests filled many thousands of years with the mythical reigns of the different gods, after which they placed four thou- sand or more years of the demigods or manes, i.e. prehistoric kings, whose names had been lost. The Egj'ptians considered Jlenes or Meni from This as the first remarkable historical King, We now i)Ossess many objects which seem to date from his time, found cliielly in the two great royal tombs at Nagada and at Abydos, and possibly relics of a few earlier kings, who, even at that time, ruled over all Egypt. The time when Egj-pt was divided into two kingdoms, the Delta and the Southern Land, has not yet been traced by archa>ology, although in the royal titles the re- membrance of that prehistoric division of the 'two countries' was preserved even down to l?oman times. The large tombs of the kings of dynasties One and Two were situated near Abydos and This (whence Manetho calls them Thinitie kings) ; these tombs were examined im- perfectly by AmCdineau in 180(1. and afterwards thoroughly by Petrie. (Consult bis Royal Tombs, London. 1900 et seq.) Thus we can go back to the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. or ear- lier. Of Dynasty Three we know little more than the names of the principal kings. They re- sided near Jlemphis. and their tombs gradually assumed the later, jn'ramidal form. The earliest example, the step-pyramid near SakkArah, is the work of Zoser, the fifth King of this dynasty. Under him we find the copper-mines near Mount Sinai already being worked by the Egj'ptians. Dynasty Four has left a great mass of monu- ments. The first King, Snefru, was the first great warrior. He nuide cximditions into Nubia and Syria, and opened a new copper-mine at Wadi MagliArah. His two successors, the Cheops (q.v. ) and Chephren (q.v.) of Herodotus, built the two largest pyramids — works which were never equaled at any later i)eriod. Later tradition ascribes the famous Sphinx near the pyramids to Chephren, but this is doubtful. Menkaure or Alycerinus built the third in size of the great pyramids; all subsequent roj'al pyramids are considerably smaller. I'uder this and the follow- ing dynasty Egyptian sculpture reached its acme of perfection (c. 2800 n.c). The most remark- able monument of Dynasty Five (twelve kings) is the sun-temple near Itiga. of which a building in the form of an obelisk has remained. The last King, called Onnos by Manetho, inaugurated the custom of covering the chamber of the pyramid with inscriptions. This example, followed regu- EGYPT. larly in DjTiasty Six, has furnished to us the ex- tensive texts of the jiyramids opened in 1880 (those of Teti or Atoli. Pepi or Apopi 1., Me- renre, Pepi 11., and XeferkarO). These are all magical texts, of no historic but of great lin- guistic interest, being copies of books so ancient that they were paltially unintelligible even to the scribes of that age. Pepi 1. (or perhaps Apopi — the vowels arc not expressed) left numerous traces of his building activity; he also waged a great war in Palestine, for which he used many negro troops from the tributary regions of Xubia. -Most of the kings of tliis ])eriod built their resi- dences — every King building a new city — around -Memphis; the city of Memphis it.self derived its name {Meiinofer, 'Good abode') from that of the pyramid of Pepi I., which stood in the vicinity. Pepi II. is reported to have reigned more than 90 years. Under his successor we hear of an ex- pedition into the negro countries on the White Nile, to procure a pigmy for the King (c.2500). Dynasties Seven to Nine form a very obscure period which has left hardly any monuments. The princes of the nomes (counties) had become so independent lliat the power of the King de- creased. Dynasties Seven and Eight ^^■ere of Memphitic, Nine and Ten of Heracleopolitan origin. The latter had to fight continually against rebellious nomarchs (counts), especially against those of Thebes, who began to claim the royal title, and finally succeeded in conquering the whole country, ruling as Dynasty Eleven. The last six kings of this family (nearly all called Antef or Mentuhotep) governed a reiinited kingdom. Under them Thebes, formerly an in significant town, first became the capital of Eg>pt. The last King of this dynasty. Sankh- ka-re, has left the first report of an expedition to Punt. (See below.) The Twelfth (Theban?) Dynasty seems, from recent discoveries, to have begun about B.C. 2000. This jieriod of about 200 years (seven kings, Amenemhat I., Usertesen I., Amenemhat 11.. Usertesen 11., Uscrte.sen 111.. Amenemhat 111., Amenemhat IV.. and a Queen, SebkiiefrurC) was considered by the later Eg;-p- tians as the Golden Age, esjiecially of literature, the poetical style of which formed tlie model for all succeeding periods. Of the luimerous build- ings of Dynasty Twelve and its renowned art, comparatively little has survived. Amenemhat 111. (q.v.) was the King Moeris of Herodotus, who gained the Province of the Fa(i)yftm for agriculture, by diking off large parts from the lake, formed by a branch of the Nile flowing into that oasis. Of the so-called Labyrinth, the larg- est of all Egj'ptian teni])les, built at this time near the pyramid <if Amenendiat III. in tlie neigh- borhood of Hawarah. only a few stones remain. It docs not seem that the Twelfth Dynasty pos- sessed more of Asia than the copper-mines near Mount Sinai, hut Xubia was gradtially conquered as far a.s the Second Cataract, where Usertesen 11. established his frimtier. by building two .strong fortresses on both sides of the Nile. The gold- mines of that country were explored by the Pharaohs. After Dynasty Twelve Egypt fell back into the former anarchy and strife of nomarchs, and it is likely that more than l.'iO princes, fight- ing with their neighbors for the crown, did not fill more than about a century (Dynasties Thir- teen and Fourteen). Somewhat before 1700, Egypt was suddenly I