A History of Egypt from the End of the Neolithic Period to the Death of Cleopatra VII B.C. 30 (Routledge Revivals)

Vol. I: Egypt in the Neolithic and Archaic Periods

E. A. Wallis Budge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135094867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (1857-1934) was Keeper of the British Museum's department of oriental antiquities from 1894 until his retirement in 1924. Carrying out many missions to Egypt in search of ancient objects, Budge was hugely successful in collecting papyri, statues and other artefacts for the trustees of the British Museum: numbering into the thousands and of great cultural and historical significance. Budge published well over 100 monographs, which shaped the development of future scholarship and are still of great academic value today, dealing with subjects such as Egyptian religion, history and literature.

This volume, first published in 1901 as part of the Egypt and Chaldaea series, is the first of eight volumes by Budge dealing with different periods in the history of Egypt. The narrative begins with an account of Egypt and her people in the latter part of the Neolithic period, and ends with the description of her conquest by the Romans under Caesar Octavianus, B.C. 30. Budge considers the great excavations of the nineteenth century in the first volume and, alongside detailed illustrations, provides a fascinating analysis of the dynastic kings.

EGYPY

IN THE

PREDYNASTIC AND ARCHAIC PERIODS.

CHAPTER I.

THE PREDYNASTIC EGYPTIANS

UNTIL within the last few years the writer who set out to gather together the facts concerning the various great periods of Egyptian history, with the view of placing before his readers a connected sketch of the most important events which took place in the Valley of the Nile between the Fourth Cataract and the Mediterranean Sea, was compelled to state un-hesitatingly that Egyptological science possessed no exact knowledge concerning the origin of the people who have been universally called “Egyptians.” It was generally assumed that they were not indigenous, but hardly any two Egyptologists agreed as to the site of their original home, and whilst one authority declared unhesitatingly that the Egyptians came from Central or North-Eastern Asia, another placed their probable home in some country far to the south of that portion of the Nile Valley which is commonly called “Egypt” and another maintained that some tract of land lying to the west of the Nile in Northern Africa must be regarded as their true home. Each authority produced proofs in support of his assertion, and each group of proofs was regarded as satisfactory evidence by those who accepted the theory which they were intended to support.

The various theories put forward by competent men were based upon :—(1) The scientific examination of the mummified remains of the historical Egyptians; (2) historical and geographical information derived from-the hieroglyphic inscriptions ; (3) the philological peculiarities of the language as exhibited by the hieroglyphic texts ; and (4) statements made by ancient chronographers and historians.

The evidence derived from the statements referred to under No. 4 was, of course, only of scientific value when supported by evidence derived from any or all of the classes of information summarized in Nos. 1, 2, and 3. The researches which have been made since the times when the main theories about the original home of the Egyptians were propounded show that in each of them many of the details were correct, and that their authors would have arrived at right conclusions had their deductions been based upon a larger number of facts, and upon a wider field of examination and information. Unfortunately, however, the field available for examination was limited, and all the necessary facts were not forthcoming, and the pity is that the early writers on Egyptology assumed that they had solved a number of far-reaching problems in Egyptology when it was evident to all unbiased observers and honest enquirers that they still lacked the information which could only be obtained from data that were then non-available. Speaking broadly, the propounders of theories were hampered by their own preconceived views, and also by ideas derived from the works of Scriptural and classical writers ; and their difficulties were increased greatly by their own efforts to make the evidence derived from the ancient Egyptian native writings “square ” with that which they obtained from foreign sources.

Side by side with the question of the site of the original home of the Egyptians it was necessary to discuss the cognate subjects of early Egyptian chronology and the language of the primitive Egyptians, and the views and opinions put forward by writers on these matters were as conflicting as those which existed on the original home. Some held that the language of the early Egyptians was of Aryan origin, others declared it to be closely allied to the Semitic dialects, especially to those belonging to the northern group, i.e., Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee, and others claimed for it a Berber, or Ethiopian, or Libyan, or Central African origin, according to individual fancy or observation.

On early Egyptian chronology opinion was hopelessly divided, the principal reason being that many investigators attempted to confine the whole period of Egyptian dynastic history within the limits assigned to Old Testament history by the impossible system of Archbishop Usher.¹ Those who did this lost sight of the fact that they were not allowing sufficient time for the rise and growth and development of Egyptian civilization, and they wrote as if they thought that the wonderfully advanced state at which the religion, and art, and sculpture, and architecture, and education, and government of ancient Egypt had arrived at the beginning of the IV th Dynasty had been reached after the lapse of a few centuries. No system of chronology which may at present be devised can be accurate in the modern acceptation of the term, and none can ever, with truth, pretend to be approximately so, except in respect of isolated periods of time of relatively limited duration. But the system which will have the best chance of survival, and at the same time be the most correct, seems, judging by the evidence before us, to be that which will take into due consideration the extreme antiquity of civilization of one kind and another in the Valley of the Nile, and which will not be fettered by views based upon the opinions of those who would limit the existence of the civilization of ancient Egypt to a period of about 3000 years.

Until the year 1891 the writer in favour of assuming a high antiquity for ancient Egyptian civilization was obliged to rely for his proofs upon the evidence furnished by the inscriptions, and upon deductions based on information supplied by texts written upon papyri, but, thanks to the labours of the recent excavators who have examined and cleared out a number of the predynastic cemeteries in Egypt, it is now possible to produce objects of various kinds which prove beyond all doubt that Egyptian civilization is older by several thousands of years than many Egyptologists have wished to admit, and that the existence of man in the Valley of the Nile may be traced back even to the Palaeolithic Period in Egypt. But before passing on to the consideration of the predynastic Egyptian it will be well to summarize briefly the principal facts in connection with the important excavations which have produced such remarkable results.

It will be remembered that between the years 1870 and 1890 there appeared from time to time in the hands of dealers in Egyptian antiquities numbers of rude figures of animals made of green slate, with inlaid eyes formed of bone rings, and little groups of earthenware vases, painted in red, with unusual designs. Specimens of these were purchased by travellers and others, and certain examples were acquired, through the late Rev. Greville Chester, B.A., by the British Museum. Thus a large, flat, green slate figure of a horned animal, with inlaid eyes (No. 35,019), was purchased in June, 1871 ; a figure of a sheep, in the same material (No. 20,910), in October, 1880 ; a green slate object, belonging to the class which has been wrongly called “palettes ” (No. 21,899), in July, 1887; and a green slate bat, with outstretched wings (No. 21,901), in the same year. Among the painted vases which were acquired in 1881 may be mentioned a little two-handled vase, ornamented with red wavy lines (No. 35,050) ; and two black and red earthenware vases, and two earthenware pots with most unusual ornamentations, which were presented to the British Museum by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1885 (Nos. 22,185, 22,186, 22,173, and 22,200). Besides these there remain to be enumerated a small earthenware vase ornamented with series of concentric rings painted in red (No. 26,411), and a number of flints and small green slate objects, which have not as yet been satisfactorily identified. The provenance of many of these objects was well known, viz., Gebelên (a town situated on the left bank of the Nile, about 470 miles south of Cairo, which marks the site of the Crocodilopolis of the Greeks) and the neighbourhood of Abydos. Opinions differed as to the age of the green slate figures of animals and the earthenware vases ; some Egyptologists boldly declared the former to be “clumsy forgeries” and the latter to be the product of the Roman period, and others believed both classes of objects to be the work of a non-Egyptian people, who, for some reason or other, had settled in Egypt during dynastic times.

About the year 1890 it became known that certain natives in Egypt had discovered large quantities of pottery,¹ i.e., vases, jars, bowls, saucers, etc., some being of most unusual shapes, and others being ornamented with unusual designs. The decorations on the pottery consisted chiefly of series of concentric rings, wavy lines, which were probably intended to represent water, and figures of a number of objects which could not then be identified, traced in red paint. Among this pottery were a large number of vessels made of red and black earthenware, the upper parts being black and the lower parts red, and it was generally agreed that these, at least, belonged to no comparatively modern period like the Roman. Subsequent inquiries revealed the fact that pottery of this kind was always found in graves of a certain class, which seem to have been quite unknown to anyone except the native dealers in antiquities in Egypt, and little by little the characteristics of such graves became known generally. The most important variation in the system of sepulture employed by those who made the graves from that in use among the historical Egyptians was in the preparation of the body for burial and its disposal in the tomb. As we shall return to this subject later on, there is no necessity to go into details here, and it will be sufficient to say that the bodies which were found in the graves mentioned above were not mummified, that they were sometimes dismembered, and that when discovered in a perfect state they were always resting on their left sides, with their knees drawn up on a level with their chins, and their hands were raised to their faces almost as if in an attitude of prayer or adoration.

Little by little it became clear that graves containing bodies which had been buried in this fashion were to be found in many parts of Egypt, and that they existed in such large numbers that it was almost impossible for them to be the remains of any small, isolated body of settlers in Egypt, or of an unimportant section of the old population of that country.

Meanwhile the natives in Egypt had excavated with great thoroughness some of the sites where such graves were found in abundance, and many of the older men among them, having learned exactly what class of antiquity was being demanded by European savants and archaeologists, remembered that flint knives of fine workmanship, and vases and vessels of earthenware made in various shapes and painted in red with concentric circles and wavy lines, had been found near Abyclos, and at Naḳâda, and Gebelên, and other places, and they set to work to obtain permission to dig on these sites. Most of the applications for licenses to dig made by natives were refused by the authorities, and comparatively little was done in the matter of excavating these curious graves until the end of 1894, when Professor Pétrie decided to make excavations on a large scale on a site which lay along the “edge of the desert, between Ballas and Naqada. This district is about thirty miles north of Thebes, and on the western side of the Nile.”¹ In the course of the winter of 1894–95 he “recorded the plans and contents of nearly three thousand graves and two towns … in the four or five months of work ;”² a vast quantity of pottery and large ...