Rev. Basil Henry Cooper
1867
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NOTE |
The Rev. Basil Henry Cooper (1819-1891) was an author of books on myriad subjects, having a wide-ranging set of interests. In 1867, Cooper presented a paper to the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art on the subject of "The Antiquity of the Use of the Metals, and Especially of Iron, among the Egyptians." This article, which was published in the Association's Report and Transactions, was reprinted as a pamphlet the following year. In the excerpt below, forming the section on iron, Cooper was among the first to propose that the Egyptians made use of meteoric iron to make tools, a fact not scientifically established for nearly half a century after Cooper had his insight. Cooper's views were quickly challenged by those who doubted the Egyptians ever made use of meteors, but science eventually vindicated Cooper decades after his death.
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The paramount importance of the metal iron in the history of human civilization is universally recognized. Archaeologists have agreed to regard its employment in the arts of life as marking an immense progress in culture, and as furnishing the means of drawing a fairly distinct line of demarcation between two widely different epochs. And although the phenomena presented by the existing remains of the Primæval Lacustrine Settlements in Switzerland and elsewhere seem to prove that the so-called Stone and Iron Ages can hardly have been separated by so vast a chasm as had been generally assumed before the discovery of these remarkable records of a remote past, yet the general truth of the received chronological distribution has not been shaken by the fresh facts which the invaluable researches of Professor Keller and others in this newest department of archaeology have brought to light; for if in some of these lake villages the synchronous use of stone and iron implements is undeniable, this inosculation of the strata no more justifies us in ignoring the essential distinction between them, than in the thousands of analogous instances with which geology renders us familiar. On the other hand, these transition strata in what we may perhaps venture to term the geology of human culture, are especially interesting and valuable, as serving, like the Prasian Lake Settlement described by Herodotus as existing in quite historical times, and, like the Venezuelan and other still extant analogies to Swiss Lacustrine dwelling-places, to bring these venerable remains more distinctly within our own horizon. The simple fact that at least the more advanced and aristocratic section of these human beavers, whom we have the honour to reckon amongst our ancestors, used iron, although the more plebian and old-fashioned were fain to content themselves with harpoons and arrows made of bone or flint, makes us at once feel and recognize their claim to kindred with us, even at an epoch when them is not the remotest chance of Sheffield or Birmingham being alarmed by the rivalry of some extensive manufactory of cells at the month of the Teign or the Dart.
The transcendant importance of iron, and its manufacture, as an instrument and an evidence of culture, naturally invests with very great interest the various ancient traditions as to the first introduction and early employment of this most useful of all the metals. In this brief memorandum, however, on the Antiquity of the Metals amongst the Egyptians, it does not fall to my province to muster and to sift these traditions. If I allude to them in passing, it is simply with the view of suggesting, that whilst their very vagueness is of such a nature as to point to the hoary age of the smith’s art, and the high rank which belongs to it in the history of civilization; yet, on the other hand, the mist and haze of long-forgotten centuries in which these traditions bury the origin of that art is so dense as to render peculiarly valuable any fact or facts such as I believe Egyptology has to offer, which may put us in possession of a strictly chronological limit, below which it will be impossible to date the introduction of iron as an actor in the drama of human progress.
The Hebrew records show that the Israelites were very early acquainted with the use of iron. Mines of copper and iron are mentioned in the enumeration of the riches of the Promised Land. We read of their axes made of iron or steel, saws, chains, weapons, bolts and bars of iron for the gates of their cities, and in the book of Job the sculptor’s graving tool is spoken of, with which an inscription may be engraven in the rock deep enough to last for ever. The national bondage in Egypt is compared by their great deliverer to “a furnace of iron” or smelting forge, and the “iron bed" of the giant King of Bashan is not likely to be forgotten. It will he remembered too that the Pentateuch distinctly refers the beginnings of the metallurgic art to Antediluvian times. Tubal-Cain, the seventh descendant of Adam in the line of Cain, is said to have been “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.” Gesenius interprets this name as scoriarum faber, or “blacksmith,” so that if this rendering be correct, we have here not only the ancestor of all the workers in iron, but the father of all the Smiths. Baron Bunsen, building on this etymology, indentifies Tubal-Cain with the Technites, to whom the Phoenician cosmogony, reported by Sanchuniatho, through the Greek writer Philo Byblius, assigns a similar role. For Technites is manifestly a Greek translation of a corresponding Phoenician name, which has unfortunately not been handed down to us, and there is no denying that “smith” is a pretty tolerable, if not an exact rendering of the Greek word. Buttman and others have preferred to compare with the Biblical Tubal-Cain, Vulcan and the Telchines of classical tradition. There is no question that the name of the grimy cripple of Lemnos, and the occupation of the god working along with the Cyclops in the forge of Etna, presents a fair handle for such a comparison. But the word volcano and the Sicilian locality of the classical myth, point to a very different etymology of the god's name. Nor does the philology of the present day seem any better satisfied that the Telchines of the Rhodian tradition, that autochthone family of smiths, of whom the insular historian Zeno tells such wonderful narratives, have anything to do with Tubal-Cain, in spite of some similarity in the names. It is scarcely necessary to allude to the Pelasgic tradition of the discovery of iron by the Idean Dactyls, in connection with the conflagration of the vast forest which crowned their native mountain. The date of that conflagration, according to the Parian Chronicle and other authorities, is the fifteenth century before the Christian Era. More precisely it is B.C. 1462, and since this is about the period to which Zeno’s Rhodian myths relative to the Telchines seem to point, it may possibly mark an important epoch in the development of Hellenic civilization.
Turning to Egypt, as it is now high time to do, we find that there also, as well as on the classical soil of Greece and Rome, the origin of the art of working in iron is pushed back into the mythological and prehistoric age. We have no reason to doubt the testimony of Diodorus, when he reports that the Egyptians assigned this invention also, as well as all the other more important arts of life, to their great national culture divinity, Osiris. This at least implies that it was known amongst them from time immemorial. Otherwise it is as indefinite, and so far unsatisfactory, as the analogous classical, Phoenician, Chaldean, and Chinese traditions. Fortunately, however, those stupendous monuments of Egyptian antiquity, the Pyramids, enable us in this instance to arrive at a less indistinct conclusion. As Sir Gardner Wilkinson and others have fairly argued, it is impossible to believe that the enormous blocks of admirably finished masonary which compose the great pyramid were wrought without the use of iron, or rather steel, tools. The great pyramid of Cheops, as Herodotus and Diodorus name the builder, or Shufi, as the national Egyptian historian Manetho and the hieroglyphical inscriptions style him, together with the second pyramid, that of Chephren or Shafra, and the third, that of Mycerinus (Herodotus), or Mencheres (Manetho), the lid of whose coffin, inscribed with his name Men-ka-ra, and found in the pyramid itself, is now in the British Museum,—were all erected under the fourth Manethonian dynasty, say about seven centuries after Menes, the founder of the Egyptian monarchy. To these and other colossal pyramids of a still earlier epoch, or only a century or two later, must now be added the great Sphinx, which the recent discoveries of Mariette Bey prove to have been already some time in existence in the reign of Cheops, inasmuch as it is distinctly mentioned in contemporary inscriptions of that monarch. Still it must be owned that the use of iron in the erection of these vast constructions is only a very probable inference, and that no direct- evidence of the fact is known to exist. It is known that the weapons mentioned in Homer were made of bronze, and that some very hard alloy of copper was employed by the ancients for very many purposes for which iron or steel would now be exclusively used. Moreover, it is true that in our collections of Egyptian, and, I may add, in those of classical antiquities, implements of iron are extremely rare —a circumstance which the notorious liability of iron to oxydation easily accounts for. Nor can it be denied that bronze tools were within reach of the Egyptians of the age of Cheops. For the existing inscriptions on the site of the extremely ancient mines in the Sinaitic peninsula, from which mines that peninsula took its name of the “Copper-land" which it always bears in the hieroglyphical records, prove incontestably that these mines were worked most extensively, as already observed, not only in the reign of Cheops himself, but as early as that of Snefru, who belongs to the third dynasty in Manetho’s enumeration. Still granting all this, it must, I think, he conceded on the other hand, that supposing iron to have been known to the Egyptians at this early period, its employment in the construction of those Titanic erections, the Pyramids and the Sphinx is far more probable than the hypothesis that none but bronze tools were used And this I venture to think can be satisfactorily demonstrated.
The proof is based on the extremely significant Coptic word for iron, as illustrated and explained by the mode in which it is written in the hieroglyphical inscriptions, and on the occurrence of that word as a component element in the name of an Egyptian Pharaoh belonging to the first dynasty. The modern Egyptian word for iron is, in the Sahidic dialect, which is considered to be the purest, Benipi, or with a slight change in the final vowel, Benipe. In the hieroglyphical form of the language it is the same, as, through the kindness of Dr. Birch, Keeper of the Oriental antiquities in the British Museum, and facile princeps amongst the hieroglyphical scholars in the world, I was already aware, more than three years ago, when that gentleman was good enough to indulge me with an extract from his then unpublished Hieroglyphical Dictionary bearing upon the point. What is more, Dr. Birch on that occasion was further so obliging as to point out that in this as in countless other instances the hieroglyphical orthography reveals clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the etymology of the word. Its first element is BA or BE (in the Coptic BO), meaning “hard-wood” or "stone," and the two letters which spell the word are often accompanied in the hieroglyphical inscriptions by a picture of the squared stone, such as those of which the pyramids were built. At other times, as if to remind us that the word originally meant “hard-wood," and that it was only in process of time that it came to denote “hardware” in general, including such stone hardware as was going in very early times, the picture illustrating the spelt word was a branch or sprig. The middle syllable in the word Benipe consists of the letter N with a. very short vowel. It is a preposition answering to the English “of.” The last element in the composite word is the syllable PE, which is the Coptic word for heaven, or the sky. And that this is really its signification here is proved incontrovertibly by the picture with which this syllable is wont to be accompanied in the hieroglyphical orthography of the word Benipe; for it is the picture invariably used to denote the heaven or the sky, and is employed for no other purpose. Properly it represents the ceiling of a temple, which was regarded as itself a representation of the sky, the true ceiling of the true and original temple, and the picture is accordingly wont to be emblazoned with stars. Hence the signification of the entire word Benipe, as Dr. Birch with great earnestness impressed upon me at the interview to which I have alluded, although he owned he could not conceive why the Egyptians should have called iron by so singular a name, is “stone of heaven,” “stone of the sky,” “sky stone.” I was naturally as much puzzled at the time as my great master in Egyptology, although it could not be questioned for a moment that he had given the correct analysis of the word.
Some time afterwards, however, it occurred to me that this was the very name which would naturally be given to the only iron with which men were likely to meet in a natural state. There is but one exception to the rule that iron is never found native, like gold and some others of the metals. That exception is in the instance of meteoric iron, which might surely be called with propriety “the stone of heaven, or of the sky.” Moreover—and I have to thank my friend Mr. Pengelly for reminding me of the fact, and so materially helping me to shape out my crude speculation— meteoric iron needs no preparatory process, as does that procured from ores, to render it workable. It is already malleable. Hence those who had already been schooled in the laborious and ingenious manipulation of flint, bone, obsidian, would find no difficulty in turning to their various purposes this new gift from heaven. In short, we may be sure, especially with the light thrown on the matter by this invaluable Egyptian word, bright with the radiance of that heaven which enters into its composition, that with this wondrous matter from another sphere than our own the art of working iron began. Meteoric iron, which is occasionally found in very large masses—one found in Peru is computed to have weighed fifteen tons, and there is one in the British Museum a foot and a half in length, and about a foot in diameter—must have been the first iron, if not the first metal of any kind, which was employed by man in the various arts of life. It would not be till ages afterwards that the bowels of the Arabian mountains were ransacked for larger stores of what still retained its original name of “The Stone of Heaven.”
It would be unsuitable on other grounds, apart from the fact that this paper has already proceeded to too great a length, to enter upon the detailed philological proof that the sixth successor of Menes, and accordingly the seventh King of Egypt, bore in his scutcheon, or the royal oval containing his name, the very word for iron of which I have just been speaking. Until three years ago his name was known only from Manetho and Eratosthenes, in both of whose lists of Pharaohs it appears in a more or less corrupted form. The scutcheon of the king did not appear on the Tablet of Karnak, nor on the old Tablet of Abydos, nor had it been detected on any isolated monument. But at the close of 1864 two new Pharaonic Tablets, or monumental series of the kings of Egypt, were published for the first time. One of them had been discovered by Mariette Bey at Saquara, which occupies a part of the site of ancient Memphis, and the other, already referred to under the name of the New Tablet of Abydos, was found by Herr Dümmichen, a young German Egyptologist. On the Tablet of Saquara, or Memphis, which like the Old Tablet of Abydos, belongs to the reign of Ramses the Great, say about the thirteenth century before the Christian era, our iron king is actually the first of the fifty-six ancestors of Sesostris, whom this Tablet originally comprised, and nearly all of whose scutcheons are still very well preserved. In the New Abydos Tablet he stands sixth, one king being omitted in the interval, as we learn from the invaluable Hieratic Canon of the Pharaohs preserved in the Turin Museum, in which priceless document the discovery of the New Tablets at once enabled Egyptologists easily to spell out the name, which had previously been undecipherable. In all the three hieroglyphical records the name reads distinctly “Lover of Iron,” of course meaning “Lover of the Sword,” thus attesting, not only the extreme antiquity of the use of iron, but unfortunately also of that most dreadful evil of all which are the scourges of humanity—war.
I ought to mention that Eratosthenes is wont in his list of Pharaohs to add a Greek rendering of the Egyptian names, and that my learned friend Professor Lauth, of Münich, at a time when only the fact of the discovery of the tablet of Saquara was known, besides the circumstance that it began with this Eratosthenic name, but several months before he had seen either of the new tablets, had already emended the senseless translation of the name, which in the present corrupt text reads φιλετερος, into φιλοσιδηρος or “Lover of the Sword.” He had also predicted, and written down his prediction in my note-book, when I had the happiness of spending the summer in his society at Paris, in 1864, the form which the hieroglyphical name, when published, would assume. That prediction has been exactly verified. I mention the circumstance with the view of imparting some measure of the confidence which I myself feel, that a far from unimportant fact in the history of human civilization has really been elicited from this interesting hieroglyphical scutcheon.
I am further indebted to Mr. Pengelly for the interesting facts, that Sir Charles Lyell has already thrown out the suggestion, that the first iron wrought by man must have been meteoric, and that Sir John Lubbock has proved that the iron implements found in the hands of the aborigines of America upon the discovery of that continent were actually made of the same extra-terrene but cosmical matter. The Egyptian metallurgical history seems to warrant the conclusion that on the old continent as well the use of iron in the arts of life had a similar origin, and thus remarkably to verify the profound a priori speculation of the father of English geology.
As to the date of Menes, and consequently of king “Mibampes” or “The Lover of Iron," or “of the Sword,” living Egyptologists of eminence differ about it to the extent of more than two thousand years. Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, by an ingenious application of the year-day theory of that redoubtable Senior Wrangler of the “Little Horn,” Dr. Cumming, to the solution of the great problems of Egyptian Chronology, and by the purely gratuitous assumption of the contemporaneousness of the dynasties, to the number of half-a-dozen rival royal houses at a time, whenever the exigences of the case so require, contrives to Iower the proto-monarch to B.C. 2717. What the great Egyptologists of the continent think of his system, which in this country is being propagated in such works as the "Encyclopædia Brittanica,” it is provokingly impossible to ascertain, for they simply refuse to discuss it. On its first promulgation in 1850, Vicomte de Rougé, of the French Institute, in a note to a Memoirs read before the Academy of Inscriptions, merely says, “Mr. Poole is of the number of those young students who deserve to have the whole truth told them. Either he has not read what recent archaeologists have written on his subject, which would be inexcusable, or he has read them and refrains from citing them, which would be a still graver error. I have not once read in his book the name of Lepsius, à propos of all the questions treated so fully in that savant’s ‘Introduction to Egyptian Chronology.’” Professor Lauth, a man not only endowed with the subtlest intellect I ever knew, but also one of the most candid, as well as profoundly learned of critics, asks in the introduction to his masterly work on “Manetho and the Turin Canon of the Pharaohs,” published in 1865:—“What scintilla. of good can be got from such works as Poole’s ‘Horæ Ægyptiacæ,’ or Lesueur's ‘Chronologie des Rois de l’Egypte.”’ Whilst Mr. Poole’s is the lowest date for Menes, that of this unhappy Lesueur, whose work is certainly the most trashy I was ever doomed for my sins to read, is, I believe, the highest arrived at by any contemporary Egyptologist. It is B.C. 5773. Between the extremes there are any number of solutions of the same enigma, and of course I have my own, which however, as I cannot here give my reasons, it would be nugatory to mention. It will have been gathered already that I am no advocate of the short date, and that I do not take fright at the apparition of a mummied record of human strivings and achievements, and of God’s dealings with our race, whose annals are measured by millenniums instead of the centuries of such “ancient history” as we have hitherto known. But if I hold myself excused in the face of the appalling discrepancy of learned opinion just adverted to, from any attempt, at least on the present occasion, to ascertain the true place of the “Iron King” in the chronological scale of history, I hope I have at least shown, that if at present unknown, it all the more deserves to be known.
The transcendant importance of iron, and its manufacture, as an instrument and an evidence of culture, naturally invests with very great interest the various ancient traditions as to the first introduction and early employment of this most useful of all the metals. In this brief memorandum, however, on the Antiquity of the Metals amongst the Egyptians, it does not fall to my province to muster and to sift these traditions. If I allude to them in passing, it is simply with the view of suggesting, that whilst their very vagueness is of such a nature as to point to the hoary age of the smith’s art, and the high rank which belongs to it in the history of civilization; yet, on the other hand, the mist and haze of long-forgotten centuries in which these traditions bury the origin of that art is so dense as to render peculiarly valuable any fact or facts such as I believe Egyptology has to offer, which may put us in possession of a strictly chronological limit, below which it will be impossible to date the introduction of iron as an actor in the drama of human progress.
The Hebrew records show that the Israelites were very early acquainted with the use of iron. Mines of copper and iron are mentioned in the enumeration of the riches of the Promised Land. We read of their axes made of iron or steel, saws, chains, weapons, bolts and bars of iron for the gates of their cities, and in the book of Job the sculptor’s graving tool is spoken of, with which an inscription may be engraven in the rock deep enough to last for ever. The national bondage in Egypt is compared by their great deliverer to “a furnace of iron” or smelting forge, and the “iron bed" of the giant King of Bashan is not likely to be forgotten. It will he remembered too that the Pentateuch distinctly refers the beginnings of the metallurgic art to Antediluvian times. Tubal-Cain, the seventh descendant of Adam in the line of Cain, is said to have been “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.” Gesenius interprets this name as scoriarum faber, or “blacksmith,” so that if this rendering be correct, we have here not only the ancestor of all the workers in iron, but the father of all the Smiths. Baron Bunsen, building on this etymology, indentifies Tubal-Cain with the Technites, to whom the Phoenician cosmogony, reported by Sanchuniatho, through the Greek writer Philo Byblius, assigns a similar role. For Technites is manifestly a Greek translation of a corresponding Phoenician name, which has unfortunately not been handed down to us, and there is no denying that “smith” is a pretty tolerable, if not an exact rendering of the Greek word. Buttman and others have preferred to compare with the Biblical Tubal-Cain, Vulcan and the Telchines of classical tradition. There is no question that the name of the grimy cripple of Lemnos, and the occupation of the god working along with the Cyclops in the forge of Etna, presents a fair handle for such a comparison. But the word volcano and the Sicilian locality of the classical myth, point to a very different etymology of the god's name. Nor does the philology of the present day seem any better satisfied that the Telchines of the Rhodian tradition, that autochthone family of smiths, of whom the insular historian Zeno tells such wonderful narratives, have anything to do with Tubal-Cain, in spite of some similarity in the names. It is scarcely necessary to allude to the Pelasgic tradition of the discovery of iron by the Idean Dactyls, in connection with the conflagration of the vast forest which crowned their native mountain. The date of that conflagration, according to the Parian Chronicle and other authorities, is the fifteenth century before the Christian Era. More precisely it is B.C. 1462, and since this is about the period to which Zeno’s Rhodian myths relative to the Telchines seem to point, it may possibly mark an important epoch in the development of Hellenic civilization.
Turning to Egypt, as it is now high time to do, we find that there also, as well as on the classical soil of Greece and Rome, the origin of the art of working in iron is pushed back into the mythological and prehistoric age. We have no reason to doubt the testimony of Diodorus, when he reports that the Egyptians assigned this invention also, as well as all the other more important arts of life, to their great national culture divinity, Osiris. This at least implies that it was known amongst them from time immemorial. Otherwise it is as indefinite, and so far unsatisfactory, as the analogous classical, Phoenician, Chaldean, and Chinese traditions. Fortunately, however, those stupendous monuments of Egyptian antiquity, the Pyramids, enable us in this instance to arrive at a less indistinct conclusion. As Sir Gardner Wilkinson and others have fairly argued, it is impossible to believe that the enormous blocks of admirably finished masonary which compose the great pyramid were wrought without the use of iron, or rather steel, tools. The great pyramid of Cheops, as Herodotus and Diodorus name the builder, or Shufi, as the national Egyptian historian Manetho and the hieroglyphical inscriptions style him, together with the second pyramid, that of Chephren or Shafra, and the third, that of Mycerinus (Herodotus), or Mencheres (Manetho), the lid of whose coffin, inscribed with his name Men-ka-ra, and found in the pyramid itself, is now in the British Museum,—were all erected under the fourth Manethonian dynasty, say about seven centuries after Menes, the founder of the Egyptian monarchy. To these and other colossal pyramids of a still earlier epoch, or only a century or two later, must now be added the great Sphinx, which the recent discoveries of Mariette Bey prove to have been already some time in existence in the reign of Cheops, inasmuch as it is distinctly mentioned in contemporary inscriptions of that monarch. Still it must be owned that the use of iron in the erection of these vast constructions is only a very probable inference, and that no direct- evidence of the fact is known to exist. It is known that the weapons mentioned in Homer were made of bronze, and that some very hard alloy of copper was employed by the ancients for very many purposes for which iron or steel would now be exclusively used. Moreover, it is true that in our collections of Egyptian, and, I may add, in those of classical antiquities, implements of iron are extremely rare —a circumstance which the notorious liability of iron to oxydation easily accounts for. Nor can it be denied that bronze tools were within reach of the Egyptians of the age of Cheops. For the existing inscriptions on the site of the extremely ancient mines in the Sinaitic peninsula, from which mines that peninsula took its name of the “Copper-land" which it always bears in the hieroglyphical records, prove incontestably that these mines were worked most extensively, as already observed, not only in the reign of Cheops himself, but as early as that of Snefru, who belongs to the third dynasty in Manetho’s enumeration. Still granting all this, it must, I think, he conceded on the other hand, that supposing iron to have been known to the Egyptians at this early period, its employment in the construction of those Titanic erections, the Pyramids and the Sphinx is far more probable than the hypothesis that none but bronze tools were used And this I venture to think can be satisfactorily demonstrated.
The proof is based on the extremely significant Coptic word for iron, as illustrated and explained by the mode in which it is written in the hieroglyphical inscriptions, and on the occurrence of that word as a component element in the name of an Egyptian Pharaoh belonging to the first dynasty. The modern Egyptian word for iron is, in the Sahidic dialect, which is considered to be the purest, Benipi, or with a slight change in the final vowel, Benipe. In the hieroglyphical form of the language it is the same, as, through the kindness of Dr. Birch, Keeper of the Oriental antiquities in the British Museum, and facile princeps amongst the hieroglyphical scholars in the world, I was already aware, more than three years ago, when that gentleman was good enough to indulge me with an extract from his then unpublished Hieroglyphical Dictionary bearing upon the point. What is more, Dr. Birch on that occasion was further so obliging as to point out that in this as in countless other instances the hieroglyphical orthography reveals clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the etymology of the word. Its first element is BA or BE (in the Coptic BO), meaning “hard-wood” or "stone," and the two letters which spell the word are often accompanied in the hieroglyphical inscriptions by a picture of the squared stone, such as those of which the pyramids were built. At other times, as if to remind us that the word originally meant “hard-wood," and that it was only in process of time that it came to denote “hardware” in general, including such stone hardware as was going in very early times, the picture illustrating the spelt word was a branch or sprig. The middle syllable in the word Benipe consists of the letter N with a. very short vowel. It is a preposition answering to the English “of.” The last element in the composite word is the syllable PE, which is the Coptic word for heaven, or the sky. And that this is really its signification here is proved incontrovertibly by the picture with which this syllable is wont to be accompanied in the hieroglyphical orthography of the word Benipe; for it is the picture invariably used to denote the heaven or the sky, and is employed for no other purpose. Properly it represents the ceiling of a temple, which was regarded as itself a representation of the sky, the true ceiling of the true and original temple, and the picture is accordingly wont to be emblazoned with stars. Hence the signification of the entire word Benipe, as Dr. Birch with great earnestness impressed upon me at the interview to which I have alluded, although he owned he could not conceive why the Egyptians should have called iron by so singular a name, is “stone of heaven,” “stone of the sky,” “sky stone.” I was naturally as much puzzled at the time as my great master in Egyptology, although it could not be questioned for a moment that he had given the correct analysis of the word.
Some time afterwards, however, it occurred to me that this was the very name which would naturally be given to the only iron with which men were likely to meet in a natural state. There is but one exception to the rule that iron is never found native, like gold and some others of the metals. That exception is in the instance of meteoric iron, which might surely be called with propriety “the stone of heaven, or of the sky.” Moreover—and I have to thank my friend Mr. Pengelly for reminding me of the fact, and so materially helping me to shape out my crude speculation— meteoric iron needs no preparatory process, as does that procured from ores, to render it workable. It is already malleable. Hence those who had already been schooled in the laborious and ingenious manipulation of flint, bone, obsidian, would find no difficulty in turning to their various purposes this new gift from heaven. In short, we may be sure, especially with the light thrown on the matter by this invaluable Egyptian word, bright with the radiance of that heaven which enters into its composition, that with this wondrous matter from another sphere than our own the art of working iron began. Meteoric iron, which is occasionally found in very large masses—one found in Peru is computed to have weighed fifteen tons, and there is one in the British Museum a foot and a half in length, and about a foot in diameter—must have been the first iron, if not the first metal of any kind, which was employed by man in the various arts of life. It would not be till ages afterwards that the bowels of the Arabian mountains were ransacked for larger stores of what still retained its original name of “The Stone of Heaven.”
It would be unsuitable on other grounds, apart from the fact that this paper has already proceeded to too great a length, to enter upon the detailed philological proof that the sixth successor of Menes, and accordingly the seventh King of Egypt, bore in his scutcheon, or the royal oval containing his name, the very word for iron of which I have just been speaking. Until three years ago his name was known only from Manetho and Eratosthenes, in both of whose lists of Pharaohs it appears in a more or less corrupted form. The scutcheon of the king did not appear on the Tablet of Karnak, nor on the old Tablet of Abydos, nor had it been detected on any isolated monument. But at the close of 1864 two new Pharaonic Tablets, or monumental series of the kings of Egypt, were published for the first time. One of them had been discovered by Mariette Bey at Saquara, which occupies a part of the site of ancient Memphis, and the other, already referred to under the name of the New Tablet of Abydos, was found by Herr Dümmichen, a young German Egyptologist. On the Tablet of Saquara, or Memphis, which like the Old Tablet of Abydos, belongs to the reign of Ramses the Great, say about the thirteenth century before the Christian era, our iron king is actually the first of the fifty-six ancestors of Sesostris, whom this Tablet originally comprised, and nearly all of whose scutcheons are still very well preserved. In the New Abydos Tablet he stands sixth, one king being omitted in the interval, as we learn from the invaluable Hieratic Canon of the Pharaohs preserved in the Turin Museum, in which priceless document the discovery of the New Tablets at once enabled Egyptologists easily to spell out the name, which had previously been undecipherable. In all the three hieroglyphical records the name reads distinctly “Lover of Iron,” of course meaning “Lover of the Sword,” thus attesting, not only the extreme antiquity of the use of iron, but unfortunately also of that most dreadful evil of all which are the scourges of humanity—war.
I ought to mention that Eratosthenes is wont in his list of Pharaohs to add a Greek rendering of the Egyptian names, and that my learned friend Professor Lauth, of Münich, at a time when only the fact of the discovery of the tablet of Saquara was known, besides the circumstance that it began with this Eratosthenic name, but several months before he had seen either of the new tablets, had already emended the senseless translation of the name, which in the present corrupt text reads φιλετερος, into φιλοσιδηρος or “Lover of the Sword.” He had also predicted, and written down his prediction in my note-book, when I had the happiness of spending the summer in his society at Paris, in 1864, the form which the hieroglyphical name, when published, would assume. That prediction has been exactly verified. I mention the circumstance with the view of imparting some measure of the confidence which I myself feel, that a far from unimportant fact in the history of human civilization has really been elicited from this interesting hieroglyphical scutcheon.
I am further indebted to Mr. Pengelly for the interesting facts, that Sir Charles Lyell has already thrown out the suggestion, that the first iron wrought by man must have been meteoric, and that Sir John Lubbock has proved that the iron implements found in the hands of the aborigines of America upon the discovery of that continent were actually made of the same extra-terrene but cosmical matter. The Egyptian metallurgical history seems to warrant the conclusion that on the old continent as well the use of iron in the arts of life had a similar origin, and thus remarkably to verify the profound a priori speculation of the father of English geology.
As to the date of Menes, and consequently of king “Mibampes” or “The Lover of Iron," or “of the Sword,” living Egyptologists of eminence differ about it to the extent of more than two thousand years. Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, by an ingenious application of the year-day theory of that redoubtable Senior Wrangler of the “Little Horn,” Dr. Cumming, to the solution of the great problems of Egyptian Chronology, and by the purely gratuitous assumption of the contemporaneousness of the dynasties, to the number of half-a-dozen rival royal houses at a time, whenever the exigences of the case so require, contrives to Iower the proto-monarch to B.C. 2717. What the great Egyptologists of the continent think of his system, which in this country is being propagated in such works as the "Encyclopædia Brittanica,” it is provokingly impossible to ascertain, for they simply refuse to discuss it. On its first promulgation in 1850, Vicomte de Rougé, of the French Institute, in a note to a Memoirs read before the Academy of Inscriptions, merely says, “Mr. Poole is of the number of those young students who deserve to have the whole truth told them. Either he has not read what recent archaeologists have written on his subject, which would be inexcusable, or he has read them and refrains from citing them, which would be a still graver error. I have not once read in his book the name of Lepsius, à propos of all the questions treated so fully in that savant’s ‘Introduction to Egyptian Chronology.’” Professor Lauth, a man not only endowed with the subtlest intellect I ever knew, but also one of the most candid, as well as profoundly learned of critics, asks in the introduction to his masterly work on “Manetho and the Turin Canon of the Pharaohs,” published in 1865:—“What scintilla. of good can be got from such works as Poole’s ‘Horæ Ægyptiacæ,’ or Lesueur's ‘Chronologie des Rois de l’Egypte.”’ Whilst Mr. Poole’s is the lowest date for Menes, that of this unhappy Lesueur, whose work is certainly the most trashy I was ever doomed for my sins to read, is, I believe, the highest arrived at by any contemporary Egyptologist. It is B.C. 5773. Between the extremes there are any number of solutions of the same enigma, and of course I have my own, which however, as I cannot here give my reasons, it would be nugatory to mention. It will have been gathered already that I am no advocate of the short date, and that I do not take fright at the apparition of a mummied record of human strivings and achievements, and of God’s dealings with our race, whose annals are measured by millenniums instead of the centuries of such “ancient history” as we have hitherto known. But if I hold myself excused in the face of the appalling discrepancy of learned opinion just adverted to, from any attempt, at least on the present occasion, to ascertain the true place of the “Iron King” in the chronological scale of history, I hope I have at least shown, that if at present unknown, it all the more deserves to be known.
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Source: Basil Henry Cooper, "The Antiquity of the Use of the Metals, and Especially of Iron, among the Egyptians," Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art, 2 (1867), 399-406.
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