Part 18 (2/2)
This is entirely covered when the reservoir is full, and the palm-trees are farther submerged.
The photographs accompanying the present chapter show the dam, the Kiosk in process of conservation and underpinning (1902), and the sh.o.r.es of the island as they now appear in the month of November, with the water nearly up to the level of the quays. A view is also given of the island of Konosso, with its inscriptions, as it is now. The island is simply a huge granite boulder of the kind characteristic of the neighbourhood of Sh.e.l.lal (Phila?) and Aswan.
On the island of Elephantine, opposite Aswan, an interesting discovery has lately been made by Mr. Howard Carter. This is a remarkable well, which was supposed by the ancients to lie immediately on the tropic. It formed the basis of Eratosthenes' calculations of the measurement of the earth. Important finds of doc.u.ments written in Aramaic have also been made here; they show that there was on the island in Ptolemaic times a regular colony of Syrian merchants.
South of Aswan and Philse begins Nubia. The Nubian language, which is quite different from Arabic, is spoken by everybody on the island of Elephantine, and its various dialects are used as far south as Dongola, where Arabic again is generally spoken till we reach the land of the negroes, south of Khartum. In Ptolemaic and Roman days the Nubians were a powerful people, and the whole of Nubia and the modern North Sudan formed an independent kingdom, ruled by queens who bore the t.i.tle or name of Candace. It was the eunuch of a Candace who was converted to Christianity as he was returning from a mission to Jerusalem to salute Jehovah. ”Go and join thyself unto his chariot” was the command to Philip, and when the Ethiopian had heard the gospel from his lips he went on his way rejoicing. The capital of this Candace was at Meroe, the modern Bagarawiya, near Shendi. Here, and at Naga not far off, are the remains of the temples of the Can-daces, great buildings of semi-barbaric Egyptian style. For the civilization of the Nubians, such as it was, was of Egyptian origin. Ever since Egyptian rule had been extended southwards to Jebel Barkal, beyond Dongola, in the time of Amenhetep II, Egyptian culture had influenced the Nubians. Amenhetep III built a temple to Amen at Napata, the capital of Nubia, which lay under the shadow of Mount Barkal; Akhunaten erected a sanctuary of the Sun-Disk there; and Ramses II also built there.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 452.jpg THE ROOK OF KONOSSO IN JANUARY, 1902, BEFORE THE BUILDING OF THE DAM AND FORMATION OF THE RESERVOIR.]
The place in fact was a sort of appanage of the priests of Amen at Thebes, and when the last priest-king evacuated Thebes, leaving it to the Bubast.i.tes of the XXIId Dynasty, it was to distant Napata that he retired. Here a priestly dynasty continued to reign until, two centuries later, the troubles and misfortunes of Egypt seemed to afford an opportunity for the rea.s.sertion of the exiled Theban power. Piankhi Mera-men returned to Egypt in triumph as its rightful sovereign, but his successors, Shabak, Shabatak, and Tirha-kah, had to contend constantly with the a.s.syrians. Finally ITrdamaneh, Tirhakah's successor, returned to Nubia, leaving Egypt, in the decadence of the a.s.syrian might, free to lead a quiet existence under Psametik I and the succeeding monarchs of the XXVIth Dynasty. When Cambyses conquered Egypt he aspired to conquer Nubia also, but his army was routed and destroyed by the Napatan king, who tells us in an inscription how he defeated ”the man Kambasauden,”
who had attacked him. At Napata the Nubian monarchs, one of the greatest of whom in Ptolemaic times was Ergam-enes, a contemporary of Ptolemy Philopator, continued to reign. But the first Roman governor of Egypt, aelius Gallus, destroyed Napata, and the Nubians removed their capital to Meroe, where the Candaces reigned.
The monuments of this Nubian kingdom, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nure close by, the pyramids of Bagarawiya, the temples of Wadi Ben Naga, Mesawwarat en-Naga, and Mesawwarat es-Sufra (”Mesawwarat”
proper), were originally investigated by Cailliaud and afterwards by Lepsius. During the last few years they and the pyramids excavated by Dr. E. A. Wallis-Budge, of the British Museum, for the Sudan government, have been again explored. As the results of his work are not yet fully published, it is possible at present only to quote the following description from Cook's _Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan_ (by Dr.
Budge), p. 6, of work on the pyramids of Jebel Barkal: ”the writer excavated the shafts of one of the pyramids here in 1897, and at the depth of about twenty-five cubits found a group of three chambers, in one of which were a number of bones of the sheep which was sacrificed there about two thousand years ago, and also portions of a broken amphora which had held Rho-dian wine. A second shaft, which led to the mummy-chamber, was partly emptied, but at a further depth of twenty cubits water was found. The high-water mark of the reservoir when full is ------ and, as there were no visible means for pumping it out, the mummy-chamber could not be entered.” With regard to the Bagarawiya pyramids, Dr. Budge writes, on p. 700 of the same work, a propos of the story of the Italian Ferlini that he found Roman jewelry in one of these pyramids: ”In 1903 the writer excavated a number of the pyramids of Meroe for the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir F. R. Wingate, and he is convinced that the statements made by Ferlini are the result of misapprehension on his part. The pyramids are solid throughout, and the bodies are buried under them. When the details are complete the proofs for this will be published.” Dr. Budge has also written upon the subject of the orientation of the Jebel Barkal and Nure pyramids.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 454.jpg THE ISLE OF KONOSSO, WITH ITS INSCRIPTIONS]
It is very curious to find the pyramids reappearing in Egyptian tomb-architecture in the very latest period of Egyptian history. We find them when Egyptian civilization was just entering upon its vigorous manhood, then they gradually disappear, only to revive in its decadent and exiled old age. The Ethiopian pyramids are all of much more elongated form than the old Egyptian ones. It is possible that they may be a survival of the archaistic movement of the XXVIth Dynasty, to which we have already referred.
These are not the latest Egyptian monuments in the Sudan, nor are the temples of Naga and Mesawwarat the most ancient, though they belong to the Roman period and are decidedly barbarian as to their style and, especially, as to their decoration. The southernmost as well as latest relic of Egypt in the Sudan is the Christian church of Soba, on the Blue Mie, a few miles above Khartum. In it was found a stone ram, an emblem of Amen-Ra, which had formerly stood in the temple of Naga and had been brought to Soba perhaps under the impression that it was the Christian Lamb. It was removed to the garden of the governor-general's palace at Khartum, where it now stands.
The church at Soba is a relic of the Christian kingdom of Alua, which succeeded the realm of the Candaces. One of its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still wors.h.i.+pped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the G.o.ddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so down to the twelfth century, when the soldiers of Islam conquered the country.
Of late pagan and early Christian Egypt very much that is new has been discovered during the last few years. The period of the Lower Empire has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in his _Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum_, especially the letters of Flavius Abinaeus, a military officer of the fourth century. The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown t.i.tles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes.
”Glorious Dukes of the Thebad,” ”most magnificent counts and lieutenants,” ”all-praiseworthy secretaries,” and the like strut across the pages of the letters and doc.u.ments which begin ”In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the G.o.d and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction.” It is an extraordinary period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now entered, with its bizarre combination of the official t.i.tulary of the divine and eternal Caesars Imperatores Augusti with the initial invocation of Christ and the Trinity. It is the transition from the ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.
In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the ”Melkites”
or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory put forward by Mr. Butler, in his _Arab Conquest of Egypt_, it is Cyril the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or ”Great and Magnificent One,” who played so doubtful a part in the epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually this Mukaukas has been regarded as a ”n.o.ble Copt,” and the Copts have generally been credited with having a.s.sisted the Islamites against the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.
In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual increase of Arab names after the conquest, more especially in those of the Archduke Rainer 's collection from the Fayym, which was so near the new capital city, Fustat. In Upper Egypt the change was not noticeable for a long time, and in the great collection of Coptic _ostraka_ (inscriptions on slips of limestone and sherds of pottery, used as a subst.i.tute for paper or parchment), found in the ruins of the Coptic monastery established, on the temple site of Der el-Bahari, we find no Arab names. These doc.u.ments, part of which have been published by Mr. W. E. Crum for the Egypt Exploration Fund, while another part will shortly be issued for the trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Hall, date to the seventh and eighth centuries. Their contents resemble those of the earlier papyri from Oxyrrhynchus, though they are not of so varied a nature and are generally written by persons of less intelligence, i.e. the monks and peasants of the monasteries and villages of Tjeme, or Western Thebes.
During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Der el-Bahari, more of these _ostraka_ were found, which will be published for the Egypt Exploration Fund by Messrs. Naville and Hall. Of actual buildings of the Coptic period the most important excavations have been those of the French School of Cairo at Bawit, north of Asyt. This work, which was carried on by M. Jean Cledat, has resulted in the discovery of very important frescoes and funerary inscriptions, belonging to the monastery of a famous martyr, St. Apollo. With these new discoveries of Christian Egypt our work reaches its fitting close. The frontier which divides the ancient from the modern world has almost been crossed. We look back from the monastery of Bawit down a long vista of new discoveries until, four thousand years before, we see again the Great Heads coming to the Tomb of Den, Narmer inspecting the bodies of the dead Northerners, and, far away in Babylonia, Naram-Sin crossing the mountains of the East to conquer Elam, or leading his allies against the prince of Sinai.
THE END.
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