Egyptomania

A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy

Ronald H. Fritze

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781780236858
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Egyptomania takes us on a historical journey to unearth the Egypt of the imagination, a land of strange gods, mysterious magic, secret knowledge, monumental pyramids, enigmatic sphinxes, and immense wealth. Egypt has always exerted a powerful attraction on the Western mind, and an array of figures have been drawn to the idea of Egypt. Even the practical-minded Napoleon dreamed of Egyptian glory and helped open the antique land to explorers. Ronald H. Fritze goes beyond art and architecture to reveal Egyptomania's impact on religion, philosophy, historical study, literature, travel, science, and popular culture. All those who remain captivated by the ongoing phenomenon of Egyptomania will revel in the mysteries uncovered in this book.

PART ONE

EGYPTOMANIA THROUGH THE AGES

ONE

THE REAL EGYPT

About all of them [the kings of Egypt] the priests had records which were regularly handed down in their sacred books to each successive priest from early times, giving the stature of each of the former kings, a description of his character, and what he had done during his reign.

DIODORUS¹

POPULAR CULTURE usually portrays ancient Egypt as a land of mystery, and in fact, accurately so – it is a land of mystery. There are lots of things about Egyptian history that historians and archaeologists are not sure about to greater or lesser degrees; for example, scholars are only able to speculate about the techniques the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. But this type of mysteriousness does not make Egypt unique. The same could be said about other ancient societies and large segments of history before the modern era. The fact is, as ancient civilizations go, Egypt is relatively well documented in terms of the surviving archaeological and documentary evidence. In contrast, after the civilizations of the Hittites and the Hurrians of Mitanni fell, they were largely forgotten for centuries until archaeologists rediscovered them. Neither of these ancient cultures lasted as long as Egyptian civilization.

Pharaonic civilization remained largely intact for approximately 3,000 years, which accounts for its survival in the historical consciousness of humanity. The fact that ancient Egyptians built many big stone monuments that have survived to the present also helps to keep their memory alive. Writing during the golden age of Egyptology, from 1818 to 1914, the great American archaeologist James Henry Breasted observed, ‘Nowhere on earth have the witnesses of a great, but now extinct civilization, been so plentifully preserved as along the banks of the Nile.’² Ancient Egypt was also considered by the ancient Greeks and Hebrews to be an exotic culture, and this opinion has persisted to the present. Hieroglyphs mystify us. The Sphinx beguiles us. Mummies fascinate us and the pyramids leave us awestruck. Those aspects of ancient Egyptian culture may be strange, but they are also intriguing, meaning that interest in the memory and remains of ancient Egypt persists. An accurate knowledge of its ancient history, however, is often lacking. What, then, was the real Egypt?

Environment

Egypt is located in the northeast corner of Africa, but even its location embodies a paradox, for its character is not African. It is the place where the continents of Asia and Africa meet. The paramount physical feature of Egypt is the River Nile. Herodotus, who wrote the first detailed description of Egypt and its surviving history, famously remarked that Egypt was the gift of the Nile. Actually, he said: ‘The Egypt to which the Hellenes [Greeks] sail is land that was deposited by the river – it is the gift of the river to the Egyptians.’³ Without the Nile, there would be no Egypt, there would simply be a larger Libya, the region just west of Egypt, which is chiefly desert because it does not have such a river of its own.

The Nile is the world’s longest river at approximately 6,695 kilometres (around 4,100 miles) and flows from south to north. Its three main tributaries are the White Nile, the Blue Nile and the Atbara. The White Nile flows from Equatorial Africa while the Blue Nile and Atbara flow from the Ethiopian highlands region. The famous annual flooding of the Nile is generated by the seasonal rainfalls in Ethiopia, which cause the levels of the Blue Nile and the Atbara to rise. The Nile is easily navigable up to Aswan, where the first of a series of cataracts appear. These cataracts are sections of the river that feature flowing rapids. While not necessarily impassable, they are dangerous hazards to shipping. The ancient Egyptians built trading posts and fortresses at the cataracts to assist or to protect commerce on the Nile. Through most of ancient history, the cataract at Aswan was considered the southernmost extent of Egypt. Beyond it lay the land of Nubia.

North of Aswan, the classic Nile Valley begins. The river runs through a flood plain that is flanked by limestone cliffs. As the river approaches the Mediterranean coast, it fans out into seven branches and forms a huge delta of alluvial soil. The best-known branches are today called the Rosetta and the Damietta. For the ancient Greeks, the size of the Nile delta was astounding and unique. In fact, the Greeks coined the term ‘delta’ for the alluvial deposits found at the mouth of many rivers, but they initially confined its use exclusively to the great Nile Delta. The term ‘delta’ derives from the triangular letter ‘Delta’ in the Greek alphabet: Δ. The Nile Delta was the inverted letter, viewed from a north to south perspective.

Egypt, however, is best viewed from south to north following the direction of the river that gives it life. The land of Egypt is divided into two parts: upper and lower Egypt. Lower Egypt is the area of the Delta going south to the location of ancient Memphis or modern Cairo. Beyond lies Upper Egypt, which continues on to Aswan. Both Upper and Lower Egypt received annual floods that brought fresh soil and much-needed moisture. The soil of the alluvial lands is black in colour, hence the Egyptian term for their land, kemet (black land). In contrast, the sandy and rocky desert beyond was known as deshret or ‘red land’. In many places the transition from the farmlands to the desert is so abrupt that a person can stand with one foot in kemet and the other in deshret.

Such was the importance of the Nile’s annual flood that it even dictated the seasons of the ancient Egyptian calendar. Ancient Egyptians divided the year into twelve months of thirty days with five additional days added at the end of the year. They began their new year with the start of the annual flood of the Nile, which occurs towards the end of July and divided the year into three seasons of four months each. The first season was called akhet (inundation), referring to the annual flood. Akhet was followed by peret (emergence), the time when the flood waters receded and the planting of the crops occurred. The third season was harvest, or summer, and was known as shemu.

Compared with other lands of the ancient world, Egypt was favoured by modest geographical isolation. The land of Libya, to the west of Egypt, was largely a desert with a few oases, and inhabited by semi-nomadic or nomadic tribes. To the east of Egypt lay the Eastern Desert, which terminated at the shores of the Red Sea. At the far north is the Sinai Peninsula, also a desert but possessing the land route to ancient Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. These desert lands were also thinly populated by nomadic tribes. While the Libyans and the tribes of the Eastern Desert posed chronic threats of raiding and brigandage, they generally were not a serious military threat unless Egypt was badly divided internally. The Sinai Desert also made Egypt more difficult although not impossible to invade from Asia. To the south beyond Aswan and the first cataract was the land of Nubia. The Nile Valley running through Nubia was not as favourable to human habitation compared to the Egyptian section of the valley. The fertile flood plain of Nubia was narrower than Egypt’s which limited the amount of potential agricultural land and therefore restricted the human population. The series of cataracts also meant that the Nile was not as useful or convenient as a means of transportation and communication for the Nubians. Still, Nubia had its attractions for the Egyptians and they were eager to control it. The southern land produced prized gemstones and gold from its mines and it served as a conduit for African goods of incense, ivory and exotic animal skins to enter Egypt. Through most of the history of ancient Egypt, it was generally the Egyptians who conquered the Nubians, but there were periods of Nubian resurgence and even a dynasty of Nubian pharaohs (the Twenty-fifth Dynasty). Lastly, in the north, Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea.

Access to the sea brought Egypt into the emerging trade network of the ancient Mediterranean along with the Cretans, the Phoenicians and others. Because the Nile split into several navigable branches in the Delta, Egypt did not have any major coastal cities until Alexander the Great created Alexandria. Instead, Egypt’s trading ports were located well up the river and so were less vulnerable to sea raiders. The border with the sea provided both access to the outside world and a degree of protection. For much of its history ancient Egypt existed in a geographical cocoon of relative isolation. As the Greek historian Diodorus accurately put it: ‘The land of Egypt is fortified on all sides by nature.’⁴ This isolation reinforced the Egyptians’ sense of their own uniqueness and it protected Egypt from the destructive wars and invasions that plagued so many ancient societies.

The How of Ancient Egyptian History

What do we know about the history of ancient Egypt? The answer is: quite a lot. That is not to say that we know anywhere close to what we would like to, but then that is the case about any aspect of human history. At least in this instance we know quite a bit more about Egypt’s ancient history than we know about most other civilizations of similar antiquity. How do we know it? Fortunately a fair amount of material from ancient Egypt has survived for scholars to study and use to recreate a chronology of events.

The ancient Egyptians were not a people who wrote history as modern people would recognize it. Instead, the first person to write a surviving history of Egypt was the Greek scholar Herodotus in his Histories. Book Two and part of Book Three of that work deal directly with Egypt, but the factual accuracy within it varies. The material covering the Saite Dynasty and the Persian conquest of Egypt is fairly exact, but the earlier material is a jumble of information, sometimes true but other times false, incomplete or out of order.

The true foundation for the chronology of ancient Egypt is the work of Manetho (c. 305–285 BC), of whose life little is known. He was an Egyptian priest living in Heliopolis during the reigns of Ptolemy I Soter, Ptolemy II Philadelphus and possibly Ptolemy III Euergetes. In his day he was well known as a promoter of the cult of Sarapis in Egypt and other parts of the Mediterranean world. For modern scholars Manetho is best known as the author of a history of Egypt, Aegyptiaca, which is organized into three books or scrolls that divide Egyptian history into thirty dynasties from its earliest times to 342 BC. To compile it, he used the resources of the Heliopolitan temples, but wrote his work in Greek. This circumstance made Manetho one of the earliest Egyptians to write in the Greek language and it further ensured that knowledge of Egypt would become part of European culture. Manetho may have written the Aegyptiaca for Ptolemy Philadelphus to promote the antiquity of his realm over that of his rival Antiochus I of the Seleucid Empire in the Middle East. As an Egyptian who was knowledgeable about the history of his own land, he also wrote it to correct and criticize Herodotus’ erroneous history of Egypt. Manetho’s chronological framework of dynasties became and remains the foundation of the chronology of ancient Egyptian history. Unfortunately, the Aegyptiaca has now been lost and only fragments are preserved in the writings of various Jewish and Christian writers, such as Flavius Josephus and Eusebius. Given the information that survives in the fragments, it is clear that a wonderful source for reconstructing and understanding Egyptian history and religion has been lost.⁵

Manetho’s king lists or dynasties have aided Egyptologists but they also present many problems which historians and archaeologists continue to untangle. First, there is inaccurate information in the lists, with omissions and unwarranted additions. The lengths of reigns are sometimes wrong, usually being too long. Second, each list is called a dynasty, which usually means a hereditary succession of rulers from the same family group. In fact, some of Manetho’s dynasties contain people who are clearly not related to each other by blood or marriage. In other cases, Manetho lists a new dynasty but other information indicates there was not a significant break in the hereditary succession to justify it as separate. Third, Manetho’s king lists seem intended to present the appearance of an orderly succession of dynasties ruling over a united Egypt. In fact, some of the dynasties from the intermediate periods, when Egypt was temporarily not a united kingdom, ruled concurrently over different parts of the country. Fourth, some Egyptologists have suggested the idea of co-regencies for certain kings. In a co-regency, the sitting king would name his successor and then rule jointly with the successor until the first king died. The idea was to assure an orderly succession to the throne and to give the successor some experience before that person became the independently governing king. The problem is that Egyptologists hotly debate whether co-regencies even occurred, or, if they did occur, when and for how long. All of these things complicate the task of creating a reliable chronology for the history of ancient Egyptian rulers.

Chronology is the bedrock of studying the past; it is essential for understanding when events occurred and in what order they took place. Without that knowledge, any accurate understanding of the past is difficult or impossible. There are two types of chronology – absolute and relative. An absolute chronology establishes reliably accurate dates that can be related to the Common Era (CE), the dating system used by modern society, or for most prehistoric dates of the Before Present (BP) system. Prior to the development of radiocarbon dating and similar techniques in the late 1940s, archaeologists had a difficult to impossible task when assigning dates related to the absolute chronology. That circumstance forced archaeologists to fall back on relative chronology, which was used heavily by necessity in Middle Eastern and biblical archaeology, although not so much by Egyptologists, except in the pre-Dynastic eras.

Relative chronology establishes a sequence of events or eras for an ancient site or culture without being able to connect them to the absolute chronology. The concept of relative chronology is based on stratigraphy. Ancient peoples tended to occupy the same sites of towns or cities for hundreds or even thousands of years. During the time people occupied the site, layers of discarded material and rubble accumulated. Frequently, ancient sites would be destroyed by natural catastrophes or marauding enemies and then reoccupied, which would create dramatic breaks in the layers or strata. Over time mounds of such material, known as ‘tells’ in the Middle East, would grow on the landscape. Ancient cities and towns would be located on mounds that slowly but surely grew in height the longer the human occupations continued. Archaeologists work on the very reasonable assumption that the oldest layers of an ancient site are located at the bottom and the upper layers are the most recent. Sometimes archaeologists would discover buried in a strata an artefact from another culture that could be dated absolutely. Such chance occurrences would allow archaeologists to assign tentative datings within the absolute chronology for at least one strata of a site. At the very least, this technique using stratigraphy allowed archaeologists to create a chronology relative to a site or surrounding culture without necessarily being able to connect it to the absolute chronology. Close study of the evolution of artefacts such as styles of pottery helped, as this method allowed discrete cultures to be identified and placed in chronological orders known as sequence dating.

Thanks to Manetho’s king lists, early Egyptologists had a framework for establishing an absolute chronology. In fact, until hieroglyphics were deciphered in 1822 Manetho was the only chronological source available. After that, when Egyptologists began to explore Egypt’s rich archaeological remains, they began to accumulate more and more chronological information in the form of other lists of kings in temples, and other inscriptions and documents. These discoveries revealed the problems with Manetho’s king lists and led to a more accurate absolute chronology. The development of radiocarbon and thermoluminescent dating helped to bring further accuracy.

The absolute chronology of ancient history remains tentative, fluid and a subject of continual d...