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Egypt
and the
Pre-Homeric Greeks.
OMER has been called by a very late Greek poet of the Antho
logy, ‘ the second sun of the life of Hellas.’ In the warm light
of his poem a world of men is alive, a world that we know from no
Other source. The sunshine of Homer breaks for a moment through
the darkness of time, and the Achaeans and Danaans, when that light
is withdrawn, fade back again into the obscurity that shrouded them
before, like Children of the Mist. Of their history and of the de
velopment of their civilisation before the Homeric age, we have no
authentic account, and of what befell them when the epics fail us, up
to the moment when Greek literary records begin, we learn but vaguely
from legend and tradition. Yet it is plain that a people so essentially
civilised as the people amidst whom Homer sung, must have had a
long training in experience of life, and in the knowledge of foreign
culture. On the nature of that training and that early history, it has
for some time been believed that light was cast by the Egyptian
monuments. Within the last year, however, the ‘ History of Egypt,’
by Dr. Brugsch, has been published and translated into English.
The aim of some chapters in that learned work is to destroy the idea
that the prehistoric Greeks had any connection with Egypt. The
present article will be devoted to a consideration of the arguments
for and against the opinions that the ancestors of Homer’s Greeks
were well acquainted with the empire on the Nile. It may be as
well, in the first place, to sketch a picture of what that empire was
like, in the distant years when the Achaeans and Danaans did not yet
possess their sacred poet.
When we read Homer, we find ourselves in the morning of the
world. Society has not yet fixed, by hard and fast limits, the special
duties and conditions of human existence. The division of labour is
still all but unknown. The king of one island may become the thrall,
the swineherd, in another. The leader in war is a carpenter, a ship
wright, a mason in time of peace. The merchant is a pirate on
occasion, and the pirate a merchant. Each day brings variety and
adventure to men who are ready for every vicissitude, and who still
find in all experience, in war, storm, and shipwreck, in voyage of
discovery, in the marvels of great towns, and in the peril of enchanted
islands, something delightfully fresh and strange. The Homeric
Greeks, in spite of the orderliness of their public and domestic life,
are still like children, easily moved to wonder, easily adapting them
selves to every change of fortune, and only impatient of dull drill, and
of routine.
With Homer’s men, we live in a young world ; but on their very
border, and within their knowledge, there existed a world already
H
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeri$ Greeks.
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old, rich, artificial, and the slave of habit. The island of Crete was a
part of heroic Greece; it owned Agamemnon as its over-lord, and
from Crete he drew some of his bravest warriors. Within five days’
sail of the island (if a ship had a fair nortll wind in her sails), were
the mouths of ‘ the River of Egypt,’ and the i most fruitful fields of
the Egyptian men ’ (Odyssey, xiv. 257). In Egypt, when Homer
sung, civilisation had passed its noon, and was declining to its even
ing. Thus in 4 Hundred-gated Thebes, where lies the greatest store
of wealth in the houses’ (Iliad, ix. 381 ; Odyssey, iv. 127), were
already found the extremes of wealth and poverty, and the fixed
divisions of society. Already the day-long and life-long labour which
the Greeks detested deformed the bodies of the artisans.
The weaver, within his four walls, is more wretched than a woman; his
knees are fitted to the height of his heart, he never breathes the free air.
.... The armourer has great toil and labour when he carries his wares
into far-off countries. A heavy price he must pay for his beasts of burden
when he sets out on his journey, and scarce has he returned to his home
when again he must depart............ Every worker in metals fares more
hardly than the delvers in the fields. His fields are the wood he works on,
his tools the metal wherewith he toils. In the night, when he should be
free, he is labouring still, after all that his hands have wrought during the
day. Yes, through the night he toils by the light of the burning torches.
.... Thus all arts and trades are toilsome; but do thou, my son, love
letters and cleave to them. Letters alone are no vain word in this world;
he who betakes himself to them is honoured by all men, even from his
childhood. He it is that goes forth on embassies and that knows not
poverty.—(Maspero, ‘ Histoire Ancienne de l’Orient,’p. 127. Translation
of Egyptian epistle.)
What a modern picture this is ! How unlike anything that Homer
has to draw, though he, too, pities the toil of the woman who lives by
her loom, and of the woman grinding at the millI The letter from
which this sketch of Egyptian life is quoted was written by a certain
scribe under the Nineteenth Dynasty, some fourteen hundred years
before the birth of Christ. It was written, probably, at the very time
when the children of Israel were suffering from cruel taskmasters,
who 4 made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and brick,
and all manner of service in the field ; all their service, wherein they
made them serve, was with rigour.’ To that Egypt, where the
Hebrews were bond-slaves, the ancestors of Homer’s Greeks may have
come as pirates, or as hostile settlers, and may have remained as
mercenary soldiers, or as labourers. Thus when Odysseus tells a
feigned tale about his adventures in Egypt, he declares that he
invaded the country, that his men were defeated, ‘and some the
Egyptians slew, and some they led away alive, to toil for them
perforce’ (Odyssey, xiv. 272). The monuments of an age much
earlier than that of Homer, of an age between the dates of Joseph
and of the Exodus, have been generally interpreted in the same sense
as the story of Odysseus. They have been supposed to prove that,
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Egypt and tke Pre-Homeric Greeks.'
173
while the Israelites were yet in Egypt, or had but recently left it, the
prehistoric Greeks fought there, were defeated, and became the
mercenaries of the Pharaohs. There can scarcely be a more inte
resting or romantic moment in history than this was, if the usual
reading of the monuments is correct. The early Greeks are learning
a sense of their own national unity, and are gaining their first sight
of an advanced civilisation, on the same soil as that where the
Hebrews learned the same lessons. The romantic interest of this
theory must not, however, lead us to neglect the arguments urged
against it by Dr. Brugsch. Let us examine, then, the foreign re
lations of Egypt at this period, and the evidence as to Homer’s know
ledge of one of the peoples who have bequeathed to us our art, our
politics, science, philosophy, and our religion.
The Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties of Egypt
bore sway, widely speaking, during the centuries which passed between
1700 B.C. and 1100 B.C. In these ages the Egyptian empire reached
the summit, of her wealth and power. Her arms were carried victoriously northward, into Asia Minor, southwards down the Nile
valley, and the Arabian Gulf, and across the ‘ great sea ’ to Cyprus.
On the walls of her temples may still be seen the painted procession
of captive or tributary races. These races are mentioned by names
which it is not always possible to attach, with certainty, to known
peoples, but the pictures themselves often afford the clearest evidence
as to types of race. The Egyptians, broadly speaking, knew four
races. These were the black men, negroes, whose type is unchanged;
the hook-nosed Semitic peoples, whose features survive in the Jews ;
the Egyptians themselves, painted in a conventional victorious red,
and lastly, the white non-Asiatic races of northern Africa, and of
the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean. It was chiefly with
the thick-lipped and curly-haired blacks of the interior, or with the
Phoenicians and other Semitic races, that the Egyptians of the
sixteenth century before Christ had to do. From the Hittites of the
Orontes valley and other Asiatic tribes, conquered in the great battle
of Megiddo, Thothmes III. took as tribute all those marvels of Sidonian art that Homer is never weary of extolling. The representations
of the gold and silver vases on the monuments prove that Homer did
not exaggerate the merit of the Phoenician craftsmen. Thothmes III.
boasts how he took ‘many golden dishes, and a large jug with a
double handle, a Phoenician work.’ He also acquired ‘ chairs with
the foot-stools to them of ivory and cedar wood ’ (Brugsch, i. 327).
We are reminded of Homer’s description of the chair which Icmalius
£ wrought with ivory and silver, and joined thereto a footstool that
was part of the chair itself’ (Odyssey, xix. 57). The horses,of the
Asiatic enemy also fell into the hands of Thothmes with the goldenstudded chariots which had been framed in the isle of Cyprus, ‘ the
land of the Asebi,’ the very country where Homer places his most
skilful artificers. It was thus that the Pharaohs dealt with their
Semitic enemies, while from the negroes they took, as tribute,
,
, <,
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
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leopards and apes, incense and fragrant woods, and slaves, and tusks
of ivory.
Such were the relations of the Egyptians with two out of the four
races into which they divided the dwellers in the world. From the
white-skinned peoples of Northern Africa, and from their allies, also
white, who came from the isles and coasts of the great sea, Egypt
took little by way of tribute. They rather came to seek her; it was
not she who wished to attack them. As early as the reign of Thothmes III., the victor over the Asiatics at Megiddo, the monuments
speak of the Tamahu, the ‘people of the North,’ and of the ‘ tribes of
the islands.’ Among these the most conspicuous at first were called
Tahennu, the ‘ white men ’ of Northern Africa. Early in the reign
of Ramses II. (about 1450 B.c.) the monarch boasts of conquests over
‘ the barbarians of the north, and the Libyans, and the warriors of the
great sea’ (Chabas, ‘ Etudes,’p. 184). It is among these ‘warriors
of the great sea’ that we seem to recognise those indubitably
powerful Mediterranean peoples, the ruins of whose vast Cyclopean
cities, built before the dawn of history, crown many an isolated rocky
height, and command many a harbour and creek, on the shores of
Greece, Italy, and the islands. These warriors, in short, were in all
probability the ancestors of Homer’s more than half-mythical heroes.
For more than two centuries Egypt was exposed to the attacks
and invasions of these northern peoples. Her wealth, her rich soil,
her soft climate, and the beginnings of her decrepitude, attracted the
maritime tribes, and the races of the Lybian mainland. As we read
the accounts of these invasions in the inscriptions, we are irresistibly
reminded of the similar excursions of the Northmen ‘ on viking.’ The
very language of the monuments reads like the language of the
English chroniclers who went in fear of Danish pirates. The first
recorded inroad on a large scale by the confederated forces of Libya
and the maritime powers was made in the time of Ramses II. This
king began his reign by an exploit which brought him into collision,
according to some authorities, with the tribes which later succoured
Ilion. In the battle of Kadesh he checked the power of the Kbita
or Hittites, with their allies, the Leku, the Dardani, the warriors of
Carchemish, ‘ all the peoples from the extremest end of the sea, to
the land of the Khita.’ In the Khita some authorities see the other
wise mysterious Keteians who were led to fight for Troy by Eurypylus
the son of Telephus (Odyssey, xi. 519). In the Dardani they remark
the familiar Dardanians of Homer, and in the ‘ Leku ’ the no less
familiar Lycians. Dr. Brugsch, the determined opponent of views so
easy and so pleasing, is not content with these identifications. He
thinks that the Leku are not the Lycians, but a much less powerful
and important tribe, ‘the Legyes mentioned by Herodotus as a
people of Asia Minor’ (Herodotus, vii. 72). Now the Greeks
called all the wide-spread Ligurians of the north Mediterranean coast
‘ Legyes,’ so it is not easy to see why, if ‘ Leku ’ is ‘ Legyes,’ the
allies of the Khita may not have come from Trieste or from the
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
175
shores under the Maritime Alps. The Dardanians again are not, so Dr.
Brugsch holds, the Dardanians with whom we are all familiar, but a
sept named once by Herodotus (i. 189). Yet even the Dardanians of.
Herodotus were next neighbours of the Paphlagonians, who, in their
turn, are numbered by Homer among the allies of Priam. Thus, even
on the showing of Dr. Brugsch, the Asiatic enemies of Agamemnon,
and the Asiatic enemies of Ramses II. drew their allies from the same
districts. But why should we look for an obscure sept of Dardani
on the Tigris, people only casually alluded to by Herodotus, writing a
thousand years later ? We might as plausibly identify the Dardani
who fought against Ramses II. with the Dardani who, according
to Strabo, lived in dens excavated under dunghills in Illyria, but
possessed an unaffected taste for music.
When he attacked the Leku, Khita, and Dardani, Ramses II. was
aided by some foreign mercenaries, called the Shardana 4 of the sea.’
These men are called 4 the King’s prisoners,’ and it is probable that
they had first been made captives in some war with North Africa, and
afterwards trained to bear arms with the native Egyptian soldiery.
The name of the Shardana, with that of other maritime peoples, was
soon to be terrible to the Egyptians. The reign of Ramses II. lasted
very long—no less than sixty-eight years—and it is possible that the
government of Egypt shared the weakness of the king’s old age.
-However that may be, Ramses II. had not long lain within his
Strangely humble tomb when the Libyans, with the peoples of the
Mediterranean, invaded the empire. The story of the invasion is
told by reliefs and inscriptions on the walls of a little court to the
south of the precinct of the chief temple at Carnac. The inscriptions
are described by Champoilion, who partly deciphered them (1828),
but did not identify the names of the races mentioned as hostile to
Egypt. As read by the late Vicomte de Rouge, and (with occasional
variations) by M. Chabas and Dr. Brugsch, they describe the war
between the Libyan king and his allies on the one part, and Meneptah,
son of Ramses II. (the Pharaoh of Exodus), on the other. The names
of the allied powers are thus written by Dr. Brugsch: 4 The A-qaua-sha, the Tulisha, or Turisha, the Liku, the Shair-dan, the Shaka-li-sha, peoples of the north which came hither out of all countries.’
{Brugsch, ii. 116.) The Vicomte de Rouge spelled the names,
4 Akaiusa, Tuir’sa, Leku, Shairdina, S4akalesha.’ (4 Memoire sur les
Attaques,’ etc., p. 11.) Both authorities agree that the Rebu (Li
byans) and Mashuasha (Maxyes, an African people who, in Herod
otus’ time, claimed Trojan ancestry) were among the invaders. All
authorities agree in saying that these allies had for months pitched
hostile camps in Egypt, did violence, 4 plundered, loved death, and
hated life.’ In this inscription (translated also by Dr. Birch,4 Records
of the Past,’ vol. iv. p. 36), one seems to hear Hildas grumbling
•about the Saxons, or the English chroniclers denouncing the Danish
pirates. Though Meneptah refused (on the pretence of a warning
vision) to lead his troops into action, the charioteers of Egypt utterly
No. 596 (no. CXV». N. s.)
N
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
[August
routed the confederate hosts. Of the Libyans there fell over six
thousand men, of the Shakalsha more than two hundred, many of the
Shardana, whose kinsmen fought against them in the ranks of Egypt,
and many of the Aqaiusha. The bloody trophies of victory, frag
ments and hands of the mutilated dead, were counted over before the
king.
The all-important question must now be asked, who were these
maritime nations, these enemies of Egypt ? The spelling of their
names by various interpreters does not vary so much, but that a ready
answer rises to the lips. When the Vicomte de Rouge published his
celebrated 4 Memoire ’ in 1866, he identified, as most people would be
prone to do, the Aqaiusha with the Achaeans, who, in Homer’s time,
were the chief race in Greece. In the Shakalusha he saw the Sicilians,
whom Homer frequently alludes to as slave merchants, and therefore,
probably, as pirates. The Shardana were taken for the Sardinians
and the Tuirsha for the Tyrrhenians or Etrurians ; these famous sea
farers, an identification favoured by the spelling of the Tyrsenian, or
Tyrrhenian name in Oscan inscriptions. Even if these natural sugges
tions are adopted, it does not follow that the Tyrrhenian, Sardinian,
Sicilian, and other tribes had as yet established themselves in Etruria,
Sardinia, and Sicily. De Rouge’s system was adopted by Maspero,
Chabas, Lenormant, and (provisionally) by Dr. Birch. It has been
disturbed by the theory of Dr. Brugsch (‘ History of Egypt,’ vol. ii.p. 124). According to Dr. Brugseh, the invaders were 4 Colchio-Cretan
tribes.’ They came from the distant Caucasus, and from Crete, where,
as Homer tells us, dwelt Achaeans, native Cretans, Cydonians, Dorians,
and Pelasgians. (Odyssey, xix. 175.) Dr. Brugsch, however, says
little about the Cretans among the invaders. It is from the spurs of
the Caucasus and the coasts of the Black Sea that he brings the allies
of the Libyans. Let us examine his reasons.
Dr. Brugsch’s system is based, partly on a point of Egyptian verbal
scholarship, in which no one agrees with him ; secondly, on ethnolo
gical conjecture. He interprets the inscriptions about the Egyptian
victory to mean that the dead Aqaiusha and Shakalsha, whose hands
were cut off and brought to Meneptah, were circumcised men. No
other translator, neither Dr. Birch, nor M. Chabas, nor De Rouge (and
their combined opinion is of immense weight) has understood the in
scription in this sense. Dr.Brugsch holds that theLibyans were despised
by the Egyptians as an uncircumcised race, while the circumcised
Aqaiusha and Shakalsha were comparatively respected. He argues
that ‘to identify circumcised tribes, as some have done, with the
Achaeans, Sicilians, Sardinians, &c., is to introduce a serious error
into the primitive history of the classical nations.’ Here, then, is the
negative argument; the Aqaiusha conformed to the Egyptian and the
Jewish rite, therefore, they were not the Achaeans of Greece. Here
two obvious answers suggest themselves; first, the translation on which
Dr. Brugsch reposes is not, as yet, accepted by other scholars ; second,
we have no means of knowing whether the prehistoric ancestors of
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
177
the Greeks did or did not practise a rite which is widely spread, espe
cially among savage races. We only know that, in the age of
Herodotus, a thousand years after this period, no tradition that the
Greeks had ever practised the rite seems to have survived. It is per
fectly possible that races with the Hellenic instinct for refinement at
one time conformed to, but later, and long before the time of Herodotus,
abandoned a custom which, in origin, seems essentially savage. In pre
cisely the same way, the Phoenicians gave up this trait of manners
when theybecame acquainted with the Greeks (Herodotus, ii. 104), and
many Polynesian peoples are abandoning it in our own time. Again,
it must be noted that Dr. Brugsch declares the Mashuasha (Maxyes)
to have conformed to the Egyptian manners in this respect. Now,
Herodotus, on whose evidence Dr. Brugsch elsewhere relies, omits to
L
.mention the Maxyes in his catalogue of circumcised races, while, in
his account of the Maxyes, he says nothing about circumcision. Did
Dr. Brugsch assume that the Maxyes conformed to the rite, because
he found that their hands were cut off, after a battle, like the hands
of the Aqaiusha ? Singularly enough, the mutilation of a hand is the
punishment now inflicted in Socotra, on persons who are not circum
cised. Many other arguments derived from the practice of Polynesian
race» might here be adduced. It is enough to say that, even if Dr.
Brugsch’s translation is accepted, the authentic history of manners
permits us to suppose that the Achaeans of the thirteenth century
before our era may have conformed to the descriptions of the Aqaiusha
in the Egyptian texts, as translated by Dr. Brugsch.
The learned German is dissatisfied with the old identification. What
reasons lead him to put forward his new theory ? At a first glance,
■ it does seem very unlikely that the tribes of4 remotest Caucasus,’ that
‘ wall of the world’s end,’ as the Greeks thought it, should ally them
selves with Libya, and invade Egypt. No Greek tradition or legend
p
speaks of such an alliance, while Greek legendary history starts from
a. supposed constant intercourse between Libya, Egypt, Sardinia,
Sicily, and Greece. Herodotus however assures us, that, whether the
Caucasian tribes came to Egypt or not, the Egyptians went to the
Caucasus. This expedition was made, he says, under Sesostris, that
is, Ramses II., the monarch on whose death the Caucasians (teste
t
Brugsch) in their turn invaded Egypt I This was a singular turning
of the. tables. Herodotus thinks that the Colchian tribes learned
K,
Egyptian manners from the soldiers of Ramses II. Is it probable
that the practice became at once so general that they could send a
circumcised army to invade the realms of the son of Ramses ? Here,
at least, is the argument of Dr. Brugsch ; the maritime invaders of
-Egypt conformed to the Egyptian rite, therefore, they were not the
ancestors of the famous Achaeans. But the tribes of the Caucasus
(a thousand years later), practised the rite, therefore it is proper to
look among them for the invaders of Egypt. Yet even Dr. Brugsch
has to come down to much later times for his facts. He wishes to
find, among the Colchian and Caucasian mountaineers, names of tribes
m
2
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
[Augus!
that correspond to the names of invaders on the monuments, and
these names he finds, more than a thousand years later, in the pages
of Strabo, a writer of the time of Augustus. As Dr. Brugsch goes
to the Caucasus, and to Colchis, to find the invaders of Egypt, it
may be as well to. quote Herodotus’s account of the Colchians, and
of their apparent ethnological connections with the Egyptians.
Thereafter he (Sesostris, Ramses II.) went all through the continent,
even till he crossed out of Asia into Europe, where he overcame the
Scythians and the Thracians. So far, and no further, methinks, came the
Egyptian host, for in the land of these peoples are the memorial pillars set,
and still to be seen, but beyond these they are no longer to be found.
Thence he turned about, and went back, and when he came to the Phasis
river, I have thereafter no clear story to tell, as to whether the King
Sesostris himself sundered a portion of his army, and planted them there,
or whether certain of the soldiers, being weary of wandering, chose to
abide there about the River Phasis. For the Colchians seem to be of
Egyptian race, and this I say as one that noted it myself, before I heard it
from others. But when the thing came into my mind I made inquiry of
both peoples, and the Colchians remember the Egyptians better than the
Egyptians remember the Colchians. The Egyptians said they reckoned the
Colchians to be in the host of Sesostris, but I guessed at the matter by this,
that both Egyptians and Colchians are dark-skinned and curly haired, And
this proves nothing, for other men so far resemble them; but by this I
was more led to my guess, namely, that the Colchians, Aegyptians, and
Aethiopians, and they alone, have always from the beginning practised
circumcision.................. Come, now, I will mention other Colchian matters,
to show how like they are to the Egyptians. They and the Egyptians are
the only peoples that weave linen (in the same way), and all their manner
of life, and the tongue they speak, resemble each other. And Colchian linen
the Greeks call Sardonikon, but that which comes from Egypt they call
Egyptian. (Herodotus, ii. 1*03, 104.)
So far Herodotus goes, and by aid of his evidence Dr. Brugseh
recognises his circumcised Shardana in the Colchian makers of Sardonian linen (Xlvov 'ZapSovticov'). The Tursha of the sea, Brugsch calls
people from Mount Taurus, but it appears that philological reasoning
(‘ if anyone is inclined to trust that,’ as Herodotus would say) strongly
favours De Rouge’s identification of the Tuirsha with the Tyrseni,
or Etruscans. The Leku, or Luku, as we have already seen, Dr.
Brugsch believes to be, not Lycians, but Legyes. The Aqaiusha
are Achaeans with Dr. Brugsch, as well as with De Rouge and Chabas,
but then they are not the Achaeans of Greece or Crete, but the
Achaeans of the Caucasus. This interesting tribe (the ancestors of
the gallant Lazi ’) are mentioned by Strabo, some thirteen hundred
years after their appearance on the monuments. According to
•Strabo, the Achaeans of the Caucasus were not unlike the m od ern
buccaneers of Batoum. In his time, they dwelt near the rugged
•and harbourless coasts of the Black Sea. They lived somewhat inland,
in the forests and glens, in which they dragged up the canoes
(capable of holding about twenty-five men each), in which they made
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tEgypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
179
buccaneering expeditions. When an expedition was over, they re
turned to their fastnesses, and drank, and feasted till all was spent.
It is in the ancestors of these semi-savage neighbours of the degraded
‘ lice-eaters,’ that Dr. Brugsch recognises the allies of Libya, the men
who shook the empire of Egypt. Few other students will be inclined to
overlook the claims of the Achaean race, which was certainly, within
four centuries, so powerful in the Levant, in favour of a remote and
obscure set of savages, without history, traditions, or architectural
remains. The remains of Mycenae, Orchomenos, and scores of other
towns, attest the prehistoric homes of the dwellers in Greek coasts
and isles. The legends of Libya, Sardinia, Sicily, Egypt, and Greece,
as' Pausanias shows, are all in undesigned coincidence with the
Egyptian monuments, as read by De Rouge and Chabas. The con
tents of the oldest graves in Greek and in Sardinian soil, speak to a
prehistoric intercourse with Egypt. The very sculptures on the
sepulchral sieZae, found in the Acropolis of Mycenae, are most easily
explained as rude and debased imitations of the familiar Egyptian
group, in which the king fights from his chariot. In face of all this
tangible evidence which connects prehistoric Greece with Egypt,
it seems superfluous to seek for casual similarities of name among the
obscure tribes of the remote Caucasus.
The next mention of the people of the Mediterranean coasts and
islands is found in the monument of Ramses III. (1200—1166 B.C.)
On the walls of Medinet Habou in Western Thebes are depicted the
chief events in the history of an invasion of Egypt, in the eighth
year of Ramses. The inscriptions declare that ‘ the people quivered
with desire of battle in all their limbs, they came up leaping from
their coasts and islands, and spread themselves all at once over the
lands.’ (Brugsch, vol. ii. p. 147.) They were moved by the irresistible
attraction of the south, by the force that draws the Slavonic races
towards India and the Mediterranean, the force that led the North
men to Byzantium and the Goths to Rome. 4 It came to pass,’ says
another inscription, ‘ that the people of the northern regions, who
reside in their islands and on their coasts, shuddered [with eagerness
for battle] in their bodies. They entered into the lakes of the
mouths of the Nile. Their nostrils snuffed up the wind, their desire
was to breathe a soft air.’ (Brugsch, vol. ii. p. 149.) From the
reliefs and inscriptions we learn that the invasion was attempted
both by land and sea. Some of the Northerners landed on the coast
of Canaan, defeated the Khita, the people of Kadi (Galilee), and
of Karchemish, and so advanced on Egypt. Others sailed round to
the mouths of the Nile. By the rapidity of his movements Ramses
III. discomfited the double attack. In the reliefs of Medinet
Habou, we see the king distributing arms, we accompany the army
on the march, and behold the destruction of the islanders and men of
the Mediterranean coasts. A fourth picture represents the return
march of the Egyptians to encounter the hostile navy, and the fifth
shows us the earliest extant view of a naval battle. Ramses had
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
[August
formed a cordon of ships and boats to protect the great water-gate of
Egypt. ‘ A defence was built on the water, like a strong wall, of
ships of war, of merchantmen, of boats and skiffs. They (who had
reached the boundary of my country never more reaped harvest. . . .
Their ships and all their possessions lay strewn on the mirror of the
waters.’ (Brugsch, vol. ii. p. 148.)
Who were the islanders and coastmen who thus failed to make
good their enterprise ? The inscriptions give their names, the basreliefs present pictures of their ships, costumes, and weapons. First
let us examine the names. They are read thus by Dr. Brugsch:
‘ Their home was in the land of the Purosatha, the Zakkar, the
Shalkalsha, the Daanau, and the Uashuash.’ (‘The Tuirsha of the
sea,’ Brugsch’s Taurians, and the Tyrrhenians of De Rouge, were
also engaged.) For Purosatha, M. Chabas, with almost all other
scholars, reads Pelesta, vaguely identified with Pelasgians, or Phi
listines. For Zakkar, it is usual to read Tekkri, or Tekkariu, sup
posed to be the classical Teucri. There is a general agreement as to the
spelling of Shakalsha or Shalkulsha, Taanau or Daanau, and Uas
huash, though not about the peoples mentioned under these names.
Now here the method of Dr. Brugsch is well worth attending to ; it is
so extraordinary as to be almost incredible. He protests that the
Shakalsha are not Sicilians, but the people of Zagylis (vol. ii. p.
124). Now what was Zagylis? It was ‘a village in the time of
the Romans.’ There ‘ the last remnant of the Shakalsha still re
mained.’ Obviously this tells us nothing. The Shakalsha are the
people of Zagylis, and the people of Zagylis (some fourteen hundred
years later), are—the remnant of the Shakalsha! Take another
example: the Shardana are ‘ the Chartani,’ and the Chartani are-—
the remains of the Shardana. Here, however, we have at least
some clue as to who the, Shardana were: they were not the Sardi
nians, but Colchians, linen-manufacturing people, inferred to exist
from the term ‘Sardonian linen,’ in Herodotus. Let us try the
Daanau; these are the classic Danai, or the Daunians, according to
other students. Dr. Brugsch says they are the people of Taineia,
mentioned by the geographer Ptolemy. And who are the people of
Taineia ? They are the remains of the Daanau. Finally, theZakkar are identified with the Zygritae (vol. ii. p. 151), and when we
ask who the Zygritae were, we find that they were a small tribe, who
perpetuated the name of the Zakkar. Surely it is not a very scien
tific process to identify a powerful ancient race with a small one
first heard of a thousand years later, and then to explain that the
weak tribe is the descendant of the strong one. We think it is suf
ficiently obvious that Dr. Brugsch’s theory is no satisfactory substi
tute for the older system, which recognised powerful and historical
peoples of the Levant in powerful prehistoric races of almost iden
tical names, only slightly altered by Egyptian orthography.
Let us now turn from the record of names in his inscriptions to
the record of facts in the bas-reliefs. In these representations
�1879]
Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
181
preserved to us through three thousand years, we may admire, with
absolute confidence, the lively pictures of the old masters of the
Mediterranean. From the representations of the battle on land, it is
plain that the Tekkri and Pelesta were in the same social con
ditions as the Cimbri who were defeated by Marius, and the Tartars
who invaded Russia in the thirteenth century. Like the Tartars,
they came to conquer and settle; they brought their wives and chil
dren with them in huge wains of wicker work, with solid wheels,
■each wain being drawn by four oxen. The descriptions of the
Russian annalist might serve for an account of these inroads of the
Tekkri. The Egyptians, like the Slavs, must have been dismayed
by ‘ the grinding of the wheels of the wooden chariots, the bellowings of the buffaloes, the howling of the barbarians.’ While the
warriors of the Tekkri and Pelesta were fighting in open chariots
like those of the Egyptians and Greeks, the wains with the women
and children were drawn up in the rear. The van of the foreign
army was routed, and in the pictures of Medinet Habou we see
the Egyptians falling on the waggons, and slaying the children
whom the women in vain endeavour to rescue. It is a singular
fact that the Tekkri who took the lead of the land-forces also
supplied many mariners to the confederate navy. In the sea-piece
which preserves the events of the naval battle, we recognise the
Tekkri by their peculiar head-piece, which is not absolutely unlike
a rude form of the later Greek helmet. This head-piece is also
worn by Pelesta, Daanau, and Uashuash.
The picture of the sea-fight throws a great deal of light on the
civilisation of the predecessors (we dare not say ‘ ancestors ’) of
Agamemnon. The artist has been most careful to mark the differ
ence between the ships of the Shalkalsha, Shardana, and Daanau, and
those of his own countrymen. The Egyptian vessels are low at prow
and stern, either extremity is tipped by a carved lion’s head, and it
is easy for a warrior to have one foot on deck, and the other on the
figure head of his ship. The bulwarks are slightly raised at each
extremity, and the ships must have been half-decked. The confede
rates on the other hand fight in barques which are lofty in prow
and stern. Either extremity is finished off with a bird’s beak,
which rises high out of the water. The reader of Homer at once
recognises the v^val KopwvLCL. the ships with beaks at either end,
the vsas apbfybsXMT&as, vessels curved at prow and stern (recurvatae)
of the poet. The later barques of the Greeks, as we see them
painted on vases of the sixth century, were quite unlike these. The
prow was by that time constructed for ramming purposes, for which
these high birds’ beaks of the early Mediterranean vessels were not at
all adapted. That the people of the Mediterranean did use such
vessels as those which they man in the Egyptian pictures, is proved by
a very old Cyprian vase in the Cesnola collections (Cesnola’s ‘ Cyprus,’
pl. xlv.). On this vase is painted a ship with the arrangement of mast
and sail common to the barques of the Egyptians and their enemies.
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
[August
The prow and stern, however, are built high out of the water,
and protected, as in the reliefs, by lofty bulwarks. This is good
evidence to the accuracy of the Egyptian draughtsmen, who were
careful to mark all these distinctions, as they were engaged in com
piling historical records, rather than in producing mere works of art.
In the sea-fight the Egyptians are, of course, having the best of'
the battle. The masts of the Tuirsha, Tekkri, and Shakalsha are
going by the board; the Egyptians shower in their arrows with
deadly effect; the Tekkri, with drawn swords, in vain attempt to
drive back the boarders. The face of the sea is covered with the
bodies of men who have fallen from the decks, and the Egyptians,
with the clemency which was peculiar to them, help the wounded
to reach the shore, or take them on board their own vessels. In some
of the ships of the allied invaders are soldiers who wear a peculiar
helmet. It so far resembles the helmets of the Shardana, that it has
a curved horn on each side, but, unlike them, it has no spike and
ball in the centre. A horned helmet of the same sort (but probably
much later) has been found in an Italian grave, and may be seen in
the British Museum. In other ships of the allies appear the Tekkri,
with their crested bonnets, mingled with allies who wear the conical cap
of the Greek and Etruscan sailors, the cap, or fez, which, in Greek art, is
worn by Odysseus. The wearers of these caps are, probably with justice,
recognised as the Tuirsha, whom Dr. Brugsch calls the Taurians,
but whom we prefer to call Etrurians or Tyrrhenians. The striped
tunics worn by these two last classes of allies are the same as those
in which the Shardana were still dressed, even after they had become
allies of the Egyptians.
We have now caught a glimpse of the races in whom it seems not
unreasonable to recognise Mediterranean peoples, the ancestors of
Homer’s heroes. We may say, then, with some confidence, that for
centuries before the period dealt with in the Homeric poems, the dwellers
on the borders of the midland sea, the Tuirsha, Shakalsha, Aqaiusha,.
Tekkri, and the rest, were adventurous warriors, capable of forming
such large confederacies as those which took part in the siege of
Troy. About the Tekkri, we may say with certainty that they had
not passed the period of great national migrations. Unless a whole
people had moved, or had at least sent out a ver sacrum, they would
not have led with them women and children, in the wains drawn by
oxen. About the sea-faring Aqaiusha, Shakalsha, and Shardana, we
cannot speak so certainly. ‘ They desired to breathe a soft air,’ they
were eager to plunder the Egyptians, but it does not seem that they
brought their women with them, or definitely meant to settle. When
we turn from the monuments to Homer, we certainly find in him a
picture of an established society contented with secure habitations.
The Achaeans and Argives of the poems are deeply attached to
home; their thoughts always go back from the leaguer under Troy
to wives, children, and aged fathers, who now and again send them
news of their welfare, from Phthia, Crete, or Argos. Homer knows
�i
1879]
Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
183
nothing of combined Achaean invasions of Egypt. The more recent
feuds of the eastern and western shores of the Aegean have put apy
t
such adventures out of memory. Only here and there the roaming
spirit of the older pirates survives in such men as Odysseus feigned
himself to be, in the story told to Eumaeus (Odyssey, xiv. 240-300).
When he there describes himself as a Cretan pirate who ventured to
make a raid on Egypt, he also declares that such adventurous persons
are now rare. His joy, he says, is in all that other men hold in horror.
Though Homer knows nothing of confederated invasions of Egypt,
le his acquaintance with the manners of the country is tolerably exact.
He knows Thebes as the richest city in the world, full of stored wealth,
of chariots, and horses. Mr. Gladstone and others have tried to show
that this description could only apply to Thebes in the days of its im
perial prosperity. We cannot possibly say, however, how long the
memory of Thebes as the 4 mickle-garth’ of the world might survive its
actual decline. It is unnecessary to discuss Dr. Lauth’s bold attempt
>■
to find Ramses III., 4 the old man of the sea,’ in the Proteus of the
fourth book of the Odyssey. Proteus is merely the Homeric form
of the marchen which in Scotland becomes the ballad of Tamlane.
Setting aside these far-fetched conjectures, it is certain that Homer
knows 4 the River Aegyptus,’ which in Hesiod has already become 4 the
Nile.’ He knows Thebes and its wealth ; he knows the island Pharos.
He is familiar with the clemency of the Egyptians. The king, in
, the story of Odysseus, conveys the pirate chief safely away in his own
t
chariot, just as the sailors, on the monuments, rescue their drowning
E
enemies. Homer is also aware that the Egyptians had friendly relations
with Cyprus and Phoenicia (Odyssey, xvii. 440). He knows the
V
Egyptian reputation for skill in medicine. 4 There each man is a
physician skilled beyond all others, for they are of the race of Paeaeon.’
(Od. iv. 211, 213.) To be brief, Egypt is to Homer a land within
the limits of the real world ; it is beyond Libya that the enchanted
isles and shores come into the ken of his wandering hero.
We have tried to show reason for maintaining the opinion that
the Egyptian monuments reveal to us a moment in the national
education of the early Greeks. Egypt probably gave them their first
glimpse of a settled and luxurious civilisation, first taught them to
take delight in other things than 4 swords, shafts, and spears, and
ships with long oars.’ What manner of life would Greek prisoners or
mercenaries see in Egypt ? There they would find towns wealthier
than the fabled city of the Phaeacians. Thebes alone they knew
of as a dim rich city that rose on the borders of the world, as did
Byzantium on the horizon of the Danes. In Thebes and the other
cities of Egypt they beheld 4 the fields full of good things, the canals
rich in fish, the lakes swarming with wild fowl, the meadows green
with herbs. There are lentils in endless abundance, and melons
honey-sweet grow in the well-watered fields. The barns are full of
wheat, and reach as high as heaven; the vine, the almond, and the
fig-tree grow in the gardens. Sweet is their wine, and with honey do
�184
Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
[August
they -mingle it. The youths are clacl always in festive array, the fine oil
is poured upon their curled locks.’ It is thus that an Egyptian scribe
depicts one of the towns of his country. The picture is precisely that
which Homer draws of ideal luxury and comfort. Even in trifling
details the Homeric domestic life is like that of Egypt. In Phaeacia, as
in the monuments, kings’ daughters drive chariots. In Ithaca, as in
Thebes, kings and queens are fond of geese, of all birds1 In the tribute
brought to Thutmes III. from the Phoenician land are 4 two geese.
These were dearer to the king than anything else’ (Brugsch, i. 334).
Compare Penelope’s story of her dream: 4 Twenty geese have I in the
house that eat wheat out of the water-trough, and it gladdens me to
look on them.’ (Odyssey, xix. 540.) In the Egyptians’ 4 Garden of
Flowers ’ the northern mercenaries may have seen the strange tamed
beasts, and have undergone (as some romances in the papyri show us)
the magic wiles of Circe. (See 4 Records of the Past,’ vi. 152, iv. 129 ;
where there are ancient Egyptian stories in the style of the 4 Arabian
Nights.’) If the stranger passed through the temple precincts he
saw the walls covered with signs, which perhaps were deciphered for
him. He then listened to chants like those which the minstrels of
his own lands were soon to recite. There are some curious, though
probably accidental resemblances, in the style of Egyptian and
Greek epic poetry. The similes are often identical. Thus the
slaughtered Khita, under the walls of Kadesh, are said by the
Egyptian poet to lie kicking in heaps, like fishes on the ground.
Compare the slain wooers in the Odyssey (xxii. 384) : 4 He
found all the host of them fallen in their blood, in the dust, like
fishes that the fishermen have drawn forth in the net, into a
hollow of the beach, from out of the grey sea .... and the
sun shines forth and takes their life away.’ In the account of the
battles with the invaders, the Egyptian warriors 4 come down like
lions of the hills, like hawks stooping upon birds.’ The Khita,
before Ramses II., are 4 like the foals of mares, which tremble before
the grim lions.’ But the Egyptian poet most closely resembles
Homer when he dilates on the valour and piety of Ramses II., when
cut off from his army at Kadesh. The religious sentiment, the
relations between Amon and Ramses, are precisely like those between
Odysseus and Athene. Ramses, with his charioteer, is alone in the
crowd of foes. Then he calls to Amon, as Aias calls to Zeus, or
Odysseus to Athene, reminding the god of all the honours he has
paid him. 4 Shall it be for nothing that I have dedicated to thee
many temples, and sacrificed tens of thousands of oxen? Nay, I
find that Amon is better to me than millions of warriors, than
hundreds of thousands of horses.......................... Amon heard my voice,
and came at my cry (saying), 441 am with thee, and am more to thee
than hundreds of thousands of warriors.” ’ This is like the reply of
Athene to Odysseus : 4 And now I will tell thee plainly, even though
fifty companies of men should compass us about, and be eager to slay
us in battle, their kine shouldst thou drive off, and their brave flocks.’
�1879]
Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks.
185
These resemblances, and many others, are, no doubt, the result
of similar ideas prevailing in societies not wholly uninfluenced by
each other. The point we have tried to prove is, that the Homeric
civilisation had been influenced by occasional contact with Egypt.
The pre-Homeric Greeks seem to have mixed, in their years of
youthful audacity and unsettled temper, with the most civilised
people of the earlier world, and to have looked, with their eager eyes
and teachable minds, on the marvels of the empire of Ramses.
They were in connection, in short, with the highly developed art and
culture which the Phoenicians spread from the Euphrates to Egypt,
and through the islands to the Hellenic coasts. Centuries of these
oriental influences gradually ripened society into the free and flexible
organisation which we meet in the lays of Homer.
A. Lang.
Sonnet
SUGGESTED BY THE PICTURE OF THE ANNUNCIATION,
BY E. BURNE JONES.
Woman, whose lot hath alway been to bear
Love’s load beneath the heart, set there to hold
It high, and keep it resolute and bold
To clasp God’s feet, and hang on to the fair
Wide skirts of light,—thy sealed sense can spare
The open vision, thou being called to fold
From time’s mischance, and from the season’s cold,
The wonder in thy breast, and nurse it there.
What though thy travail hath been long and sore,
Love being borne in so great heaviness,
Through loss and labour, joy shall be the more
Of love that living shall the nations bless :
Love that shall set man’s bounden spirit free,
The ‘ holy thing’ that still is born of thee.
Emily Pjfeiffer.
cv
A
�
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Victorian Blogging
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Egypt and the Pre-Homeric Greeks
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Lang, Andrew [1844-1912]
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Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 171-185 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From Fraser's Magazine 20 (August 1875). From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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[s.n.]
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1879
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CT52
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Egypt
Greece
Classics
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greek Poetry
Egypt-History
Greece-History
Homer