Egypt - Rawlinson
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Egypt - Rawlinson Contents I - The Land of Egypt ........................................... 2 II - The People of Egypt .......................................... 8 III - The Dawn of History ......................................... 14 IV - The Pyramid Builders ........................................ 19 V - The Rise of Thebes .......................................... 26 VI - The Good Amenemhat and His Works ............................... 31 VII - Abraham in Egypt .......................................... 34 VIII - The Great Invasion; the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings; Joseph and Apepi ............ 36 IX - How the Hyksos were Expelled from Egypt ............................. 40 X - Thothmes I, the First Great Egyptian Conqueror .......................... 43 XI - Queen Hatasu and her Merchant Fleet ............................... 46 XII - Thothmes III and Amenhotep II .................................. 49 XIII - Amenhotep III ............................................ 54 XIV - Khuenaten and the Disk Worshippers ............................... 58 XV - Beginning of the Decline of Egypt ................................. 60 XVI - Menephthah I, the Pharaoh of the Exodus ............................ 66 XVII - The Decline of Egypt under the Later Ramessides ....................... 71 XVIII - The Priest Kings – Pinetem and Solomon ........................... 76 XIX - Shishak and His Dynasty ...................................... 79 XX - Egypt Under the Ethiopians .................................... 83 XXI - Ethiopia vs Assyria ......................................... 88 XXII - Psamatik I and Necho ....................................... 91 XXIII - The Later Saite Kings ...................................... 96 XXIV - The Persian Conquest ...................................... 98 XXV - Three Desperate Revolts ..................................... 102 XXVI - The Last Gleam of Sunshine – Nectanebo I ........................... 104 XXVII - The Light Goes Out in Darkness ................................ 105 Grace Notes, a ministry of Austin Bible Church http://gracenotes.info/ Egypt - Rawlinson 2 I - The Land of Egypt or gorges, or cascades, or rushing streams, or bab- bling rills, meet his gaze on any side; look which way he will, all is sameness, one vast smooth ex- In shape Egypt is like a lily with a crooked stem. panse of rich alluvial soil, varying only in being A broad blossom terminates it at its upper end; a cultivated or else allowed to lie waste. Turning his button of a bud projects from the stalk a little be- back with something of weariness on the dull uni- low the blossom, on the left-hand side. The broad formity of this featureless plain, the wayfarer pro- blossom is the Delta, extending from Aboosir to ceeds southwards, and enters, at the distance of a Tineh, a direct distance of a hundred and eighty hundred miles from the coast, on an entirely new miles, which the projection of the coast–the grace- scene. Instead of an illimitable prospect meeting ful swell of the petals–enlarges to two hundred and him on every side, he finds himself in a compar- thirty. The bud is the Fayoum, a natural depres- atively narrow vale, up and down which the eye sion in the hills that shut in the Nile valley on the still commands an extensive view, but where the west, which has been rendered cultivable for many prospect on either side is blocked at the distance of thousands of years by the introduction into it of a few miles by rocky ranges of hills, white or yellow the Nile water, through a canal known as the “Bahr or tawny, sometimes drawing so near as to threaten Yousouf.” The long stalk of the lily is the Nile val- an obstruction of the river course, sometimes reced- ley itself, which is a ravine scooped in the rocky soil ing so far as to leave some miles of cultivable soil for seven hundred miles from the First Cataract to on either side of the stream. The rocky ranges, the apex of the Delta, sometimes not more than a as he approaches them, have a stern and forbid- mile broad, never more than eight or ten miles. No ding aspect. They rise for the most part, abruptly other country in the world is so strangely shaped, in bare grandeur; on their craggy sides grows nei- so long compared to its width, so straggling, so ther moss nor heather; no trees clothe their steep hard to govern from a single centre. heights. They seem intended, like the mountains At the first glance, the country seems to divide it- that enclosed the abode of Rasselas, to keep in the self into two strongly contrasted regions; and this inhabitants of the vale within their narrow limits, was the original impression which it made upon its and bar them out from any commerce or acquain- inhabitants. The natives from a very early time tance with the regions beyond. designated their land as “the two lands,” and rep- Such is the twofold division of the country which resented it by a hieroglyph in which the form used impresses the observer strongly at the first. On a to express “land” was doubled. The kings were longer sojourn and a more intimate familiarity, the called “chiefs of the Two Lands,” and wore two twofold division gives place to one which is three- crowns, as being kings of two countries. The He- fold. The lower differs from the upper valley, it is brews caught up the idea, and though they some- a sort of debatable region, half plain, half vale; the times called Egypt “Mazor” in the singular num- cultivable surface spreads itself out more widely, ber, preferred commonly to designate it by the the enclosing hills recede into the distance; above dual form “Mizraim,” which means “the two Ma- all, to the middle tract belongs the open space of zors.” These “two Mazors,” “two Egypts,” or “two the Fayoum nearly fifty miles across in its great- lands,” were, of course, the blossom and the stalk, est diameter, and containing an area of four hun- the broad tract upon the Mediterranean known as dred square miles. Hence, with some of the occu- “Lower Egypt,” or “the Delta,” and the long narrow pants of Egypt a triple division has been preferred valley that lies, like a green snake, to the south, to a twofold one, the Greeks interposing the “Hep- which bears the name of “Upper Egypt,” or “the tanomis” between the Thebais and the Delta, and Said.” Nothing is more striking than the contrast the Arabs the “Vostani” between the Said and the between these two regions. Entering Egypt from Bahari, or “country of the sea.” the Mediterranean, or from Asia by the caravan route, the traveller sees stretching before him an It may be objected to this description, that the apparently boundless plain, wholly unbroken by Egypt which it presents to the reader is not the natural elevations, generally green with crops or Egypt of the maps. Undoubtedly it is not. The with marshy plants, and canopied by a cloudless maps give the name of Egypt to a broad rectangular sky, which rests everywhere on a distant flat hori- space which they mark out in the north-eastern cor- zon. An absolute monotony surrounds him. No ner of Africa, bounded on two sides by the Mediter- alternation of plain and highland, meadow and for- ranean and the Red Sea, and on the two others by est, no slopes of hills, or hanging woods, or dells, two imaginary lines which the map-makers kindly Grace Notes, a ministry of Austin Bible Church http://gracenotes.info/ Egypt - Rawlinson 3 draw for us across the sands of the desert. But the whole of northern Africa from the Atlantic to “this Egypt,” as has been well observed, “is a fic- the Red Sea. Having scooped itself out this bed to tion of the geographers, as untrue to fact as the is- a depth, in places, of three hundred feet from the land Atlantis of Greek legend, or the Lyonnesse of desert level, it has then proceeded partially to fill mediaeval romance, both sunk beneath the ocean it up with its own deposits. Occupying, when it to explain their disappearance. The true Egypt of is at its height, the entire bed, and presenting at the old monuments, of the Hebrews, of the Greeks that time the appearance of a vast lake, or succes- and Romans, of the Arabs, and of its own people sion of lakes, it deposes every day a portion of sed- in this day, is a mere fraction of this vast area of iment over the whole space which it covers: then, the maps, nothing more than the valley and plain contracting gradually, it leaves at the base of the watered by the Nile, for nearly seven hundred miles hills, on both sides, or at any rate on one, a strip by the river’s course from the Mediterranean south- of land fresh dressed with mud, which gets wider wards.” The great wastes on either side of the Nile daily as the waters still recede, until yards grow valley are in no sense Egypt, neither the undulating into furlongs, and furlongs into miles, and at last sandy desert to the west, nor the rocky and grav- the shrunk stream is content with a narrow channel elly highland to the east, which rises in terrace after a few hundred yards in width, and leaves the rest terrace to a height, in some places, of six thousand of its bed to the embraces of sun and air, and, if he feet. Both are sparsely inhabited, and by tribes of so wills, to the industry of man. The land thus left a different race from the Egyptian–tribes whose al- exposed is Egypt–Egypt is the temporarily uncov- legiance to the rulers of Egypt is in the best times ered bed of the Nile, which it reclaims and recovers nominal, and who for the most part spurn the very during a portion of each year, when Egypt disap- idea of submission to authority. pears from view, save where human labour has by mounds and embankments formed artificial islands If, then, the true Egypt be the tract that we have that raise their heads above the waste of waters, for described–the Nile valley, with the Fayoum and the the most part crowned with buildings.