Gaston Maspero
1899
translated by Jason Colavito
2017
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NOTE |
Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) was one of the greats among early French Egyptologists, notable for a number of accomplishments, including clearing the Sphinx of much of its sand, charging admission to tourist sites in Egypt, and poplularizing the Sea Peoples hypothesis. He contributed greatly to his most consistent passion, studies of the language and religion of ancient Egypt. In this last category we find the following article, a review of the French translation of the medeival Arabic book Akhbār al-zamān made by Baron Carra de Vaux in 1898. Maspero produced the longest and most sustained analysis of this essential medieval text ever written, but it was widely dismissed and ignored by Egyptologists because Maspero was likely wrong in one key element: He wrongly assumed that the book reflected a genuine tradition traceable back to the Old Kingdom of Egypt. In some other respects, however, Maspero was precient in his analysis, correctly identifying the text as the oldest surviving Arabic recension (though not, as he thought, a direct verbatim copy) of a now-lost Byzantine account of Egyptian history. This fact was only recognized in recent years, and even today is not universally accepted by Egyptologists, who tend to be less interested in the corrupt and fantastical Roman and Byzantine imagining of pharaonic history. The translation below is the first English version of the two articles on the subject that Maspero produced for the Journal des Savants in February and March 1898. I have modernized the transcription of names following the system I used in my own translation of the Akhbār al-zamān. I have also used my own translation of the book for direct quotations from it, rather than the quotations Maspero provided, which in the French style are sometimes paraphrases as much as quotations despite the quotation marks. I have omitted the footnotes, which primarily refer to pages in the French edition of the Akhbār al-zamān and to Classical sources, but I have placed relevant citations in parentheses. I have placed in square brackets clarifications of some obscure references or unfamiliar transcriptions.
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Baron Carra de Vaux. L’Abrégé des Merveilles, translated from the Arabic of the manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. Paris, Klincksieck, 1898, xxxvi + 415 pages. |
First Article
I would be a latecomer if I wished to express appreciation for the translation considered here: the people of the trade have already judged it, and they have been unanimous in recognizing its merits. It is the underlying work itself that I intend to examine briefly, if not the whole work, then at least those portions devoted to the cataloguing of the wonders of Egypt. M. Carra de Vaux insisted, in his introduction, on the interest which such a study would present to Egyptologists, and he very finely indicated its nature. The original author was not a curious man who went out to collect, from out in the field and from the mouths of the people, the legends he hints at. He is an archival scholar who is educated in older works and who advances nothing but on the authority of others. He has borrowed all his history, the names and actions of the kings, the description of the monuments, and the framework of the dynasties. The exactness with which one finds entire pages of the same texts in Mas‘udi, Maqrizi, and Murtada ibn al-‘Afif assures us that he was equally diligent in places where this point of comparison is lacking. Though he receives his material third or fourth hand, he alters it so little in arranging it that he most often can be said to preserve the archetype, still unknown, from which all the Arab traditions on Egypt more or less descended: One can distinguish here the original physiognomy, almost as clear as if he had been the first to write it. Had this material been imported from abroad after the triumph of Islam, or did the conquerors encounter it from their new subjects? The author repeats to the saturation point that he drew his material from the records of the ancient priests, from the books of the Egyptians, and from the pages of the Copts, and their sayings and beliefs. At least half of the documents to which he refers were extracted according to him from the official archives of the country: “Each king made note of what had happened to him every day, and the leaves were rolled and then deposited in the treasury, and so we have knowledge of their annals.” He asserted that one of these historical records had been found in a tomb on the breast of a dead man, and this detail betrays a man who had seen the unwrapping of mummies. M. Carra de Vaux thinks that it is true, and that the narratives are really derived from these compilations attributed to the Copts; apart from the biblical legends and a small number of tales in which the mark of the Greek spirit is discerned, the greater part of the work would undoubtedly derive from the old Egyptian collection. All those who will carefully examine the Akhbār al-zamān will, I think, share his opinion: Perhaps it is not superfluous to justify it by examples, and to prove how certain sets of narratives, those least Egyptian in appearance, stem directly from the religious ideas and customs of pharaonic Egypt.
What strikes us first in this history is the considerable place held by magic, its practices, its instruments, its operators, and the natural or supernatural beings it brings into play. I employ the words magic and magicians so they may be understood by the reader, but they are inaccurate, and the words which would best correspond to the ancient reality would be those of science and scholars. The knowledge of the hidden forces which penetrate the universe and of the mysterious beings which govern them was, for the Egyptians, the necessary culmination of all instruction that advanced beyond the principles which suffice among the commoners for the ordinary conduct of life. The magicians were named in two ways: khri-habi, “the men with the scroll,” and rokhoaū-khaîtū, “those who know things.” The first of these qualifications was broad and extended to anyone who, having learned to read in a liturgical or other form, and to execute the prescriptions slavishly, succeeded in routinely producing the effects envisaged for each of the formulas recited according to the rite. The followers of this category did not need to understand why or how their incantations and manipulations led them to success; it was sufficient for them to be able to act at their will, and it mattered little to them that their power should always remain empirical, as long as it was always efficacious. The rokhoaū-khaîtū, on the contrary, had learned to distinguish things, their essence, their virtues, their combinations, their attractions and reciprocal repulsions, the motives and conditions of their influence, and when they mingled to operate themselves. They did so in full awareness of the work they planned and the agents or spirits by which they performed it. They were the scholars of their age, and their knowledge was so highly valued that they not only ranked first among the counselors of the sovereigns, but counted the sovereigns themselves or their children among their pupils. They alone could, as in the Tale of Two Brothers, guess by the odor of a curl of hair that it belonged to a daughter of the gods, or, as in the History of the Princess of Bakhtan, that no one but a god would deliver the patient from the specter who devoured her. They are, then, the undisputed ancestors of those sages of whom our Arab author describes the prodigies and of whom none of his time disputed his superiority. They had discovered in the intervals of revenues which their ancients were ignorant. It must be observed, however, that the latter had discovered, in the interim, formulae of which their elders were ignorant. They had adopted, without suspecting it, more than one Chaldean or Hellenic theory, and thought they had learned their art in the stars. The question of origin put aside, the whole apparatus of the science which was lent to them did not differ from that which their predecessors possessed in the pharaonic period. “It is they who made famous talismans and dictated the excellent laws, who built the speaking sculpted figures and moving statues, who built the high buildings and engraved on stone the secrets of medicine. Only they could build the berba (great temples); they knew of talismans that could remove the enemies of their country. The wonders which they accomplished are manifest, and their wisdom is dazzling” (Akhbār 2.1).
This point of talismans is of capital importance for the object which concerns us. The talisman is, properly speaking, an external sign on which the will of the magician has concentrated and within which it perpetuated the virtue of one or more magical operations. It does not lose any of its efficacy, even if it serves continuously for thousands of years, provided, however, that it remains as it was at the time of its consecration; but if it be broken, or altered, or sometimes even displaced just a little, all its virtue evaporates at once, and the effects which it emits cease immediately. The talismans are of two kinds: the most common, and usually the easiest to make, are those that a designated person can wear upon himself, around his neck, his arm, his chest, around his waist, or his leg, or sewn in his clothes, and protecting him against one or more kinds of danger: The Egyptians of the pharaonic period covered themselves in them, living and dead, and most of the small objects we call amulets are really talismans, and their texts teach us of their composition and use, of scarabs, olives, half-serpents, the eye of Horus, images of the heart, and figurines of animals or divinities. One such talisman put specters to flight, while others made the snakes or the ferocious beasts inoffensive. Another paralyzed the crocodile, and still another annulled the virulence of the evil eye. The Arab author does not specify any of them in this case, for he dealt only with the marvels produced by kings for the splendor of their court or for the interest of public affairs, but he never tires of enumerating talismans of general interest, those which made a whole country or the cities safe from foreign invasions, and those which could “repel reptiles and vermin from the edifice, and anyone who would dig it up, man or djinn” (Akhbār 2.2). These talismans of state were of twenty different kinds, isolated statues, groups of statues, bas-reliefs embedded above one door or in the masonry of an edifice, weapons, utensils, jewels, and furniture, and they are animated, or at least spirits reside in them, which eternally assure the perpetuity of their actions. The idea was known and practiced widely by the Egyptians of the pharaonic age. In this manner, the statues of gods, sphinxes, hawks, lions, ram-headed monsters, falcon-headed monsters, even the obelisks seen at the door or in front of their temples, are merely so many advanced sentinels that protect the edifice and its inhabitants against evil influences and against violent destruction by man or by elements. In addition to fore-guarding talismans, every part of the construction, every court, every door, each chamber, every wall of a room had its guardian, often a serpent lying at the top of a stone cut in the form of a rounded stele, sometimes a god or a monstrous djinn whose face grimaces prominently. The very pictures which decorated the walls, the jambs, and the lintels of the gates constitute phylacteries, not only their large figures, but all their hieroglyphics, each in particular. And a living reality corresponded to the least of these immutable talismans, which was revealed as soon as necessity demanded it: the sphinxes, the rams, and the lions ran to the enemy, serpents bit him or consumed him with their flames, the hieroglyphics attacked him according to their form—the axes, the daggers, the lions, the birds of prey, the vipers. This innumerable army was so formidable and so rebellious that at certain periods, in the tombs, it was feared that they would attack the dead man, and that they would become fatal to his soul. They therefore depicted serpents without heads, men or animals without bodies, or the body cut into two pieces, so that they could no longer harm anyone. It was preferable to deprive themselves of their aid rather than to expose the (spiritual) double to their blind fury.
Thus, by multiplying the talismans around the kings, the tradition of the Arabic period faithfully reproduced one of the principal traits of the ancient civilization. If, on the other hand, we examine the enumerated talismans one after the other, we can easily see that most of them present the characteristics of the Egyptians of the pharaonic period, at least for in their form and symbolism. They are, above all, statues of kings or gods as seen in the temples, and the very insistence with which the writer defines the nature of the substances of which they were composed proves that the first storytellers did not invent the objects of which they spoke: they confined themselves to describing images which they had often seen, and if they gave rein to their imagination, they confined themselves to exchanging the attributes and composition of several images. King Marqūnos set up a golden eagle, two cubits in length, a breadth of a cubit, two hyacinth eyes, two pearl necklaces set in gold, a fine stone hanging from its beak, and rubies sown among its feathers; The base was of chiseled silver, and the whole, borne on a pillar of glass, was installed under an arch near a temple. Bronze or gold pieces encrusted with enamel or fragments of precious stone are common in our museums, and here evidently is a figure of an eagle or rather a hawk, a Horus, adorned with a large collar, with eyes and wings attached, perched on the column with lotus capitals, Or perhaps on the stem of the lotus itself. Those which we possess of this kind are of bronze, without incrustations and of small size, but that it existed in gold and of great dimensions, like that which the Arab author depicted, we know from the testimonies of the monuments! Elsewhere our curiosity leads us to “the idol of Venus [which] was of lapis lazuli inlaid with gleaming gold. She wore emerald bracelets. She had the figure of a woman with well-polished nails of blackened gold, whose feet were adorned with rings of stone as red as the hyacinth, and shod with golden shoes. Her hand held a coral wand. She made a sign with her index finger, as if to bless those who were in the temple. In front of the statue, on the other side of the room, there was placed a cow with horns and hooves of red and gold copper, adorned with lapis stones” (Akbar 2.6). The visage of the cow was right in front of the face of the idol. The Venus in question was a Hathor, as is proved by the mention of the cow, and one immediately imagines an offering scene: a statue of a woman raises an emblem, perhaps a short scepter with one hand, and she sketches the gesture which always accompanies the offering. Were the two statues in true lapis-lazuli or in that blue substance which the Egyptians called artificial lapis-lazuli? It matters little, but what we must not fail to mention is the care with which the narrator tells us that “the visage of the cow was right in front of the face of the idol.” The Egyptian sculptors made their scenes in such a way that the main characters had their faces at the same height, either sitting or standing, so the description corresponds to something we see, at least in a bas-relief, and since it is given here as applying to the temple of Venus at Memphis, it is quite possible that the original would have been inspired by the appearance of the public hall of a temple of Hathor in this city. What is then added about the fountain erected on marble pillars between the two statues, and whose water, under the influence of the goddess, cured all diseases, is not so estranged from what was done in Ancient Egypt that one is tempted to believe at first sight. The idea of water which vivifies and renews bodies, the water of youth, is frequently found in funerary texts; it is quite possible that the water offered in libation in one of the temples of Hathor, that fresh water which the dead were so desirous of drinking in the other world, should be thought to cure the diseases of the living.
The figures of the talismans are thus those of the ancient Egyptian statues as they were seen everywhere in intact or ruined temples, but did the legends which they recounted sometimes recall the character or the actions of the represented divinity? King Sūrīd had erected in the middle of his capital the statue of a woman seated and holding on her breast a little boy whom she seemed to breastfeed. A modern observer would immediately suspect that it was an Isis nourishing the child Horus, and this hypothesis turns into certainty, when he reads a little further that the image of this statue is reproduced in all the temples of Egypt and painted in several colors. But the miracles it performs are of a rather peculiar nature. “Any woman who had disease afflicting a part of her body could touch the corresponding portion of the body of the statue, and the malady would cease; so if her milk were to decline, she touched the statue’s breasts and it would increase; if she wanted to curry favor with her husband, she touched the statue’s face with fragrant grease, saying, ‘Get me this or that.’ If a woman had a sick child, she did the same with the child of the statue, and it was healed; if her children had a difficult character, she touched the child’s head, and they grew sweeter. Young women also found relief, and if an adulterous woman were to put her hand on the statue, she felt a disorder so deep that despite herself she confessed her crime” (Akhbār 2.2). It is not known whether some or all of these virtues were once attributed to the goddess or to one or other of her most revered statues, but one is forced to confess that on the whole none of the wonders reported in the Arabic is in contradiction with what we know of the Egyptians. Isis was the instituter of marriage and, as such, she had to respect its sanctity; it is therefore not without reason that her image brings back the husband to the wife and terrifies the adulterer who places impure hands on her. Isis is the magician par excellence and, as such, is invoked in the conjurations that cure headaches, for example: that explains the medical properties of the statue. The way in which it was invoked, at least in a particular case, is, moreover, the copy of a rite often represented on the walls of the temples, the anointing of the face. The celebrant, king or priest, holds in one hand a pot of grease or perfumed oil, and with the little finger of the other hand he rubs the lips or the face of the divine statue, murmuring a prayer. According to these traits common to the Arabic narrative and to the Egyptian concepts, I would not be far off in my account to admit that the properties assigned to the talisman of King Sūrīd were those of certain statues of Isis, if not all, in pharaonic times. The recent tradition would complete here, at least for the most part, the lacunae of the ancient tradition. This is only a conjecture, but in others there is certainty. Here, for example, is what is said of the talismans that protected the pyramids of Giza: The eastern pyramid, that of Cheops, has for its guardian an idol striped with white and black, with two open and dazzling eyes. This idol sits on a throne; she holds a kind of lance, and when a man looks at her, she utters a cry so terrible that he falls fainting and dies in place. This must have been one of the statues of Cheops that was preserved in the pyramid: The latter was seated and clasped in his fist the old cross, or some other divine or royal insignia, and was cut in a breccia streaked with white and black, or perhaps in a diorite darker than that of the Chephren of Giza, which it must have resembled a great deal. The depiction of his gaze proves that he had his eyes inlaid, as is the case with the two individuals from Meidum and the sheikh-el-beled [i.e., the statue of Kaaper] from Saqqara. Those who have seen these pupils of crystal and enamel light up abruptly in the shadow of a tomb, with the first beam of light that feeds them, will comprehend the description of the Arab author and the feeling of terror which it implies. The cry that the spirit-double of the statue makes, and which kills, immediately recalls the cry of the specter Tbūbūi in the demotic tale and the failure that seizes Satni as soon as he hears it. The western pyramid, that of Chephren, was guarded by an idol of striped flint, standing, armed with a sort of lance, and bearing a serpent on the head; As soon as a man approached her, the serpent jumped on his neck and stifled him, then resumed his place on the forehead of the idol. Here again it is a statue, but standing. It was probably cut in a diorite duller than that of the Chephren of Giza, since it is compared to striped flint. The serpent is the uraeus of the crown, that living uraeus, which fights the enemies of Pharaoh and can strangle them or burn them. In short, the two guardians of the pyramids are none other than the statues of Cheops and Chephren, animated by a double of the dead king. The Arab author has transmitted to us the pure Egyptian conception, without modifying it, although he no longer understood it, and thought he recognized a djinn which, in reality, was the soul of a dead man.
We see now that M. Carra de Vaux is right when he declares that the picture of pharaonic civilization outlined in the Akhbār al-zamān contains many ancient facts barely distorted. If I wished to push this examination further, almost every page would furnish me with the material for an edifying comparison on the subject. I have already reminded, a long time ago, that the spirit of the pyramid of Mycerinus, a naked woman, very beautiful, whose hair is divided in two, which runs after men and causes them to lose their reason, is undoubtedly the spirit-double of Queen Nitocris: An Egyptian tradition asserted that she had been buried in this pyramid. The guardian spirits of the ruined temples are the doubles of the statues once worshiped in the temples, and when they appear, it is under the form of these statues. If the spirit of the Berba of Kouft is the figure of a black servant who lulls a little Negro, it is because the two principal divinities were the Isis of Coptos and her son Horus: the mother and the child are black because the most venerated statue was of basalt or black granite. If the spirit of the Berba of Dendera is a man with a lion's head and two horns, this is due to the considerable number of lion-headed and bull-headed divinities carved on the walls of the lower chambers or chapels built on the outer terrace. When the temple was invaded by the Copts, the inner rooms were filled almost to the ceiling by filth and a village had settled on the platform, which is why the locals chose to incarnate the local god and not one of the forms of Hathor. But one of the satellites of Osiris, the combination of the lion’s head with the horns, proves that they could not distinguish these monsters from each other. I must add that since the excavation carried out by Mariette, the goddess has resumed her rights. The spirit of the berba is now a beautiful white cow, with long horns, which lodges in the room on the New Year. She goes out at night from her retreat, and she goes to walk in the neighboring fields, where the fellahs have seen her more than once while I was in Egypt. While she is feeding, the door of her house remains open and can be entered. No one doubts that it is full of treasures, and I have heard stories of people who have brought back with them bags of gold or silver; but, as is almost always the case, it does little good for those who steal it without taking proper precautions, and eventually it returns to the hiding places of the cow, not without bringing with it that which was in the thief’s purse. Some of the spirits mentioned in the Akhbār al-zamān are as easy to determine as these. Thus, the one at Akhmim, a young black and naked boy, lets us easily guess a statue of the Horus child in black stone, basalt, or granite; that of Samannud, a dark-skinned old man with long hair and short beard, is a statue of Osiris or Phtah, not mummified, but whose face was painted blue or green; that of Būsīr, a white sheikh, dressed as well as a monk and carrying a book, responds to the report of a limestone statue of Imhotep, the god-son of the Memphite triad, wrapped in his cloak and reading, as was his custom, a roll of papyrus spread out on his knees. Others leave us bewildered, like the guardian of the colored pyramid, a sea-sheikh, carrying a basket, and holding censers such as those of the churches. One immediately thinks of one of those figures, so frequent in each hypogeum of the neighborhood, which symbolize the domains of the dead, and which bring different animals or objects for the funeral sacrifice. But why does the Arab writer call it a sea-sheikh, and what variety of costume or appearance does he mean by these singular words? As long as this expression remains obscure, the proposed correspondence will necessarily be uncertain.
This is proof, I believe, of the ancient origin of talismans and their guardians, as well as of the fidelity with which the Arab author has often preserved the ideas and superstitions of pharaonic times. There are, however, several classes of these objects and beings, whose properties are of such a nature that it may be asked whether they go back like the others to the greatest antiquity in the country, or whether they are not foreign imports. The most curious, from this point of view, of the talismans which are described, is the figure of a man on horseback, who wields a bronze sword and pierces anyone who approaches with hostile intentions the object placed under his protection. In one case the horse is winged and the rider is designated as the genius of the planet Saturn. The horse was not one of the sacred animals of Egypt, and its role is almost zero in myths or in religious representations. We are therefore tempted to believe in the foreign origin of the talisman, probably a Greek origin, since one of the marvelous horses has wings. Yet it is indeed an Egyptian image, and an Egyptian image of the Roman period. A curious passage from Plutarch tells us that the horse had penetrated late into Egyptian mythology. At the moment of sending Horus to war against Typhon, Osiris asked his son “what animal seems to him most useful for the battle?” “The horse,” replied Horus, and as Osiris is surprised: “The horse,” he adds, “makes it possible to pursue and kill the fleeing enemy” (Isis and Osiris 19). And in fact, a number of bas-reliefs or statuettes represent Horus on horseback, dressed as a Roman centurion and piercing the crocodile of the spear. How this Romanized Horus became a Saint George, M. Clermont-Ganneau has shown to us a long time ago, and the pictures which decorate certain Coptic scenes have proved how right his demonstration was. The rider-talisman descends from these Horuses of the Imperial Age; if it is Egyptian contaminated with foreign emblems, it is still Egyptian, and its name of Saturn proves it, for in pharaonic Egypt, our planet Saturn is Horus, Harka or Harkahari. He thus reproduced a statuette of a real Horus, or a Greco-Roman statue of a hero mounted on a winged horse, whom the natives supposed to represent one of their Horuses. In a similar order of ideas, King Qoftarim had erected a copper idol above the four gates of his city, the influence of which put to sleep strangers who wished to enter; if they no one blew into their faces, they no longer awoke, and they died in their sleep. He also built an elegant lighthouse of colored glass, on a base of copper, and then he planted on the top an idol of glass holding in his hand a bow which seemed soft; it turned itself to all the winds, and as soon as a stranger arrived, it stopped him on the spot, and he did not stir any more until they came to rescue him. King Adīm, having built a marble bridge, placed four idols oriented to the four cardinal points. They brandished swords, which they struck down on anyone approaching in their direction. The rebel ’Ūnā perched large images of eagles on the ramparts of his palace, erected at each corner a rider armed with a sword and looking outside the city, guarded the gates with magic scorpions that stopped foreigners when a resident of the city did not accompany them. Most other sovereigns had also resorted to such means of defense, but the description given to us of their marvelous devices varies only in detail: they are always moving figures which immobilize. I do not believe that there is anything of the kind in the hieroglyphic documents known hitherto, but a similar conception had existed in Egypt before the Muslim conquest. A novel of the pseudo-Callisthenes, begins, as we know, with the fabulous story of the last indigenous Pharaoh, Nectanebo. This Nectanebo was considered to be one of the most formidable magicians in the world, and he deserved this reputation, if we may judge by the ingenious methods which he applied to the defense of his kingdom. “When a force of enemies approached him, he did not summon the militia, nor prepare for war, but shut himself up alone in a secret chamber of his palace, taking care to carry off a basin with him. He filled it with very pure water. He modeled with wax a miniature vessel, and he furnished it with small figures of men. As soon as he had launched his skiff over the basin, everything seemed to come alive and be set into motion. He then seized his wand of ebony, conjured by terrible incantations the gods of heaven and hell, and tried to sink the boat with their aid. As soon as the latter had been shipwrecked and its crew with it, all the enemies whose approach had been announced perished in the waves.” Here the talisman, instead of being permanent, must be constructed and consecrated to every new occasion, but the principle does not differ, and in the Alexandrian Greek as in the Arabic, the mechanism of the operation is the same. The prepared figure protects the city or the kingdom, and its virtue takes the place of the armies of which the other sovereigns were satisfied. I may add that it is possible to follow certain details of the Greek narrative even in writings written in the Egyptian language. This wax boat of which Nectanebo serves, is found in the novel of Satni, with his galley slaves endowed with movement. Satni builds them to securely reach the place of the Nile where the grimoire of Thot is hidden. They lead him there, and after having rowed, they work with him to drain the river to the necessary point. The very material that Nectanebo employs is the magical matter used in such cases by the Egyptians of the pharaonic period. In the Tale of Cheops, it is with wax that a magician kneads the crocodile which, thrown into the water, animates and devours the adulterous page. The builders and decorators of the temples had besides, to place on the lintels of the gates, on the pylons, along the lateral walls, ligatures which constituted real talismans: the winged disk, flanked by two uraeae, alone or containing the scarabs, and before whom “the wicked fall in every place where they are,” the lion's fore-bodies serving as a gutter, the cornices bordered by a line of erect uraeae, the doors themselves being phylacteries which kept the enemy away. We can follow the development of the same superstition from ancient times to the centuries of Islam. At first, any decoration being a protection in itself, the figures or symbols carved around the gates of the cities, the only parts of the enclosure which were mostly made of stone, constituted real defenses against any enemy, visible or invisible. This idea became restricted in time to a small number of these images, which the popular belief deemed more effective than the others, but as the quantity diminished, their virtues would grow and expand. The talismans of this type no longer acted only against the enemy which approached them: they now signaled the imminence of danger, they struck at a distance, and the operator could concentrate and direct their energies at the point of attack, to strike whomever he pleases. The talismanic defense of houses or human cities is a pharaonic conception as well as the rest of the magical ideas, only it has become more precise and surrounded by more and more marvelous fantasies as Egypt aged, attaining its last degree of strangeness in the books from which our author derived information.
I have avoided pointing out, in passing, the resemblances which many of these stories present with certain narratives common in our countries here in the West. Nevertheless, I cannot refrain from discussing this part of my subject for even two more words. I will confine myself to taking some of the prodigies attributed [in the Middle Ages] to Virgil, and of which we find the equivalent in the Akhbār al-zamān. It is well known that the magician-poet had filled firsts Naples and then Rome with marvelous works: a bronze horse, “a guarantor against sickness – whenever a horse was ill – such that those which gazed upon it were cured; a bronze fly, which, when exposed in one place in the town, prevented all flies from penetrating the enclosure; the brazen statue which held a bow, and which threatened the top of the valley with an arrow, in order to prevent the eruption of the volcano.” We have already met the archer among the talismans described by our author; the horse and the fly, in spite of their contrary properties, belong to the same entirely Egyptian concept: the like is saved or destroyed by its fellows. Considering that it was enough for a woman to touch the breast of a talismanic idol, a cow or a woman, so that her own breasts would be filled with milk, one should not find difficulty in admitting that a simulacrum of a vigorous horse, enchanted in a certain way, rendered vigorous all the horses which entered its sphere of magical influence. By an analogous effect, an image of man or animal, enchanted in a contrary manner, was to injure men or animals of the same species, which exposed themselves to its aura. The Akhbār al-zamān not only knows the fly that slays flies, as the Virgilian legend, but the lion that kills lions, and twenty other beasts fatal to their own race. King Marqūnos had made “images of reptiles, frogs, beetles, flies, scorpions, and various insects were manufactured; these images, placed anywhere, attracted similar beasts, paralyzed them, and kept them until they should die or someone came to kill them” (Akhbār 2.8). Elsewhere, images of crows fascinate crows, and everywhere there is one key difference between the Oriental and Western variants: the animal is not simply kept apart or destroyed by the talisman, as in the Virgilian legend; he is fascinated and struck with immobility until he dies or is killed. This trait of fascination is of the purest Egyptian. I insisted elsewhere on the fascinating power that many animals, such as the crocodile, the lion, the oryx, and the serpents, exert by their gaze, voice, touch, movement, or by a particular approach. They were defended by invocations engraved on a stela, or on an amulet in the form of a stela, which could be carried on oneself and which constituted a real talisman. On one of the faces was a Horus, a child, standing atop two crocodiles and brandishing a handful of lions, gazelles, scorpions, and serpents. Did the authors who provided the subject matter of the Akhbār al-zamān have in mind a stela of this kind, describing one of the talismans whose erection they attributed to an ancient sovereign? Qoftarim had erected a “a copper pillar bearing the image of a bird; when the big cats, lions, and snakes approached the city, the bird emitted a shrill whistle which put them to flight” (Akhbār 2.3). The bird is not defined, but the bird which is most frequently seen on a column in the pharaonic monuments is the hawk, the bird of Horus, and I do not doubt that we can recognize one here. Horus, whether he was a hawk or a child, was the enemy of the evil eye, and his eye was one of the most powerful weapons available against fascination. He set in motion a whole legion of geniuses, whom we see on the Stela of Metternich, the most beautiful of these stelae of Horus, of which I have just spoken. A fashion for them spread in Greek times, among the Alexandrians as well as among the natives, and it persisted under the Roman Empire, at the time when all our talismans were in fashion. Even today, in the Saud, I saw fellahs wearing amulets, or placing frogs in green paste and serpent heads in enameled earth in a corner of their house, in order to keep away poisonous insects and the reptiles.
I will not speak of the magic mirror or warrior, erected by Virgil at Rome, in the palace of the Emperor, and of which the like are met in every instance in the Akhbār al-zamān. It seems to me from the analysis of the texts that the Arab legends and Western legends have drawn from a common source that which they know about talismans and works of magic. This source is probably the same one that the Muslim writers indicate, the pages of the Copts, the books of the Copts, the ancient accounts interpreted by the Copts, and whose authenticity is admitted by M. Carra de Vaux. Whether these documents were at least partly from writings in the Coptic language, there are several indications that this is the case. The author, speaking of the thirty companions of Miṣraīm, all giants, affirms that “built a city they called Māfah, a name which in their language meant thirty. This is the city of Manf (Memphis)” (Akhbār 2.3). Mefi is indeed a variant of the name of Memphis, which must be very old, since the Hebrew prophet Hosea already knows it; It derives very naturally from the primitive name Mānnofirū, by Mannūfi, Memphi. And therefore it does not have the meaning that the Arabic attributes to it. However, a man speaking the language of the country, only a Copt, could think of bringing it closer to the word, which means thirty in Egyptian, maav, maave. If we search well, we should find two or three other passages which indicate in the primitive author an exact knowledge of the native dialects of Egypt. The first historian who wrote these so-called annals of kings in Arabic must have learned, at least in part, from the Coptic books to which he refers, and according to Oriental practice every extract he makes of them reproduces very literally the original text. That there were natives books in which the wonders of the country were described, and its legends told in detail, is not unlikely in itself, since we have found in the scraps of this library fragments of a Coptic version of the Alexander Romance: the miraculous biography of the old pharaohs obviously interested the inhabitants of Egypt as much as that of the Macedonian conqueror, and the immensity of the temples or ruined cities beside which they lived must necessarily have kept alive in their minds the memory of the legends that made up history. These books were, in their final form, works written by Copts, that is, by Egyptians who had converted to Christianity; the intimate way in which the Biblical legends are mingled with it, and the perpetual mention of the monks is proof of this. On the other hand, facts on which I shall have to insist later, show that these Coptic works were themselves, like the Alexander Romance, only the adaptation of older Greek writings. We know with what care the Greeks of Egypt had described the principal cities of the country, Alexandria, Naucratis, Arsinoë, Hemopolis, Memphis. These historical descriptions were readily complemented by extravagant details of the gods, cults, monuments, machines, and fables which the pseudo-Callisthenes put down about Alexandria, show us how much the fantastic prevailed over the real in about the fourth century of our era, when the oldest portions of the novel were fixed almost in their entirety: one would say than an extract from a book on the Mirabilia Alexandriae, analogous to the work which we know as the Mirabilia Romae, and the same love of the marvelous which had thus distorted the history of Alexandria had no more respect for the other cities of Egypt. It is these treatises of Marvels, now lost, that the Copts must have translated from the Greek, as they had translated the Alexander Romance, probably by mixing traditions of their time then current among the people. To sum up, if we admit the data which seem to result clearly from this discussion, the pharaonic tradition has arrived at the author of the Akhbār al-zamān and the Arabic writers who preceded it through two series of intermediary works, books written in Greek where the oddities and fabulous history of Egypt were told, and Coptic translations of the Greek books where the original texts were enriched with new legends and miracles.
What strikes us first in this history is the considerable place held by magic, its practices, its instruments, its operators, and the natural or supernatural beings it brings into play. I employ the words magic and magicians so they may be understood by the reader, but they are inaccurate, and the words which would best correspond to the ancient reality would be those of science and scholars. The knowledge of the hidden forces which penetrate the universe and of the mysterious beings which govern them was, for the Egyptians, the necessary culmination of all instruction that advanced beyond the principles which suffice among the commoners for the ordinary conduct of life. The magicians were named in two ways: khri-habi, “the men with the scroll,” and rokhoaū-khaîtū, “those who know things.” The first of these qualifications was broad and extended to anyone who, having learned to read in a liturgical or other form, and to execute the prescriptions slavishly, succeeded in routinely producing the effects envisaged for each of the formulas recited according to the rite. The followers of this category did not need to understand why or how their incantations and manipulations led them to success; it was sufficient for them to be able to act at their will, and it mattered little to them that their power should always remain empirical, as long as it was always efficacious. The rokhoaū-khaîtū, on the contrary, had learned to distinguish things, their essence, their virtues, their combinations, their attractions and reciprocal repulsions, the motives and conditions of their influence, and when they mingled to operate themselves. They did so in full awareness of the work they planned and the agents or spirits by which they performed it. They were the scholars of their age, and their knowledge was so highly valued that they not only ranked first among the counselors of the sovereigns, but counted the sovereigns themselves or their children among their pupils. They alone could, as in the Tale of Two Brothers, guess by the odor of a curl of hair that it belonged to a daughter of the gods, or, as in the History of the Princess of Bakhtan, that no one but a god would deliver the patient from the specter who devoured her. They are, then, the undisputed ancestors of those sages of whom our Arab author describes the prodigies and of whom none of his time disputed his superiority. They had discovered in the intervals of revenues which their ancients were ignorant. It must be observed, however, that the latter had discovered, in the interim, formulae of which their elders were ignorant. They had adopted, without suspecting it, more than one Chaldean or Hellenic theory, and thought they had learned their art in the stars. The question of origin put aside, the whole apparatus of the science which was lent to them did not differ from that which their predecessors possessed in the pharaonic period. “It is they who made famous talismans and dictated the excellent laws, who built the speaking sculpted figures and moving statues, who built the high buildings and engraved on stone the secrets of medicine. Only they could build the berba (great temples); they knew of talismans that could remove the enemies of their country. The wonders which they accomplished are manifest, and their wisdom is dazzling” (Akhbār 2.1).
This point of talismans is of capital importance for the object which concerns us. The talisman is, properly speaking, an external sign on which the will of the magician has concentrated and within which it perpetuated the virtue of one or more magical operations. It does not lose any of its efficacy, even if it serves continuously for thousands of years, provided, however, that it remains as it was at the time of its consecration; but if it be broken, or altered, or sometimes even displaced just a little, all its virtue evaporates at once, and the effects which it emits cease immediately. The talismans are of two kinds: the most common, and usually the easiest to make, are those that a designated person can wear upon himself, around his neck, his arm, his chest, around his waist, or his leg, or sewn in his clothes, and protecting him against one or more kinds of danger: The Egyptians of the pharaonic period covered themselves in them, living and dead, and most of the small objects we call amulets are really talismans, and their texts teach us of their composition and use, of scarabs, olives, half-serpents, the eye of Horus, images of the heart, and figurines of animals or divinities. One such talisman put specters to flight, while others made the snakes or the ferocious beasts inoffensive. Another paralyzed the crocodile, and still another annulled the virulence of the evil eye. The Arab author does not specify any of them in this case, for he dealt only with the marvels produced by kings for the splendor of their court or for the interest of public affairs, but he never tires of enumerating talismans of general interest, those which made a whole country or the cities safe from foreign invasions, and those which could “repel reptiles and vermin from the edifice, and anyone who would dig it up, man or djinn” (Akhbār 2.2). These talismans of state were of twenty different kinds, isolated statues, groups of statues, bas-reliefs embedded above one door or in the masonry of an edifice, weapons, utensils, jewels, and furniture, and they are animated, or at least spirits reside in them, which eternally assure the perpetuity of their actions. The idea was known and practiced widely by the Egyptians of the pharaonic age. In this manner, the statues of gods, sphinxes, hawks, lions, ram-headed monsters, falcon-headed monsters, even the obelisks seen at the door or in front of their temples, are merely so many advanced sentinels that protect the edifice and its inhabitants against evil influences and against violent destruction by man or by elements. In addition to fore-guarding talismans, every part of the construction, every court, every door, each chamber, every wall of a room had its guardian, often a serpent lying at the top of a stone cut in the form of a rounded stele, sometimes a god or a monstrous djinn whose face grimaces prominently. The very pictures which decorated the walls, the jambs, and the lintels of the gates constitute phylacteries, not only their large figures, but all their hieroglyphics, each in particular. And a living reality corresponded to the least of these immutable talismans, which was revealed as soon as necessity demanded it: the sphinxes, the rams, and the lions ran to the enemy, serpents bit him or consumed him with their flames, the hieroglyphics attacked him according to their form—the axes, the daggers, the lions, the birds of prey, the vipers. This innumerable army was so formidable and so rebellious that at certain periods, in the tombs, it was feared that they would attack the dead man, and that they would become fatal to his soul. They therefore depicted serpents without heads, men or animals without bodies, or the body cut into two pieces, so that they could no longer harm anyone. It was preferable to deprive themselves of their aid rather than to expose the (spiritual) double to their blind fury.
Thus, by multiplying the talismans around the kings, the tradition of the Arabic period faithfully reproduced one of the principal traits of the ancient civilization. If, on the other hand, we examine the enumerated talismans one after the other, we can easily see that most of them present the characteristics of the Egyptians of the pharaonic period, at least for in their form and symbolism. They are, above all, statues of kings or gods as seen in the temples, and the very insistence with which the writer defines the nature of the substances of which they were composed proves that the first storytellers did not invent the objects of which they spoke: they confined themselves to describing images which they had often seen, and if they gave rein to their imagination, they confined themselves to exchanging the attributes and composition of several images. King Marqūnos set up a golden eagle, two cubits in length, a breadth of a cubit, two hyacinth eyes, two pearl necklaces set in gold, a fine stone hanging from its beak, and rubies sown among its feathers; The base was of chiseled silver, and the whole, borne on a pillar of glass, was installed under an arch near a temple. Bronze or gold pieces encrusted with enamel or fragments of precious stone are common in our museums, and here evidently is a figure of an eagle or rather a hawk, a Horus, adorned with a large collar, with eyes and wings attached, perched on the column with lotus capitals, Or perhaps on the stem of the lotus itself. Those which we possess of this kind are of bronze, without incrustations and of small size, but that it existed in gold and of great dimensions, like that which the Arab author depicted, we know from the testimonies of the monuments! Elsewhere our curiosity leads us to “the idol of Venus [which] was of lapis lazuli inlaid with gleaming gold. She wore emerald bracelets. She had the figure of a woman with well-polished nails of blackened gold, whose feet were adorned with rings of stone as red as the hyacinth, and shod with golden shoes. Her hand held a coral wand. She made a sign with her index finger, as if to bless those who were in the temple. In front of the statue, on the other side of the room, there was placed a cow with horns and hooves of red and gold copper, adorned with lapis stones” (Akbar 2.6). The visage of the cow was right in front of the face of the idol. The Venus in question was a Hathor, as is proved by the mention of the cow, and one immediately imagines an offering scene: a statue of a woman raises an emblem, perhaps a short scepter with one hand, and she sketches the gesture which always accompanies the offering. Were the two statues in true lapis-lazuli or in that blue substance which the Egyptians called artificial lapis-lazuli? It matters little, but what we must not fail to mention is the care with which the narrator tells us that “the visage of the cow was right in front of the face of the idol.” The Egyptian sculptors made their scenes in such a way that the main characters had their faces at the same height, either sitting or standing, so the description corresponds to something we see, at least in a bas-relief, and since it is given here as applying to the temple of Venus at Memphis, it is quite possible that the original would have been inspired by the appearance of the public hall of a temple of Hathor in this city. What is then added about the fountain erected on marble pillars between the two statues, and whose water, under the influence of the goddess, cured all diseases, is not so estranged from what was done in Ancient Egypt that one is tempted to believe at first sight. The idea of water which vivifies and renews bodies, the water of youth, is frequently found in funerary texts; it is quite possible that the water offered in libation in one of the temples of Hathor, that fresh water which the dead were so desirous of drinking in the other world, should be thought to cure the diseases of the living.
The figures of the talismans are thus those of the ancient Egyptian statues as they were seen everywhere in intact or ruined temples, but did the legends which they recounted sometimes recall the character or the actions of the represented divinity? King Sūrīd had erected in the middle of his capital the statue of a woman seated and holding on her breast a little boy whom she seemed to breastfeed. A modern observer would immediately suspect that it was an Isis nourishing the child Horus, and this hypothesis turns into certainty, when he reads a little further that the image of this statue is reproduced in all the temples of Egypt and painted in several colors. But the miracles it performs are of a rather peculiar nature. “Any woman who had disease afflicting a part of her body could touch the corresponding portion of the body of the statue, and the malady would cease; so if her milk were to decline, she touched the statue’s breasts and it would increase; if she wanted to curry favor with her husband, she touched the statue’s face with fragrant grease, saying, ‘Get me this or that.’ If a woman had a sick child, she did the same with the child of the statue, and it was healed; if her children had a difficult character, she touched the child’s head, and they grew sweeter. Young women also found relief, and if an adulterous woman were to put her hand on the statue, she felt a disorder so deep that despite herself she confessed her crime” (Akhbār 2.2). It is not known whether some or all of these virtues were once attributed to the goddess or to one or other of her most revered statues, but one is forced to confess that on the whole none of the wonders reported in the Arabic is in contradiction with what we know of the Egyptians. Isis was the instituter of marriage and, as such, she had to respect its sanctity; it is therefore not without reason that her image brings back the husband to the wife and terrifies the adulterer who places impure hands on her. Isis is the magician par excellence and, as such, is invoked in the conjurations that cure headaches, for example: that explains the medical properties of the statue. The way in which it was invoked, at least in a particular case, is, moreover, the copy of a rite often represented on the walls of the temples, the anointing of the face. The celebrant, king or priest, holds in one hand a pot of grease or perfumed oil, and with the little finger of the other hand he rubs the lips or the face of the divine statue, murmuring a prayer. According to these traits common to the Arabic narrative and to the Egyptian concepts, I would not be far off in my account to admit that the properties assigned to the talisman of King Sūrīd were those of certain statues of Isis, if not all, in pharaonic times. The recent tradition would complete here, at least for the most part, the lacunae of the ancient tradition. This is only a conjecture, but in others there is certainty. Here, for example, is what is said of the talismans that protected the pyramids of Giza: The eastern pyramid, that of Cheops, has for its guardian an idol striped with white and black, with two open and dazzling eyes. This idol sits on a throne; she holds a kind of lance, and when a man looks at her, she utters a cry so terrible that he falls fainting and dies in place. This must have been one of the statues of Cheops that was preserved in the pyramid: The latter was seated and clasped in his fist the old cross, or some other divine or royal insignia, and was cut in a breccia streaked with white and black, or perhaps in a diorite darker than that of the Chephren of Giza, which it must have resembled a great deal. The depiction of his gaze proves that he had his eyes inlaid, as is the case with the two individuals from Meidum and the sheikh-el-beled [i.e., the statue of Kaaper] from Saqqara. Those who have seen these pupils of crystal and enamel light up abruptly in the shadow of a tomb, with the first beam of light that feeds them, will comprehend the description of the Arab author and the feeling of terror which it implies. The cry that the spirit-double of the statue makes, and which kills, immediately recalls the cry of the specter Tbūbūi in the demotic tale and the failure that seizes Satni as soon as he hears it. The western pyramid, that of Chephren, was guarded by an idol of striped flint, standing, armed with a sort of lance, and bearing a serpent on the head; As soon as a man approached her, the serpent jumped on his neck and stifled him, then resumed his place on the forehead of the idol. Here again it is a statue, but standing. It was probably cut in a diorite duller than that of the Chephren of Giza, since it is compared to striped flint. The serpent is the uraeus of the crown, that living uraeus, which fights the enemies of Pharaoh and can strangle them or burn them. In short, the two guardians of the pyramids are none other than the statues of Cheops and Chephren, animated by a double of the dead king. The Arab author has transmitted to us the pure Egyptian conception, without modifying it, although he no longer understood it, and thought he recognized a djinn which, in reality, was the soul of a dead man.
We see now that M. Carra de Vaux is right when he declares that the picture of pharaonic civilization outlined in the Akhbār al-zamān contains many ancient facts barely distorted. If I wished to push this examination further, almost every page would furnish me with the material for an edifying comparison on the subject. I have already reminded, a long time ago, that the spirit of the pyramid of Mycerinus, a naked woman, very beautiful, whose hair is divided in two, which runs after men and causes them to lose their reason, is undoubtedly the spirit-double of Queen Nitocris: An Egyptian tradition asserted that she had been buried in this pyramid. The guardian spirits of the ruined temples are the doubles of the statues once worshiped in the temples, and when they appear, it is under the form of these statues. If the spirit of the Berba of Kouft is the figure of a black servant who lulls a little Negro, it is because the two principal divinities were the Isis of Coptos and her son Horus: the mother and the child are black because the most venerated statue was of basalt or black granite. If the spirit of the Berba of Dendera is a man with a lion's head and two horns, this is due to the considerable number of lion-headed and bull-headed divinities carved on the walls of the lower chambers or chapels built on the outer terrace. When the temple was invaded by the Copts, the inner rooms were filled almost to the ceiling by filth and a village had settled on the platform, which is why the locals chose to incarnate the local god and not one of the forms of Hathor. But one of the satellites of Osiris, the combination of the lion’s head with the horns, proves that they could not distinguish these monsters from each other. I must add that since the excavation carried out by Mariette, the goddess has resumed her rights. The spirit of the berba is now a beautiful white cow, with long horns, which lodges in the room on the New Year. She goes out at night from her retreat, and she goes to walk in the neighboring fields, where the fellahs have seen her more than once while I was in Egypt. While she is feeding, the door of her house remains open and can be entered. No one doubts that it is full of treasures, and I have heard stories of people who have brought back with them bags of gold or silver; but, as is almost always the case, it does little good for those who steal it without taking proper precautions, and eventually it returns to the hiding places of the cow, not without bringing with it that which was in the thief’s purse. Some of the spirits mentioned in the Akhbār al-zamān are as easy to determine as these. Thus, the one at Akhmim, a young black and naked boy, lets us easily guess a statue of the Horus child in black stone, basalt, or granite; that of Samannud, a dark-skinned old man with long hair and short beard, is a statue of Osiris or Phtah, not mummified, but whose face was painted blue or green; that of Būsīr, a white sheikh, dressed as well as a monk and carrying a book, responds to the report of a limestone statue of Imhotep, the god-son of the Memphite triad, wrapped in his cloak and reading, as was his custom, a roll of papyrus spread out on his knees. Others leave us bewildered, like the guardian of the colored pyramid, a sea-sheikh, carrying a basket, and holding censers such as those of the churches. One immediately thinks of one of those figures, so frequent in each hypogeum of the neighborhood, which symbolize the domains of the dead, and which bring different animals or objects for the funeral sacrifice. But why does the Arab writer call it a sea-sheikh, and what variety of costume or appearance does he mean by these singular words? As long as this expression remains obscure, the proposed correspondence will necessarily be uncertain.
This is proof, I believe, of the ancient origin of talismans and their guardians, as well as of the fidelity with which the Arab author has often preserved the ideas and superstitions of pharaonic times. There are, however, several classes of these objects and beings, whose properties are of such a nature that it may be asked whether they go back like the others to the greatest antiquity in the country, or whether they are not foreign imports. The most curious, from this point of view, of the talismans which are described, is the figure of a man on horseback, who wields a bronze sword and pierces anyone who approaches with hostile intentions the object placed under his protection. In one case the horse is winged and the rider is designated as the genius of the planet Saturn. The horse was not one of the sacred animals of Egypt, and its role is almost zero in myths or in religious representations. We are therefore tempted to believe in the foreign origin of the talisman, probably a Greek origin, since one of the marvelous horses has wings. Yet it is indeed an Egyptian image, and an Egyptian image of the Roman period. A curious passage from Plutarch tells us that the horse had penetrated late into Egyptian mythology. At the moment of sending Horus to war against Typhon, Osiris asked his son “what animal seems to him most useful for the battle?” “The horse,” replied Horus, and as Osiris is surprised: “The horse,” he adds, “makes it possible to pursue and kill the fleeing enemy” (Isis and Osiris 19). And in fact, a number of bas-reliefs or statuettes represent Horus on horseback, dressed as a Roman centurion and piercing the crocodile of the spear. How this Romanized Horus became a Saint George, M. Clermont-Ganneau has shown to us a long time ago, and the pictures which decorate certain Coptic scenes have proved how right his demonstration was. The rider-talisman descends from these Horuses of the Imperial Age; if it is Egyptian contaminated with foreign emblems, it is still Egyptian, and its name of Saturn proves it, for in pharaonic Egypt, our planet Saturn is Horus, Harka or Harkahari. He thus reproduced a statuette of a real Horus, or a Greco-Roman statue of a hero mounted on a winged horse, whom the natives supposed to represent one of their Horuses. In a similar order of ideas, King Qoftarim had erected a copper idol above the four gates of his city, the influence of which put to sleep strangers who wished to enter; if they no one blew into their faces, they no longer awoke, and they died in their sleep. He also built an elegant lighthouse of colored glass, on a base of copper, and then he planted on the top an idol of glass holding in his hand a bow which seemed soft; it turned itself to all the winds, and as soon as a stranger arrived, it stopped him on the spot, and he did not stir any more until they came to rescue him. King Adīm, having built a marble bridge, placed four idols oriented to the four cardinal points. They brandished swords, which they struck down on anyone approaching in their direction. The rebel ’Ūnā perched large images of eagles on the ramparts of his palace, erected at each corner a rider armed with a sword and looking outside the city, guarded the gates with magic scorpions that stopped foreigners when a resident of the city did not accompany them. Most other sovereigns had also resorted to such means of defense, but the description given to us of their marvelous devices varies only in detail: they are always moving figures which immobilize. I do not believe that there is anything of the kind in the hieroglyphic documents known hitherto, but a similar conception had existed in Egypt before the Muslim conquest. A novel of the pseudo-Callisthenes, begins, as we know, with the fabulous story of the last indigenous Pharaoh, Nectanebo. This Nectanebo was considered to be one of the most formidable magicians in the world, and he deserved this reputation, if we may judge by the ingenious methods which he applied to the defense of his kingdom. “When a force of enemies approached him, he did not summon the militia, nor prepare for war, but shut himself up alone in a secret chamber of his palace, taking care to carry off a basin with him. He filled it with very pure water. He modeled with wax a miniature vessel, and he furnished it with small figures of men. As soon as he had launched his skiff over the basin, everything seemed to come alive and be set into motion. He then seized his wand of ebony, conjured by terrible incantations the gods of heaven and hell, and tried to sink the boat with their aid. As soon as the latter had been shipwrecked and its crew with it, all the enemies whose approach had been announced perished in the waves.” Here the talisman, instead of being permanent, must be constructed and consecrated to every new occasion, but the principle does not differ, and in the Alexandrian Greek as in the Arabic, the mechanism of the operation is the same. The prepared figure protects the city or the kingdom, and its virtue takes the place of the armies of which the other sovereigns were satisfied. I may add that it is possible to follow certain details of the Greek narrative even in writings written in the Egyptian language. This wax boat of which Nectanebo serves, is found in the novel of Satni, with his galley slaves endowed with movement. Satni builds them to securely reach the place of the Nile where the grimoire of Thot is hidden. They lead him there, and after having rowed, they work with him to drain the river to the necessary point. The very material that Nectanebo employs is the magical matter used in such cases by the Egyptians of the pharaonic period. In the Tale of Cheops, it is with wax that a magician kneads the crocodile which, thrown into the water, animates and devours the adulterous page. The builders and decorators of the temples had besides, to place on the lintels of the gates, on the pylons, along the lateral walls, ligatures which constituted real talismans: the winged disk, flanked by two uraeae, alone or containing the scarabs, and before whom “the wicked fall in every place where they are,” the lion's fore-bodies serving as a gutter, the cornices bordered by a line of erect uraeae, the doors themselves being phylacteries which kept the enemy away. We can follow the development of the same superstition from ancient times to the centuries of Islam. At first, any decoration being a protection in itself, the figures or symbols carved around the gates of the cities, the only parts of the enclosure which were mostly made of stone, constituted real defenses against any enemy, visible or invisible. This idea became restricted in time to a small number of these images, which the popular belief deemed more effective than the others, but as the quantity diminished, their virtues would grow and expand. The talismans of this type no longer acted only against the enemy which approached them: they now signaled the imminence of danger, they struck at a distance, and the operator could concentrate and direct their energies at the point of attack, to strike whomever he pleases. The talismanic defense of houses or human cities is a pharaonic conception as well as the rest of the magical ideas, only it has become more precise and surrounded by more and more marvelous fantasies as Egypt aged, attaining its last degree of strangeness in the books from which our author derived information.
I have avoided pointing out, in passing, the resemblances which many of these stories present with certain narratives common in our countries here in the West. Nevertheless, I cannot refrain from discussing this part of my subject for even two more words. I will confine myself to taking some of the prodigies attributed [in the Middle Ages] to Virgil, and of which we find the equivalent in the Akhbār al-zamān. It is well known that the magician-poet had filled firsts Naples and then Rome with marvelous works: a bronze horse, “a guarantor against sickness – whenever a horse was ill – such that those which gazed upon it were cured; a bronze fly, which, when exposed in one place in the town, prevented all flies from penetrating the enclosure; the brazen statue which held a bow, and which threatened the top of the valley with an arrow, in order to prevent the eruption of the volcano.” We have already met the archer among the talismans described by our author; the horse and the fly, in spite of their contrary properties, belong to the same entirely Egyptian concept: the like is saved or destroyed by its fellows. Considering that it was enough for a woman to touch the breast of a talismanic idol, a cow or a woman, so that her own breasts would be filled with milk, one should not find difficulty in admitting that a simulacrum of a vigorous horse, enchanted in a certain way, rendered vigorous all the horses which entered its sphere of magical influence. By an analogous effect, an image of man or animal, enchanted in a contrary manner, was to injure men or animals of the same species, which exposed themselves to its aura. The Akhbār al-zamān not only knows the fly that slays flies, as the Virgilian legend, but the lion that kills lions, and twenty other beasts fatal to their own race. King Marqūnos had made “images of reptiles, frogs, beetles, flies, scorpions, and various insects were manufactured; these images, placed anywhere, attracted similar beasts, paralyzed them, and kept them until they should die or someone came to kill them” (Akhbār 2.8). Elsewhere, images of crows fascinate crows, and everywhere there is one key difference between the Oriental and Western variants: the animal is not simply kept apart or destroyed by the talisman, as in the Virgilian legend; he is fascinated and struck with immobility until he dies or is killed. This trait of fascination is of the purest Egyptian. I insisted elsewhere on the fascinating power that many animals, such as the crocodile, the lion, the oryx, and the serpents, exert by their gaze, voice, touch, movement, or by a particular approach. They were defended by invocations engraved on a stela, or on an amulet in the form of a stela, which could be carried on oneself and which constituted a real talisman. On one of the faces was a Horus, a child, standing atop two crocodiles and brandishing a handful of lions, gazelles, scorpions, and serpents. Did the authors who provided the subject matter of the Akhbār al-zamān have in mind a stela of this kind, describing one of the talismans whose erection they attributed to an ancient sovereign? Qoftarim had erected a “a copper pillar bearing the image of a bird; when the big cats, lions, and snakes approached the city, the bird emitted a shrill whistle which put them to flight” (Akhbār 2.3). The bird is not defined, but the bird which is most frequently seen on a column in the pharaonic monuments is the hawk, the bird of Horus, and I do not doubt that we can recognize one here. Horus, whether he was a hawk or a child, was the enemy of the evil eye, and his eye was one of the most powerful weapons available against fascination. He set in motion a whole legion of geniuses, whom we see on the Stela of Metternich, the most beautiful of these stelae of Horus, of which I have just spoken. A fashion for them spread in Greek times, among the Alexandrians as well as among the natives, and it persisted under the Roman Empire, at the time when all our talismans were in fashion. Even today, in the Saud, I saw fellahs wearing amulets, or placing frogs in green paste and serpent heads in enameled earth in a corner of their house, in order to keep away poisonous insects and the reptiles.
I will not speak of the magic mirror or warrior, erected by Virgil at Rome, in the palace of the Emperor, and of which the like are met in every instance in the Akhbār al-zamān. It seems to me from the analysis of the texts that the Arab legends and Western legends have drawn from a common source that which they know about talismans and works of magic. This source is probably the same one that the Muslim writers indicate, the pages of the Copts, the books of the Copts, the ancient accounts interpreted by the Copts, and whose authenticity is admitted by M. Carra de Vaux. Whether these documents were at least partly from writings in the Coptic language, there are several indications that this is the case. The author, speaking of the thirty companions of Miṣraīm, all giants, affirms that “built a city they called Māfah, a name which in their language meant thirty. This is the city of Manf (Memphis)” (Akhbār 2.3). Mefi is indeed a variant of the name of Memphis, which must be very old, since the Hebrew prophet Hosea already knows it; It derives very naturally from the primitive name Mānnofirū, by Mannūfi, Memphi. And therefore it does not have the meaning that the Arabic attributes to it. However, a man speaking the language of the country, only a Copt, could think of bringing it closer to the word, which means thirty in Egyptian, maav, maave. If we search well, we should find two or three other passages which indicate in the primitive author an exact knowledge of the native dialects of Egypt. The first historian who wrote these so-called annals of kings in Arabic must have learned, at least in part, from the Coptic books to which he refers, and according to Oriental practice every extract he makes of them reproduces very literally the original text. That there were natives books in which the wonders of the country were described, and its legends told in detail, is not unlikely in itself, since we have found in the scraps of this library fragments of a Coptic version of the Alexander Romance: the miraculous biography of the old pharaohs obviously interested the inhabitants of Egypt as much as that of the Macedonian conqueror, and the immensity of the temples or ruined cities beside which they lived must necessarily have kept alive in their minds the memory of the legends that made up history. These books were, in their final form, works written by Copts, that is, by Egyptians who had converted to Christianity; the intimate way in which the Biblical legends are mingled with it, and the perpetual mention of the monks is proof of this. On the other hand, facts on which I shall have to insist later, show that these Coptic works were themselves, like the Alexander Romance, only the adaptation of older Greek writings. We know with what care the Greeks of Egypt had described the principal cities of the country, Alexandria, Naucratis, Arsinoë, Hemopolis, Memphis. These historical descriptions were readily complemented by extravagant details of the gods, cults, monuments, machines, and fables which the pseudo-Callisthenes put down about Alexandria, show us how much the fantastic prevailed over the real in about the fourth century of our era, when the oldest portions of the novel were fixed almost in their entirety: one would say than an extract from a book on the Mirabilia Alexandriae, analogous to the work which we know as the Mirabilia Romae, and the same love of the marvelous which had thus distorted the history of Alexandria had no more respect for the other cities of Egypt. It is these treatises of Marvels, now lost, that the Copts must have translated from the Greek, as they had translated the Alexander Romance, probably by mixing traditions of their time then current among the people. To sum up, if we admit the data which seem to result clearly from this discussion, the pharaonic tradition has arrived at the author of the Akhbār al-zamān and the Arabic writers who preceded it through two series of intermediary works, books written in Greek where the oddities and fabulous history of Egypt were told, and Coptic translations of the Greek books where the original texts were enriched with new legends and miracles.
(The continuation will appear in our next issue.)
Second Article
I have preferably insisted on the very direct relationship which unites the marvels of the Akhbār al-zamān to the marvels of the Egyptian pharaonic period. It necessarily combines in them the reminiscences of all the periods through which Egypt had traversed since the fall of the native dynasties, and consequently the Greco-Roman elements are encountered in number. Natural sciences, mechanics, medicine, and astronomy had grown too much in the schools of Alexandria, so that the results would have gone unnoticed in the rest of the country. No one among the provincials was aware of the existence of a monument such as the lighthouse, whose glory ran through the world, and what they saw or heard of mirrors or automatons made by physicists of the great city excited their curiosity, but they succeeded, as well as the Egyptians of today, in conceiving of natural explanations which were furnished to them by their action. Steam is, for the modern fellah, an ifrit [i.e., a spirit] which the Europeans imprison in a boiler by prestige and magic art. As for lighthouses and mirrors, the ancient fellah incessantly persuaded himself that there was witchcraft hidden in the ingenious inventions of his contemporaries, and he soon made them rank among the talismans of extreme occult virtue. The mirrors reflected the four parts of the world with the travelers who were going towards Egypt, or they immobilized the ships which pretended to escape the tolls imposed by the sovereigns. The lighthouses were no more than towers intended to carry the miraculous mirrors, or the images charged with defending the cities. It would be curious to analyze narratives of this kind, for there would sometimes be recollections of devices analogous to those of the Alexandrian engineers. I would prefer to approach, without further delay, the discussion of a different order of facts: the origin of the names disguising the kings of the Akhbār, and the composition of the dynasties among which these kings are distributed.
Many names have a characteristic aspect, and they appear at first glance to fall into several categories, each of which has its particular origin. Some are Greek or Hebrew; a rather small quantity of them are Arabic, a greater number Egyptian, but with a Hebrew or Hellenic twist; the remainder are Egyptian, but have assumed a form so bizarre that one can no longer recognize them. Such a mixture ought not to astonish in an area where so many heterogeneous races have dominated in turn; we should even expect it a priori after the three revolutions Egypt has undergone since the fourth century: the Macedonian conquest, the triumph of Christianity, and the Muslim occupation. The Arab component is very weak, and one can easily recognize it from the moment one realizes that fabulous history is a compilation executed at the expense of Byzantine works soon after taking possession. The first of the newcomers who wrote it were too recent in the valley to have had time to spread their own traditions, and, as soon as they had published it in their language, the success it obtained everywhere that Arabic was spoken, caused it to be read so keenly that their successors could no longer modify it sensibly, on pain of appearing to distort it.
Al-Wālīd is a Muslim import, as are Mālīk, and Bedrah, and Dulaīfah, and half a dozen others, but more than one on which one is tempted to impose such an extraction is after all an Arabized Egyptian. Al-Būdashīr is allowed to return very well to the old language, despite his borrowed article, and his moniker decomposes exactly into Pū-tashīr, “the red house,” and as in Ashmūn, Ṣā, and Atrib one guesses in him an eponym for the royal deity. The purely Greco-Roman element is less strong than the Arab: It is found in Filamun-Felimūn, which answers either to Philemon or Philammon; and it is in Markūnos, where one senses an elongation of Markos; and in Marqūrah-Merkūreh, coming from the Merkūrios of Christian hagiography; and in Tūsidūn-Nūsidūn, where a simple rectification of the diacritical points brings back to Būsidūn, the Poseidon of mythology or its derivative Posidonios. The Hebrew names are usually betrayed by their final in īm, and the Christians have extracted them from the Bible in order: Miṣraīm, Shimun, Qofṭarīm, Khaṣlīm, and Lūjīm. Miṣraīm is sometimes stripped his Hebrew garment and has reduced himself to Miṣr. Shimun is a derivative of Simon Magus, the one whose faithful had kept a memory, if a lamentable one. Khaṣlīm and Lūjīm appear to be confounded with two of the sons whom the Holy Scripture assigned to Mizraim, Casluhim and Ludim, and Qofṭarīm is undoubtedly the Caphtorim of the same genealogy. False analogies have increased this series with an important name: Qoftīm or Qobtīm, the mythical ancestor of the Copts. The name for the Egyptians, Αἴγυπτος, by which the Greeks and Romans officially designated their native subjects, had altered to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the spoken language, whereas Kovt, Koft, and Kopt sounded like the [city of] Coptos, and the identity of pronunciation led to the belief in the identity of etymology. Of Coptos herself, to whom could she owe her name? Kobt-Qoft, the eponym of Coptos and the Egyptians, was not, however, among the children of Mizraim, and it was necessary to guess a means of introducing him to it: a passage from the Akhbār, where the author, listing the four sovereigns who shared Egypt after the Deluge, gives Qobtīm instead of Qofṭarīm, which is usually found in this place, seems to show that Kobt-Qoft, father of the Copts, had begun to be assimilated with the one of the sons of Mizraim whose name most resembled his own, Casluhim, and one of the methods used in the old onomastics facilitated the operation. Zosirkērā, the “Saint who is the double of the Sun,” was abbreviated to Zosirkē, “the Saint who is the double,” and Zosirkē or Zosirkērā indifferently designated the Pharaoh Amenhotep I. By dint of dropping the -rā, the people had persuaded themselves that they had the right to add it to names which did not include it: Thus, we see Apōpi-rā and Khufu-rā, instead of Apōpi or Khufu-Cheops. Caphtorim-Qofṭarīm was at Qoft what Sosirkeres was at Zosirkes, and might seem like an authentic doublet, especially if the final -im which distinguishes the sons of Mizraim in the Bible were joined to Kobt-Qoft. Once installed, Qobtīm did not take long to take over the predominant role; he took for himself the title of Mizraim’s son, and he retained Qofṭarīm for his own son to him, Qobtīm. The series Mizraim-Caphtorim of Genesis now yielded to the series Miṣraīm-Qobtīm-Qofṭarīm, and it descended from the Byzantines to the Arabs along with the rest of the fabulous history.
It goes without saying that the Hebrew names were not borrowed directly from the Jews or from the Hebrew language; they emanate from the Greek of the Septuagint, or from the Coptic translations executed according to the Septuagint. This curious fact proves once again how little the editors of this history had drawn from the purely indigenous sources, for the Egyptian names themselves are not admitted with their real physiognomy, but they had to dress up in Greek, like the others, before reaching the Arab compilers. The most characteristic example of this indirect transmission is provided by a certain Afrāūs, Afrūs, whose ancient prototype is Apries-Waphres [Wahibre Haaibre]. Wafres, one of the few Pharaohs named in the Bible [Jeremiah 44:30] owed this peculiarity to being popular among the Jews of Alexandria. At the moment when the Ptolemies, faced with the annals of Egypt, sought synchronizations with their own annals, some of their scholars made use of him according to the needs of their systems: Eupolemus declared him a contemporary of David and said he opened an epistolary correspondence with Solomon, but others preferred that he should have been the pharaoh defeated by Cambyses. His name, Apries, Aprias, and Waphres, Quaphris, was bound by its termination in -os, and it was with it that he appeared in the Byzantine histories which the Arabs have exploited. Menes is rendered by the same into Menaūs, and if Manqāūs is not the equivalent of Menakhos [Menemachus or Menalces (?), in Apollodorus, Library 2.1.5], one of the sons of Aegyptus in the Alexandrian legend, then, perhaps, there is to be recognized a widening of the theme of Menes, Menkaū, “the one whose duplicates are stable,” instead of Manu, “the stable one.” The ambiguity produced by the abuse of the Greek terminations makes one sometimes hesitate between two conjectures: Is Marinos a Greco-Roman name, Marinos, or the variant of the Egyptian Mares, Maris, “the friend of Ra”? The name Mares was highly prized by the chronographers, and Eratosthenes had it admitted into his Canon three times with different shades of spelling, Marēs, Maris and Meuris; an imaginary successor of Amasis was called Maros or Mendes, and Merri, Merris, Merrine was a daughter of the so-called pharaoh Palmanothes, a contemporary of Moses (Diodorus, Library 1.61 and 97). The Merrine variant of Merri would justify the Marinos variant of Mari. It should be noted, moreover, that this final -inos appears to have been used very early for the transcriptions of Egyptian names, noted already in Herodotus: The Ionian settlers established in Egypt, in the fifth century BC, said Mykerinos, instead of Menkeres, which was the legitimate equivalent of Menkara or Menkaūra. The Armālīnūs of the Akhbār is also, I believe, one of these compounds, and the classical legend knew an Arminos of analogous assonance, to which it attributed a reform of the calendar. The two are probably, like Armittos, variants of of Armaios and Armais, the Pharaoh Harmhabi [i.e., Horemheb]. The ending -es, so frequent in Greek transcriptions, is found less frequently than the terminal -os in the Akhbār: it is nevertheless found there, rendered by -is according to the laws of iotacism, and several of the words which are thus indicated let themselves be interpreted without too much difficulty. Tūtis is thus called after the god Thot. Bilāṭis contains the masculine article pi, and the tradition which retained awareness of it called the same king of Bilāṭis or Lazar indifferently. Is it not the same name as that of that shepherd Philitis, of whom Herodotus (2.128) speaks in telling us about the Pyramids? Tedāris is a faulty reading, and the manuscripts give us Badaris, a doublet Peteres, from Petephres, the gift of Ra, the master of Joseph in the Bible. We see how difficult it is to restore orthography and meaning. The confusion of letters which is inevitable in Arabic writing has multiplied the errors, and as these were aggravated by copying copies of copies. The names are so distorted today that one often despairs when the terminations of Greek or Hebrew were lacking from the beginning or fell away over time, a single index that guides us to appreciate their value and to assure us whether certain names came out or did not come out of the old indigenous background, through the multiplicity of metamorphoses which they have undergone. If the scribes have titled the same king Harjit, Harjib, Hūjit, and Hūjib, it is because they understood nothing at all, and because the word was not Arabic. And if, on the other hand, it does not betray any kinship with Greek or Hebrew, we may assume that it is Egyptian, without improbability; but what prototype is concealed under this floating disguise? Perhaps one would succeed in distinguishing among the varied readings the one which would make it possible to unmask it, but it would be enormously difficult for such a miniscule return. Nevertheless, it suffices that I have shown that the greater number of these Baroque names belong to the pure or the Grecian Egyptian, and consequently represent an Egyptian tradition anterior to the Muslim invasion.
And now, how are we to classify and organize the dynasties? It must be pointed out at the outset that the Akhbār al-zamān and most of the Arabic writings of the same kind do not pretend to present to us the whole history of Egypt, but only the events which succeed each other from the beginning of the empire to the death of the pharaoh of the Exodus. The present scheme comprises, in the first place, seventeen kings prior to the deluge, from Naqrāūs to Far’ān, the summary account of the Deluge, the advent of Miṣraīm, the reign of Qofṭīm, and the partition of the country between four dynasties. A few generations later, the pharaoh of Abraham appears, and soon after, the invasion of the Amalekites ends the line of Sa. Then comes the Pharaoh of Joseph, then that of Moses, after which the narration is interrupted just at the moment when the charioteers and the horsemen have just drowned themselves in the Red Sea. It is the history of Egypt adapted to that of the Hebrews, and this manner of expressing it, which moreover corresponds to that of the Byzantine chronographic histories, cannot have prevailed before the triumph of Christianity. The Flood marks the climax; but that idea was alien to the pharaonic ages, and if some of them later knew it through the intervention of the Jews, it was much too contrary to the local religions for the fabulous chronicle to take hold, as long as the mass of the population remained pagan. When it was necessary to introduce it, the operation did not fail to present some difficulty. First of all, Jewish or Christian chronographic histories, meeting Menes at the start of the authentic lists, had identified him with Mizraim, the grandson of Noah, the same who was the ancestor of the Egyptians, according to the sacred books. This most accepted identification of all should have obliged the storytellers to remove the Flood back before all royalty, but, on the other hand, a tradition had been established which placed the pyramids in connection with the Universal Cataclysm, and moreover, the variants were too widespread that it could ever permitted to neglect them. The people had long regarded the Memphite or Theban tombs as mysterious magazines, where the ancestors had buried their mummies and treasures with the talismans and books that had enabled them to multiply miracles. Their spirit-duplicates themselves guarded them and gave battle to those who penetrated into them to despoil them: What is the demotic novel of Satni-Khamois, if not the account of a struggle for the possession of the grimoire of Thot by a sorcerer, a son of a king and a magician, also still alive, against a family of other sorcerers, also sons of a king, but buried for centuries? When the Jews and then the Christians visited the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, they could not be persuaded that so much labor had been lavished on them for the safety of a single corpse, or for the ultimate earthly happiness of a single soul, and they believed, with the neighboring fellahs, that the pictures drawn on the walls were eternal memories of the arts and sciences practiced by the old sages, that the inscriptions revealed to those learned in hieroglyphics the formulas necessary to gain the wisdom of the pictures, and wondering for what purpose they had wished to preserve the resources of a complete civilization, they imagined in the past the only motive capable of justifying such a precaution, the fear of the Deluge where all mankind had perished, except Noah and the people of his family. It was affirmed in Alexandria in the fourth century, and Ammianus Marcellinus (Roman History 22.15.30) tells us, that former masters of these ancient rites, foreseeing the catastrophe, feared that the memory of their ceremonies might be obliterated, so they dug tortuous underground vaults in various places. There they carved many images of birds and beasts, and these innumerable figures of animals were called by the hieroglyphic letters. Such an idea was proclaimed for the Theban tombs, but it was also applied to the Memphite pyramid, but without completely succeeding in superseding competing theories, for example, that they honor the Jews persecuted after Joseph, or that the Jews were pleased to venerate in them the seven granaries built by the Patriarch to house wheat. But astrological speculations ensured the triumph of those who pretended them to be contemporaries of the Deluge. We read in the Akhbār al-zamān and in a number of Arab writers that one night the [celestial] sphere descended in a dream, in the likeness of a woman, to Sūrīd the son of Sahlūq: the earth was immediately overthrown with its inhabitants, and the sun was eclipsed. The college of priests, presided over by Filimun, consulted the stars, and announced, according to their conjunctions, a deluge of water which would partially destroy humanity, then a deluge of fire which would annihilate the universe forever. Sūrīd then constructed the three pyramids of Giza in order to deposit therein the talismans invented up to that time, and the books which contained the annals of the past, or the laws of all sciences. There was also a sum of wealth which cannot be valued. The name of the magician, Filimun-Philemon, is already indicative of a Byzantine origin, and other details confirm this first impression. Our text describes the positions which the planets occupy during the two deluges, and cites the names in Greek: Zaūs, Arys, Afrūdita, Qrūnos, Silina, Ailiūs, with Arabic translation. It is likely that, when the astrological charts of everything that attracted attention, people or things, were drawn up under one of the Caesars, some dreamer dreamed of reconstructing that of the Pyramids; he, or others after him, found the horoscope quite similar to that of the Deluge and concluded that the construction of the monuments must have been contemporaneous with the disaster, or preceded it by only a little bit. He remained unacquainted with the claim that they had been built, like the obelisks, in order to preserve the deposited science against the waters. This datum contradicted a priori that which results from the assimilation of Menes to Mizraim. The chronographers were not unaware that the pyramids were the work of Cheops, of Chephren, of Mykerinos, and the storytellers themselves, who substituted apocryphal sovereigns for these pharaohs, did not doubt that their heroes would be posterior to the first human king; they were therefore obliged to place the Deluge after Menes. Now Menes was Mizraim, and Mizraim had come down into Africa after the Deluge. They split the difference in this dilemma by splitting the most troublesome personage, and it was decided that there would be three Mizraims. The first had flowered four generations after the creation, and was called a son of Marākil, son of Dāwil, son of ‘Arbāq, son of Adam. He had not reigned himself, but his son Naqrāūs, the giant, fleeing the hegemony of the children of Cain, had colonized the valley with seventy horsemen and a few of the descendants of ‘Arbāq, and had exercised royal authority there. He was succeeded by his own son, also named Mizraim, like the grandfather, and this was the second Mizraim. The third manifested immediately after the deluge; he was the son of Baīṣar, son of Ham, son of Noah. An arrangement which maintained the identity of a Mizraim with Menes, placed the erection of the Pyramids before the Flood and after Mizraim, and did not prevent the appearance of a Mizraim after the Deluge raised no serious objections: at most, certain details were debated, such how to know which of the three had lent his name to the country. Many were inclined toward the last, the only one that appeared in Genesis, but others gave glory to the second and they asserted that Mizraim, son of Ham, was thus named after him whose name he had found engraved on the stones and that Filimun, the priest, had in fact instructed him in the history of Egypt. This system was already complete in Byzantine times, for the author of the Akhbār al-zamān says that he borrowed from the records of the priests and the Egyptians what he relates of Naqrāūs, Mizraim II, and Mizraim III. Let me add, to finish with this point of my subject, that the name of Naqrāūs is of Egyptian-Greek origin, Nakhēros, Nakhôr, Narakhos. A Nakhēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses, and a Nakhor or Narakho is indicated by the Christian chronographic histories (Chronicon Pasquale, Cedrenus 1.37, etc.) as the successor of Sesostris.
So much for the general plan: the distribution of the dynasties betrays a similar origin in an antecedent to Islam. Until the Deluge the sovereigns reign successively, each over the whole of the country, but they are not yet ordinary beings. The author of the Akhbār expressly says of several that they were giants, and the overall context allows us to think that even those who did not qualify as such were nevertheless also of colossal size, including the kings and their subjects, at least those who had been the fathers of the people, the seventy and some-odd number of the race of ‘Arbāq. We immediately think of those giants who were born of the union of angels with the daughters of men [Genesis 6:1-4], and which the Book of Enoch had made popular throughout the Judeo-Christian world. Thus, Panodorus had abused these Egregores [i.e., the Watchers] to reconcile the limited chronology of the Bible with the almost unlimited chronology of the pagan Annalists of Egypt. Their semi-celestial nature had induced him to compare them to the dynasties of demi-gods or manes which joined the era of creation to that of Menes-Mizraim; he gave them the merit of having taught astronomy as well as science to humans, and his idea was found in our fabulous chronicle, for it is to the giant kings that the Akhbār al-zamān attributes the invention of magic, astrology and talismans. In contrast to the Egypt of antediluvian times, that of post-diluvian times was divided into several states whose dynasties reigned simultaneously, and here again the Arabs merely developed one of the ideas of the Byzantine period. Manetho presented the various families of the pharaohs as having exercised power one after the other, from Menes to Nectanebo. The compilers of his lists had preserved the order in which he had enumerated them, and the number of years assigned to each of them, but adding up the sum of their reigns furnished a total so considerable that it could not be reconciled, at least not without artifice, with the small number of centuries which calculations established on the biblical data showed to have elapsed since the age of Menes-Mizraim. Among other methods used to eliminate the contradiction between the two chronologies, it was naturally thought that several of the most inconvenient dynasties ran parallel to one another, and this is one of the solutions which Eusebius already attempted in the fourth century. He admitted that the Thinites had reigned here, the Memphites there, the Saites and the Ethiopians elsewhere, perhaps others in other places, and it was probably to him that the fabulous history borrowed the idea of the four dynasties: after Mizraim, the eponymous Hebrew of Egypt, there was enthroned Qofṭīm, the Greek-Egyptian eponym of the Copts, then, after Qofṭīm, he divided his empire between his four sons, Qoftarim, Ashmūn, Atrib, and Ṣā. Ṣā is at first sight merely the city of Sais made into a hero, and his lineage is the equivalent of the Saites indicated in the hypothesis of Eusebius. But he is apparently the only one of these personages that can be reduced to a relatively old origin. This is only superficial, for analysis furnishes for two of them curious comparisons with rather ancient names. I have insinuated that Qoftarim is a doublet of Qofṭīm, and his domain includes, in fact, Coptos, Dendera, and the cities of Middle Egypt, with no definite limits. But, as we have seen, it is the popular etymology above all which has located him in Coptos: He was first of all the Egyptian, that is, Mephite, for that term for Egypt derives from the sacred name of Memphis, Hai[t]kuphtah. This Coptic dynasty had thus become a Memphite dynasty supposedly contemporary to the Saite dynasties. Ashmūn is the patron of Ashmunein [i.e. Hermopolis], and in other words he is Thoth, Khmun, the god of the Eight, and more than one detail shows that his divine nature was not entirely forgotten at the moment when he was chosen to be one of the terrestrial pharaohs: His taste for the arts was left to him, his native equity, his qualities as a sorcerer, as a healing physician, and as master of all the sciences. It is also written in the Akhbār that, in the year 66 of the Hegira, in the time of ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ibn Marwīn, a man strayed into the wilderness, came to a ruined city. He found a tree loaded with fruit, of which he ate, and for which he carried off provisions. A Copt explained to the governor that this was one of the two cities of Hermes—the other being Ashmunein—and he was not mistaken (Akhbār 2.4). Thoth the Dog-Headed possessed in Nubia a town named Pinubsu, in Greek Pnups, the house of the Nubsu tree, the napeca, and we find even under the Caesars a large tree of this species to which the inhabitants offered cultic worship. The ruined city and the tree of the Akhbār are evidently the Pnups and the napeca of Nubia, dispatched to the desert by the imagination of the people after the fall of paganism. Ashmūn is Hermes-Thoth, but how did Thoth, who already figured into the divine dynasties, became a king of the human dynasties, grandson of Menes-Miaraim? The metamorphosis had once again taken place by means of an etymology. The lists of Manetho ascribe after Menes two princes, his son and grandson, whose names, distinct by spelling and unrelated to that of the god, both sounded like the god Atuti in pronunciation, in the Greek transcription, Athothes. The assonance between Atuti and a frequent name, Thutii, that often belongs to Thoth, had misled the Egyptians so well that the dragomans of Eratosthenes translated Έρμογὲνης as “the race of Hermes,” the names of these personages being Athothes I and II. The confusion once established, tradition attributed to the one of these kings the character and works of the god: Manetho already said that he had practiced medicine and composed treaties on anatomy. The tradition collected by the author of the Akhbār derives from Manetho as its ultimate source, but the instinct of symmetry had led a Byzantine author to replace the proper name of the god with one of his nicknames, which made the eponymous name of Athrib correspond to the Athrib of the eastern Delta, and there are perhaps conclusions to be drawn from the preference which this place is afforded relative to Tanis, to Mendes, and to all its neighbors, for it had a very short period of prosperity under the Byzantine Caesars, then declined rapidly under the Arabs. Therefore, the choice of its name to designate one of the four great subdivisions of the country can scarcely have been known before or after this moment of brief flowering: Is this not a means of calculating the date when the Chronicle used by the Muslim writers was definitively drafted?
I would like to present some additional proof, and confirm by the details of each reign the conclusions to which I have reached in general terms, but to do so would unduly lengthen an already too long article, and I would rather examine a new point in order to obtain it. Let us examine whether some general information, which is mentioned here and there in the Akhbār, has been inserted by the Arab authors, or whether it was included in earlier writings. If this information was older, did it reproduce with sufficient fidelity the documents of the pharaonic age? Let us take the material in the chapter by which the work begins. The author treats of diviners and priests, of their virtues, of their science, of the severe regime they had imposed on the king, of the apparatuses which they deployed when they went to the council. It shows that Egypt was divided into eighty-five nomes, of which forty-five were in the Delta, and forty in the Sa’id. Each of the nomes had its prince of the priests, whose chief was the Nazir, the observer of the stars. The Nāzir was so well regarded that the king rose at his approach and invited him to sit beside him. Before promulgating a law, he consulted each of the priests; he asked each the location of the star that he was serving, and when he was acquainted with all that concerned the present position of the seven planets he said, “The king must now act thus, eating this or that food, having intercourse with women at such times,” and he explained in this way everything which seemed good. A scribe stood before the king and wrote down all the words of the Nāzir. He then turned to the artisans, and they went to the house of wisdom in order to apply to it the work he was to accomplish that day (Akhbār 2.1). The number of nomes has been doubled, but there was not a Muslim, nor even a Christian of the time of Heraclius, who could know of the existence of a chief of the priesthood, a first prophet of the local god in each of them: The Byzantine author had to draw from some source from the good old days, as is evident from the passage in which the king’s relations with the Nāzir are defined. Diodorus of Sicily (Library 1.70) had exhibited, in effect, according to the lost romance of Hecataeus of Abdera, what the life of the pharaohs was like, and how minutely each hour was filled with duties determined in advance. After rushing from his rising to the most urgent business, the sovereign proceeded to his dress, and then sacrificed to the gods. The rite accomplished, the high priest standing beside him, he prayed for him aloud in the presence of the people, praised him, and reminded him of the essential duties of royalty, and then the writer of the sacred records recalled similar events from the sacred books; he developed this with examples borrowed from the lives of illustrious men. The Nāzir was so well regarded that the king rose at his approach and invited him to sit beside him. In order to impose a law, he consulted every priest. The whole day’s occupation was ordered point by point, even in the most intimate questions, the hour of the walk, of the ablutions, of the commerce with the women. The role of the king, that of the high priest, and that of the hierarchy are identical in both cases, as well as the meticulous regulation of royal acts, only tradition has been imbued with astrology between the Ptolemies and the Caliphs. It is no longer the precepts of the divine law that interest, but the revelations of the planets, and the high priest of old has become the great observer of the stars. The same change took place in all the priests of the nomes, and their powers as sorcerers prevailed over the priestly virtues of the past. When a matter was pressing, the King of the Akhbār called them all together outside Misr, and they arrived at the rendezvous, “assembled one before the other, clapping their hands like a drum, and each operating a prodigy. One had a bright face like sunlight, and nobody could look at him; another had a finger of green and red stone and was wearing a woven gold robe; he was mounted on a lion and was girded with big snakes; he had above his head a dome of fire or precious stones; and the prodigies were diverse, since each priest had been taught by the star that served him. When they arrived before the king, the priests said, ‘The king has called us to such a cause, and is concerned in thinking about it. The correct solution is the following’” (Akkbar 2.1). It was indeed the custom, at least under the Ptolemies, that the king should summon the priests of all the temples in council to deliberate on public affairs, and the decrees of Rosetta and Canopis, to cite only the most celebrated, were promulgated after synods of this kind. We do not know how they went there, but we know, from written texts and bas-reliefs, what costumes they wore and what order they observed in certain solemn processions. A singer opened the march with a musical instrument, then came the astrologer holding a timepiece and a branch of a palm tree, the sacred scribe with his feathers, armed with his palette and papyrus in a roll, the stolist with cubit and the purification vessel; the prophet walked behind these priests, recognizable by the sacred seal and followed by the bearers of the loaves (Clement of Alexandria Stromata 6.4). The persons enumerated here belong to the same clergy; when the clergy of all the gods were assembled, the chief priests of each nome marched each group to its geographical rank. Their insignia were those of their gods, and some of them are to be found in the description of the Akhbār: Thus, the dome, or, more exactly, the ball of fire or jewels, is the solar disk; the green stone is the ring with a mafkait stone, that is to say, one of those green substances, sulfate of copper or some other, which the Egyptians loved so strongly, and so on. Here again, the general design of the piece is exact and comes from an ancient source; the predominance of magical theories has distorted the meaning and transformed the setting of the stage.
Once again, we infer an ancient document under the Arabic text, and we are led to suppose that the fabulous story of the Akhbār was not made by Muslim writers with elements from outside. They received it, ready-made, from natives who had recorded it in books originally written in Greek, but perhaps translated into Coptic as was one of the redactions of the Alexander Romance. They rendered it in their own language, and it seemed to them so plausible that they all repeated it over and over again, almost in the same terms, except to enrich it with unpublished details, especially in those places which concerned the pharaohs of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. The very manner in which the dynasties are combined, and how the narrative is conducted, means that the first of the Muslim storytellers who wrote it did not have at his disposal several Greek or Coptic works, the details of which he arranged as he judged suitable; instead, he knew of one which he transcribed faithfully. I think, however, that this work must have existed in several drafts as different in certain respects as those of the Pseudo-Callisthenes. The life of Naqrāūs, for example, was exhibited in variants such that one of the Arab scribes thought to divide him and admit the existence of two successive kings named Naqrāūs. If there were other fabulous stories of the same kind, as is probable, the Arab author did not know them and they are lost to us. They had been composed by Christians, who themselves had in most cases confined themselves to compiling pagan works of the same kind and adapting them to the frameworks of Biblical chronology. When attempts are made to analyze, through so many intermediaries, the documents used in these first collections which are at present unknown, two facts at first sight amaze us: first, the character of the recorded events, and second, the absence of the authentic pharaohs and their replacement by pharaohs created from scratch. I have elsewhere pointed out that the most fantastic narratives have an Egyptian tone, and that the marvelous proceeds directly from the marvels of ancient Egypt. The substitution of the imaginary pharaohs for the real ones is nothing to astonish an Egyptologist. The scribes of Thebes and Memphis had composed from time immemorial novels, the heroes of which were famous kings, Thuthmosis III, Ramses II, Usirtasen I, Cheops, Snefru, Ahmasis, sometimes bore fictitious names, Rhampsinitos, Meinebphtah, Asychis, Anysis, or titles used as names, like Pharaoh and Proteus. The chroniclers of the later ages had been deceived by appearances, and they had admitted several of these characters without consistency in the series of princely families: Manetho himself had intercalated among them at the end of his fourth dynasty, Bicheres, Sebercheres, and Thamphthis, whose combined reigns were no less than thirty-eight superfluous years. The Jews, then the Christians, helped the natives in this work of imagination, and as knowledge of hieroglyphs diminished, folk tales or novels written in Greek by the literate increased, and ignorance soon descended. The monuments piqued the curiosity of the crowd and inspired their fantasy, but the fables they wrote about them contradicted each other so strongly that there was no longer any way to distinguish the true from the false. Herodotus and Manetho agreed in declaring that the three great pyramids of Giza were the tombs of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, but travelers had collected other accounts where the erection was attributed to other real or supposed Pharaohs: Armais, Ahmose, and Maros, and, in the impossibility of verifying their merit, they preferred to suspend their judgment. The new legends naturally ended up stifling the old ones, and when the older ones had disappeared, the kings whom they had glorified slipped away with them, and Sūrīd supplanted Cheops. The only fact that could disconcert modern critics is therefore explained when we examine it in a bit of detail, and the argument that one would be tempted to make against the native origin of the fabulous history falls away.
In short, it is a new chapter in the literary history of Egypt that M. Carra de Vaux has made accessible to us in complete security. The Egyptologist who ventures to study this little book will find there, I am convinced, the material for unexpected discoveries, and if his familiarity with ancient Egypt reveals to him the value of many details which remained obscure to the Arabs, he will also often deduce the explanation of old ideas and practices that the pharaonic texts did not allow him to understand. And then, his work will not only interest those who are Orientalists by trade, deciphering Arabic manuscripts or hieroglyphic inscriptions. Many of these narratives have traveled even to our Occident, and they have spread there with varying fortunes, and have been dressed in new costumes. Will the scholars who have examined them in their recent metamorphoses not have a serious interest in going back to their place of origin, and to seek what they have preserved, among so many adventures, of a likeness more ancient than that by which we know them today?
Many names have a characteristic aspect, and they appear at first glance to fall into several categories, each of which has its particular origin. Some are Greek or Hebrew; a rather small quantity of them are Arabic, a greater number Egyptian, but with a Hebrew or Hellenic twist; the remainder are Egyptian, but have assumed a form so bizarre that one can no longer recognize them. Such a mixture ought not to astonish in an area where so many heterogeneous races have dominated in turn; we should even expect it a priori after the three revolutions Egypt has undergone since the fourth century: the Macedonian conquest, the triumph of Christianity, and the Muslim occupation. The Arab component is very weak, and one can easily recognize it from the moment one realizes that fabulous history is a compilation executed at the expense of Byzantine works soon after taking possession. The first of the newcomers who wrote it were too recent in the valley to have had time to spread their own traditions, and, as soon as they had published it in their language, the success it obtained everywhere that Arabic was spoken, caused it to be read so keenly that their successors could no longer modify it sensibly, on pain of appearing to distort it.
Al-Wālīd is a Muslim import, as are Mālīk, and Bedrah, and Dulaīfah, and half a dozen others, but more than one on which one is tempted to impose such an extraction is after all an Arabized Egyptian. Al-Būdashīr is allowed to return very well to the old language, despite his borrowed article, and his moniker decomposes exactly into Pū-tashīr, “the red house,” and as in Ashmūn, Ṣā, and Atrib one guesses in him an eponym for the royal deity. The purely Greco-Roman element is less strong than the Arab: It is found in Filamun-Felimūn, which answers either to Philemon or Philammon; and it is in Markūnos, where one senses an elongation of Markos; and in Marqūrah-Merkūreh, coming from the Merkūrios of Christian hagiography; and in Tūsidūn-Nūsidūn, where a simple rectification of the diacritical points brings back to Būsidūn, the Poseidon of mythology or its derivative Posidonios. The Hebrew names are usually betrayed by their final in īm, and the Christians have extracted them from the Bible in order: Miṣraīm, Shimun, Qofṭarīm, Khaṣlīm, and Lūjīm. Miṣraīm is sometimes stripped his Hebrew garment and has reduced himself to Miṣr. Shimun is a derivative of Simon Magus, the one whose faithful had kept a memory, if a lamentable one. Khaṣlīm and Lūjīm appear to be confounded with two of the sons whom the Holy Scripture assigned to Mizraim, Casluhim and Ludim, and Qofṭarīm is undoubtedly the Caphtorim of the same genealogy. False analogies have increased this series with an important name: Qoftīm or Qobtīm, the mythical ancestor of the Copts. The name for the Egyptians, Αἴγυπτος, by which the Greeks and Romans officially designated their native subjects, had altered to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the spoken language, whereas Kovt, Koft, and Kopt sounded like the [city of] Coptos, and the identity of pronunciation led to the belief in the identity of etymology. Of Coptos herself, to whom could she owe her name? Kobt-Qoft, the eponym of Coptos and the Egyptians, was not, however, among the children of Mizraim, and it was necessary to guess a means of introducing him to it: a passage from the Akhbār, where the author, listing the four sovereigns who shared Egypt after the Deluge, gives Qobtīm instead of Qofṭarīm, which is usually found in this place, seems to show that Kobt-Qoft, father of the Copts, had begun to be assimilated with the one of the sons of Mizraim whose name most resembled his own, Casluhim, and one of the methods used in the old onomastics facilitated the operation. Zosirkērā, the “Saint who is the double of the Sun,” was abbreviated to Zosirkē, “the Saint who is the double,” and Zosirkē or Zosirkērā indifferently designated the Pharaoh Amenhotep I. By dint of dropping the -rā, the people had persuaded themselves that they had the right to add it to names which did not include it: Thus, we see Apōpi-rā and Khufu-rā, instead of Apōpi or Khufu-Cheops. Caphtorim-Qofṭarīm was at Qoft what Sosirkeres was at Zosirkes, and might seem like an authentic doublet, especially if the final -im which distinguishes the sons of Mizraim in the Bible were joined to Kobt-Qoft. Once installed, Qobtīm did not take long to take over the predominant role; he took for himself the title of Mizraim’s son, and he retained Qofṭarīm for his own son to him, Qobtīm. The series Mizraim-Caphtorim of Genesis now yielded to the series Miṣraīm-Qobtīm-Qofṭarīm, and it descended from the Byzantines to the Arabs along with the rest of the fabulous history.
It goes without saying that the Hebrew names were not borrowed directly from the Jews or from the Hebrew language; they emanate from the Greek of the Septuagint, or from the Coptic translations executed according to the Septuagint. This curious fact proves once again how little the editors of this history had drawn from the purely indigenous sources, for the Egyptian names themselves are not admitted with their real physiognomy, but they had to dress up in Greek, like the others, before reaching the Arab compilers. The most characteristic example of this indirect transmission is provided by a certain Afrāūs, Afrūs, whose ancient prototype is Apries-Waphres [Wahibre Haaibre]. Wafres, one of the few Pharaohs named in the Bible [Jeremiah 44:30] owed this peculiarity to being popular among the Jews of Alexandria. At the moment when the Ptolemies, faced with the annals of Egypt, sought synchronizations with their own annals, some of their scholars made use of him according to the needs of their systems: Eupolemus declared him a contemporary of David and said he opened an epistolary correspondence with Solomon, but others preferred that he should have been the pharaoh defeated by Cambyses. His name, Apries, Aprias, and Waphres, Quaphris, was bound by its termination in -os, and it was with it that he appeared in the Byzantine histories which the Arabs have exploited. Menes is rendered by the same into Menaūs, and if Manqāūs is not the equivalent of Menakhos [Menemachus or Menalces (?), in Apollodorus, Library 2.1.5], one of the sons of Aegyptus in the Alexandrian legend, then, perhaps, there is to be recognized a widening of the theme of Menes, Menkaū, “the one whose duplicates are stable,” instead of Manu, “the stable one.” The ambiguity produced by the abuse of the Greek terminations makes one sometimes hesitate between two conjectures: Is Marinos a Greco-Roman name, Marinos, or the variant of the Egyptian Mares, Maris, “the friend of Ra”? The name Mares was highly prized by the chronographers, and Eratosthenes had it admitted into his Canon three times with different shades of spelling, Marēs, Maris and Meuris; an imaginary successor of Amasis was called Maros or Mendes, and Merri, Merris, Merrine was a daughter of the so-called pharaoh Palmanothes, a contemporary of Moses (Diodorus, Library 1.61 and 97). The Merrine variant of Merri would justify the Marinos variant of Mari. It should be noted, moreover, that this final -inos appears to have been used very early for the transcriptions of Egyptian names, noted already in Herodotus: The Ionian settlers established in Egypt, in the fifth century BC, said Mykerinos, instead of Menkeres, which was the legitimate equivalent of Menkara or Menkaūra. The Armālīnūs of the Akhbār is also, I believe, one of these compounds, and the classical legend knew an Arminos of analogous assonance, to which it attributed a reform of the calendar. The two are probably, like Armittos, variants of of Armaios and Armais, the Pharaoh Harmhabi [i.e., Horemheb]. The ending -es, so frequent in Greek transcriptions, is found less frequently than the terminal -os in the Akhbār: it is nevertheless found there, rendered by -is according to the laws of iotacism, and several of the words which are thus indicated let themselves be interpreted without too much difficulty. Tūtis is thus called after the god Thot. Bilāṭis contains the masculine article pi, and the tradition which retained awareness of it called the same king of Bilāṭis or Lazar indifferently. Is it not the same name as that of that shepherd Philitis, of whom Herodotus (2.128) speaks in telling us about the Pyramids? Tedāris is a faulty reading, and the manuscripts give us Badaris, a doublet Peteres, from Petephres, the gift of Ra, the master of Joseph in the Bible. We see how difficult it is to restore orthography and meaning. The confusion of letters which is inevitable in Arabic writing has multiplied the errors, and as these were aggravated by copying copies of copies. The names are so distorted today that one often despairs when the terminations of Greek or Hebrew were lacking from the beginning or fell away over time, a single index that guides us to appreciate their value and to assure us whether certain names came out or did not come out of the old indigenous background, through the multiplicity of metamorphoses which they have undergone. If the scribes have titled the same king Harjit, Harjib, Hūjit, and Hūjib, it is because they understood nothing at all, and because the word was not Arabic. And if, on the other hand, it does not betray any kinship with Greek or Hebrew, we may assume that it is Egyptian, without improbability; but what prototype is concealed under this floating disguise? Perhaps one would succeed in distinguishing among the varied readings the one which would make it possible to unmask it, but it would be enormously difficult for such a miniscule return. Nevertheless, it suffices that I have shown that the greater number of these Baroque names belong to the pure or the Grecian Egyptian, and consequently represent an Egyptian tradition anterior to the Muslim invasion.
And now, how are we to classify and organize the dynasties? It must be pointed out at the outset that the Akhbār al-zamān and most of the Arabic writings of the same kind do not pretend to present to us the whole history of Egypt, but only the events which succeed each other from the beginning of the empire to the death of the pharaoh of the Exodus. The present scheme comprises, in the first place, seventeen kings prior to the deluge, from Naqrāūs to Far’ān, the summary account of the Deluge, the advent of Miṣraīm, the reign of Qofṭīm, and the partition of the country between four dynasties. A few generations later, the pharaoh of Abraham appears, and soon after, the invasion of the Amalekites ends the line of Sa. Then comes the Pharaoh of Joseph, then that of Moses, after which the narration is interrupted just at the moment when the charioteers and the horsemen have just drowned themselves in the Red Sea. It is the history of Egypt adapted to that of the Hebrews, and this manner of expressing it, which moreover corresponds to that of the Byzantine chronographic histories, cannot have prevailed before the triumph of Christianity. The Flood marks the climax; but that idea was alien to the pharaonic ages, and if some of them later knew it through the intervention of the Jews, it was much too contrary to the local religions for the fabulous chronicle to take hold, as long as the mass of the population remained pagan. When it was necessary to introduce it, the operation did not fail to present some difficulty. First of all, Jewish or Christian chronographic histories, meeting Menes at the start of the authentic lists, had identified him with Mizraim, the grandson of Noah, the same who was the ancestor of the Egyptians, according to the sacred books. This most accepted identification of all should have obliged the storytellers to remove the Flood back before all royalty, but, on the other hand, a tradition had been established which placed the pyramids in connection with the Universal Cataclysm, and moreover, the variants were too widespread that it could ever permitted to neglect them. The people had long regarded the Memphite or Theban tombs as mysterious magazines, where the ancestors had buried their mummies and treasures with the talismans and books that had enabled them to multiply miracles. Their spirit-duplicates themselves guarded them and gave battle to those who penetrated into them to despoil them: What is the demotic novel of Satni-Khamois, if not the account of a struggle for the possession of the grimoire of Thot by a sorcerer, a son of a king and a magician, also still alive, against a family of other sorcerers, also sons of a king, but buried for centuries? When the Jews and then the Christians visited the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, they could not be persuaded that so much labor had been lavished on them for the safety of a single corpse, or for the ultimate earthly happiness of a single soul, and they believed, with the neighboring fellahs, that the pictures drawn on the walls were eternal memories of the arts and sciences practiced by the old sages, that the inscriptions revealed to those learned in hieroglyphics the formulas necessary to gain the wisdom of the pictures, and wondering for what purpose they had wished to preserve the resources of a complete civilization, they imagined in the past the only motive capable of justifying such a precaution, the fear of the Deluge where all mankind had perished, except Noah and the people of his family. It was affirmed in Alexandria in the fourth century, and Ammianus Marcellinus (Roman History 22.15.30) tells us, that former masters of these ancient rites, foreseeing the catastrophe, feared that the memory of their ceremonies might be obliterated, so they dug tortuous underground vaults in various places. There they carved many images of birds and beasts, and these innumerable figures of animals were called by the hieroglyphic letters. Such an idea was proclaimed for the Theban tombs, but it was also applied to the Memphite pyramid, but without completely succeeding in superseding competing theories, for example, that they honor the Jews persecuted after Joseph, or that the Jews were pleased to venerate in them the seven granaries built by the Patriarch to house wheat. But astrological speculations ensured the triumph of those who pretended them to be contemporaries of the Deluge. We read in the Akhbār al-zamān and in a number of Arab writers that one night the [celestial] sphere descended in a dream, in the likeness of a woman, to Sūrīd the son of Sahlūq: the earth was immediately overthrown with its inhabitants, and the sun was eclipsed. The college of priests, presided over by Filimun, consulted the stars, and announced, according to their conjunctions, a deluge of water which would partially destroy humanity, then a deluge of fire which would annihilate the universe forever. Sūrīd then constructed the three pyramids of Giza in order to deposit therein the talismans invented up to that time, and the books which contained the annals of the past, or the laws of all sciences. There was also a sum of wealth which cannot be valued. The name of the magician, Filimun-Philemon, is already indicative of a Byzantine origin, and other details confirm this first impression. Our text describes the positions which the planets occupy during the two deluges, and cites the names in Greek: Zaūs, Arys, Afrūdita, Qrūnos, Silina, Ailiūs, with Arabic translation. It is likely that, when the astrological charts of everything that attracted attention, people or things, were drawn up under one of the Caesars, some dreamer dreamed of reconstructing that of the Pyramids; he, or others after him, found the horoscope quite similar to that of the Deluge and concluded that the construction of the monuments must have been contemporaneous with the disaster, or preceded it by only a little bit. He remained unacquainted with the claim that they had been built, like the obelisks, in order to preserve the deposited science against the waters. This datum contradicted a priori that which results from the assimilation of Menes to Mizraim. The chronographers were not unaware that the pyramids were the work of Cheops, of Chephren, of Mykerinos, and the storytellers themselves, who substituted apocryphal sovereigns for these pharaohs, did not doubt that their heroes would be posterior to the first human king; they were therefore obliged to place the Deluge after Menes. Now Menes was Mizraim, and Mizraim had come down into Africa after the Deluge. They split the difference in this dilemma by splitting the most troublesome personage, and it was decided that there would be three Mizraims. The first had flowered four generations after the creation, and was called a son of Marākil, son of Dāwil, son of ‘Arbāq, son of Adam. He had not reigned himself, but his son Naqrāūs, the giant, fleeing the hegemony of the children of Cain, had colonized the valley with seventy horsemen and a few of the descendants of ‘Arbāq, and had exercised royal authority there. He was succeeded by his own son, also named Mizraim, like the grandfather, and this was the second Mizraim. The third manifested immediately after the deluge; he was the son of Baīṣar, son of Ham, son of Noah. An arrangement which maintained the identity of a Mizraim with Menes, placed the erection of the Pyramids before the Flood and after Mizraim, and did not prevent the appearance of a Mizraim after the Deluge raised no serious objections: at most, certain details were debated, such how to know which of the three had lent his name to the country. Many were inclined toward the last, the only one that appeared in Genesis, but others gave glory to the second and they asserted that Mizraim, son of Ham, was thus named after him whose name he had found engraved on the stones and that Filimun, the priest, had in fact instructed him in the history of Egypt. This system was already complete in Byzantine times, for the author of the Akhbār al-zamān says that he borrowed from the records of the priests and the Egyptians what he relates of Naqrāūs, Mizraim II, and Mizraim III. Let me add, to finish with this point of my subject, that the name of Naqrāūs is of Egyptian-Greek origin, Nakhēros, Nakhôr, Narakhos. A Nakhēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses, and a Nakhor or Narakho is indicated by the Christian chronographic histories (Chronicon Pasquale, Cedrenus 1.37, etc.) as the successor of Sesostris.
So much for the general plan: the distribution of the dynasties betrays a similar origin in an antecedent to Islam. Until the Deluge the sovereigns reign successively, each over the whole of the country, but they are not yet ordinary beings. The author of the Akhbār expressly says of several that they were giants, and the overall context allows us to think that even those who did not qualify as such were nevertheless also of colossal size, including the kings and their subjects, at least those who had been the fathers of the people, the seventy and some-odd number of the race of ‘Arbāq. We immediately think of those giants who were born of the union of angels with the daughters of men [Genesis 6:1-4], and which the Book of Enoch had made popular throughout the Judeo-Christian world. Thus, Panodorus had abused these Egregores [i.e., the Watchers] to reconcile the limited chronology of the Bible with the almost unlimited chronology of the pagan Annalists of Egypt. Their semi-celestial nature had induced him to compare them to the dynasties of demi-gods or manes which joined the era of creation to that of Menes-Mizraim; he gave them the merit of having taught astronomy as well as science to humans, and his idea was found in our fabulous chronicle, for it is to the giant kings that the Akhbār al-zamān attributes the invention of magic, astrology and talismans. In contrast to the Egypt of antediluvian times, that of post-diluvian times was divided into several states whose dynasties reigned simultaneously, and here again the Arabs merely developed one of the ideas of the Byzantine period. Manetho presented the various families of the pharaohs as having exercised power one after the other, from Menes to Nectanebo. The compilers of his lists had preserved the order in which he had enumerated them, and the number of years assigned to each of them, but adding up the sum of their reigns furnished a total so considerable that it could not be reconciled, at least not without artifice, with the small number of centuries which calculations established on the biblical data showed to have elapsed since the age of Menes-Mizraim. Among other methods used to eliminate the contradiction between the two chronologies, it was naturally thought that several of the most inconvenient dynasties ran parallel to one another, and this is one of the solutions which Eusebius already attempted in the fourth century. He admitted that the Thinites had reigned here, the Memphites there, the Saites and the Ethiopians elsewhere, perhaps others in other places, and it was probably to him that the fabulous history borrowed the idea of the four dynasties: after Mizraim, the eponymous Hebrew of Egypt, there was enthroned Qofṭīm, the Greek-Egyptian eponym of the Copts, then, after Qofṭīm, he divided his empire between his four sons, Qoftarim, Ashmūn, Atrib, and Ṣā. Ṣā is at first sight merely the city of Sais made into a hero, and his lineage is the equivalent of the Saites indicated in the hypothesis of Eusebius. But he is apparently the only one of these personages that can be reduced to a relatively old origin. This is only superficial, for analysis furnishes for two of them curious comparisons with rather ancient names. I have insinuated that Qoftarim is a doublet of Qofṭīm, and his domain includes, in fact, Coptos, Dendera, and the cities of Middle Egypt, with no definite limits. But, as we have seen, it is the popular etymology above all which has located him in Coptos: He was first of all the Egyptian, that is, Mephite, for that term for Egypt derives from the sacred name of Memphis, Hai[t]kuphtah. This Coptic dynasty had thus become a Memphite dynasty supposedly contemporary to the Saite dynasties. Ashmūn is the patron of Ashmunein [i.e. Hermopolis], and in other words he is Thoth, Khmun, the god of the Eight, and more than one detail shows that his divine nature was not entirely forgotten at the moment when he was chosen to be one of the terrestrial pharaohs: His taste for the arts was left to him, his native equity, his qualities as a sorcerer, as a healing physician, and as master of all the sciences. It is also written in the Akhbār that, in the year 66 of the Hegira, in the time of ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ibn Marwīn, a man strayed into the wilderness, came to a ruined city. He found a tree loaded with fruit, of which he ate, and for which he carried off provisions. A Copt explained to the governor that this was one of the two cities of Hermes—the other being Ashmunein—and he was not mistaken (Akhbār 2.4). Thoth the Dog-Headed possessed in Nubia a town named Pinubsu, in Greek Pnups, the house of the Nubsu tree, the napeca, and we find even under the Caesars a large tree of this species to which the inhabitants offered cultic worship. The ruined city and the tree of the Akhbār are evidently the Pnups and the napeca of Nubia, dispatched to the desert by the imagination of the people after the fall of paganism. Ashmūn is Hermes-Thoth, but how did Thoth, who already figured into the divine dynasties, became a king of the human dynasties, grandson of Menes-Miaraim? The metamorphosis had once again taken place by means of an etymology. The lists of Manetho ascribe after Menes two princes, his son and grandson, whose names, distinct by spelling and unrelated to that of the god, both sounded like the god Atuti in pronunciation, in the Greek transcription, Athothes. The assonance between Atuti and a frequent name, Thutii, that often belongs to Thoth, had misled the Egyptians so well that the dragomans of Eratosthenes translated Έρμογὲνης as “the race of Hermes,” the names of these personages being Athothes I and II. The confusion once established, tradition attributed to the one of these kings the character and works of the god: Manetho already said that he had practiced medicine and composed treaties on anatomy. The tradition collected by the author of the Akhbār derives from Manetho as its ultimate source, but the instinct of symmetry had led a Byzantine author to replace the proper name of the god with one of his nicknames, which made the eponymous name of Athrib correspond to the Athrib of the eastern Delta, and there are perhaps conclusions to be drawn from the preference which this place is afforded relative to Tanis, to Mendes, and to all its neighbors, for it had a very short period of prosperity under the Byzantine Caesars, then declined rapidly under the Arabs. Therefore, the choice of its name to designate one of the four great subdivisions of the country can scarcely have been known before or after this moment of brief flowering: Is this not a means of calculating the date when the Chronicle used by the Muslim writers was definitively drafted?
I would like to present some additional proof, and confirm by the details of each reign the conclusions to which I have reached in general terms, but to do so would unduly lengthen an already too long article, and I would rather examine a new point in order to obtain it. Let us examine whether some general information, which is mentioned here and there in the Akhbār, has been inserted by the Arab authors, or whether it was included in earlier writings. If this information was older, did it reproduce with sufficient fidelity the documents of the pharaonic age? Let us take the material in the chapter by which the work begins. The author treats of diviners and priests, of their virtues, of their science, of the severe regime they had imposed on the king, of the apparatuses which they deployed when they went to the council. It shows that Egypt was divided into eighty-five nomes, of which forty-five were in the Delta, and forty in the Sa’id. Each of the nomes had its prince of the priests, whose chief was the Nazir, the observer of the stars. The Nāzir was so well regarded that the king rose at his approach and invited him to sit beside him. Before promulgating a law, he consulted each of the priests; he asked each the location of the star that he was serving, and when he was acquainted with all that concerned the present position of the seven planets he said, “The king must now act thus, eating this or that food, having intercourse with women at such times,” and he explained in this way everything which seemed good. A scribe stood before the king and wrote down all the words of the Nāzir. He then turned to the artisans, and they went to the house of wisdom in order to apply to it the work he was to accomplish that day (Akhbār 2.1). The number of nomes has been doubled, but there was not a Muslim, nor even a Christian of the time of Heraclius, who could know of the existence of a chief of the priesthood, a first prophet of the local god in each of them: The Byzantine author had to draw from some source from the good old days, as is evident from the passage in which the king’s relations with the Nāzir are defined. Diodorus of Sicily (Library 1.70) had exhibited, in effect, according to the lost romance of Hecataeus of Abdera, what the life of the pharaohs was like, and how minutely each hour was filled with duties determined in advance. After rushing from his rising to the most urgent business, the sovereign proceeded to his dress, and then sacrificed to the gods. The rite accomplished, the high priest standing beside him, he prayed for him aloud in the presence of the people, praised him, and reminded him of the essential duties of royalty, and then the writer of the sacred records recalled similar events from the sacred books; he developed this with examples borrowed from the lives of illustrious men. The Nāzir was so well regarded that the king rose at his approach and invited him to sit beside him. In order to impose a law, he consulted every priest. The whole day’s occupation was ordered point by point, even in the most intimate questions, the hour of the walk, of the ablutions, of the commerce with the women. The role of the king, that of the high priest, and that of the hierarchy are identical in both cases, as well as the meticulous regulation of royal acts, only tradition has been imbued with astrology between the Ptolemies and the Caliphs. It is no longer the precepts of the divine law that interest, but the revelations of the planets, and the high priest of old has become the great observer of the stars. The same change took place in all the priests of the nomes, and their powers as sorcerers prevailed over the priestly virtues of the past. When a matter was pressing, the King of the Akhbār called them all together outside Misr, and they arrived at the rendezvous, “assembled one before the other, clapping their hands like a drum, and each operating a prodigy. One had a bright face like sunlight, and nobody could look at him; another had a finger of green and red stone and was wearing a woven gold robe; he was mounted on a lion and was girded with big snakes; he had above his head a dome of fire or precious stones; and the prodigies were diverse, since each priest had been taught by the star that served him. When they arrived before the king, the priests said, ‘The king has called us to such a cause, and is concerned in thinking about it. The correct solution is the following’” (Akkbar 2.1). It was indeed the custom, at least under the Ptolemies, that the king should summon the priests of all the temples in council to deliberate on public affairs, and the decrees of Rosetta and Canopis, to cite only the most celebrated, were promulgated after synods of this kind. We do not know how they went there, but we know, from written texts and bas-reliefs, what costumes they wore and what order they observed in certain solemn processions. A singer opened the march with a musical instrument, then came the astrologer holding a timepiece and a branch of a palm tree, the sacred scribe with his feathers, armed with his palette and papyrus in a roll, the stolist with cubit and the purification vessel; the prophet walked behind these priests, recognizable by the sacred seal and followed by the bearers of the loaves (Clement of Alexandria Stromata 6.4). The persons enumerated here belong to the same clergy; when the clergy of all the gods were assembled, the chief priests of each nome marched each group to its geographical rank. Their insignia were those of their gods, and some of them are to be found in the description of the Akhbār: Thus, the dome, or, more exactly, the ball of fire or jewels, is the solar disk; the green stone is the ring with a mafkait stone, that is to say, one of those green substances, sulfate of copper or some other, which the Egyptians loved so strongly, and so on. Here again, the general design of the piece is exact and comes from an ancient source; the predominance of magical theories has distorted the meaning and transformed the setting of the stage.
Once again, we infer an ancient document under the Arabic text, and we are led to suppose that the fabulous story of the Akhbār was not made by Muslim writers with elements from outside. They received it, ready-made, from natives who had recorded it in books originally written in Greek, but perhaps translated into Coptic as was one of the redactions of the Alexander Romance. They rendered it in their own language, and it seemed to them so plausible that they all repeated it over and over again, almost in the same terms, except to enrich it with unpublished details, especially in those places which concerned the pharaohs of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. The very manner in which the dynasties are combined, and how the narrative is conducted, means that the first of the Muslim storytellers who wrote it did not have at his disposal several Greek or Coptic works, the details of which he arranged as he judged suitable; instead, he knew of one which he transcribed faithfully. I think, however, that this work must have existed in several drafts as different in certain respects as those of the Pseudo-Callisthenes. The life of Naqrāūs, for example, was exhibited in variants such that one of the Arab scribes thought to divide him and admit the existence of two successive kings named Naqrāūs. If there were other fabulous stories of the same kind, as is probable, the Arab author did not know them and they are lost to us. They had been composed by Christians, who themselves had in most cases confined themselves to compiling pagan works of the same kind and adapting them to the frameworks of Biblical chronology. When attempts are made to analyze, through so many intermediaries, the documents used in these first collections which are at present unknown, two facts at first sight amaze us: first, the character of the recorded events, and second, the absence of the authentic pharaohs and their replacement by pharaohs created from scratch. I have elsewhere pointed out that the most fantastic narratives have an Egyptian tone, and that the marvelous proceeds directly from the marvels of ancient Egypt. The substitution of the imaginary pharaohs for the real ones is nothing to astonish an Egyptologist. The scribes of Thebes and Memphis had composed from time immemorial novels, the heroes of which were famous kings, Thuthmosis III, Ramses II, Usirtasen I, Cheops, Snefru, Ahmasis, sometimes bore fictitious names, Rhampsinitos, Meinebphtah, Asychis, Anysis, or titles used as names, like Pharaoh and Proteus. The chroniclers of the later ages had been deceived by appearances, and they had admitted several of these characters without consistency in the series of princely families: Manetho himself had intercalated among them at the end of his fourth dynasty, Bicheres, Sebercheres, and Thamphthis, whose combined reigns were no less than thirty-eight superfluous years. The Jews, then the Christians, helped the natives in this work of imagination, and as knowledge of hieroglyphs diminished, folk tales or novels written in Greek by the literate increased, and ignorance soon descended. The monuments piqued the curiosity of the crowd and inspired their fantasy, but the fables they wrote about them contradicted each other so strongly that there was no longer any way to distinguish the true from the false. Herodotus and Manetho agreed in declaring that the three great pyramids of Giza were the tombs of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, but travelers had collected other accounts where the erection was attributed to other real or supposed Pharaohs: Armais, Ahmose, and Maros, and, in the impossibility of verifying their merit, they preferred to suspend their judgment. The new legends naturally ended up stifling the old ones, and when the older ones had disappeared, the kings whom they had glorified slipped away with them, and Sūrīd supplanted Cheops. The only fact that could disconcert modern critics is therefore explained when we examine it in a bit of detail, and the argument that one would be tempted to make against the native origin of the fabulous history falls away.
In short, it is a new chapter in the literary history of Egypt that M. Carra de Vaux has made accessible to us in complete security. The Egyptologist who ventures to study this little book will find there, I am convinced, the material for unexpected discoveries, and if his familiarity with ancient Egypt reveals to him the value of many details which remained obscure to the Arabs, he will also often deduce the explanation of old ideas and practices that the pharaonic texts did not allow him to understand. And then, his work will not only interest those who are Orientalists by trade, deciphering Arabic manuscripts or hieroglyphic inscriptions. Many of these narratives have traveled even to our Occident, and they have spread there with varying fortunes, and have been dressed in new costumes. Will the scholars who have examined them in their recent metamorphoses not have a serious interest in going back to their place of origin, and to seek what they have preserved, among so many adventures, of a likeness more ancient than that by which we know them today?
Source: G. Maspero, Review of Le Abrégé des Merveilles by Baron Carra de Vaux, Journal des Savants (February 1899), 69-86 and (March 1899), 154-172.
