E. A. Wallis Budge - The Dwellers on the Nile

DWELLERS

ON THE

NILE

1. Gold plaque, inlaid with coloured pastes, representing Usertsen III, in the form of hawk-headed lions, trampling on his foes. XIIth Dynasty. In the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

2. Gold plaque, inlaid with coloured pastes, representing Amenemhat III slaughtering his enemies. XIIth Dynasty. In the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

DWELLERS

ON THE

NILE

The Life, History, Religion and Literature of the Ancient Egyptians

E. A. WALLIS BUDGE

Dover Publications, Inc.

Mineola, New York

This Dover edition, first published in 1977 and reissued in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1926 by The Religious Tract Society, London, under the title The Dwellers on the Nile: Chapter on the Life, History, Religion and Literature of the Ancient-Egyptians.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-72195

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-23501-1

ISBN-10: 0-486-23501-7

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

23501714 2016

www.doverpublications.com

PREFACE

E ARLY in the year 1925 the Rev. Dr. C. H. Irwin, General Editor of the Religious Tract Society, informed me that the Committee wished to keep on their List of Publications a little book entitled The Dwellers on the Nile, which I wrote for them so far back as 1885. The book, he said, had been well received by the public, and had been reprinted from stereotype plates several times. It would have been reprinted again had the plates been available, but unfortunately during the Great War the Government, being in need of lead, requisitioned them for military purposes and they were, together with those of the books of many other writers, melted down. The first idea of the officers of the Society was that the book might be revised before reprinting, and they brought with them the last available copy of the book, viz., the file copy, to discuss the matter with me. A glance at the Chapters in the book showed that no revision, however drastic, would be satisfactory either to the Society or their readers, for the book was written when the long series of important excavations, which only became possible after an occupation of Egypt by the British in 188283, was about to begin.

During the forty and more years that have elapsed since I wrote the little book excavations have been carried on in many parts of both Upper and Lower Egypt, Nubia, the Egyptian Sdn, and the Sinaitic Peninsula, by the accredited Agents of the Governments of Great Britain, America, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, and by numerous Societies and private individuals. Besides these, the natives in many parts of Egypt who possessed local knowledge embarked on excavations of sites and tombs known to them, either clandestinely, or with the permission of the various Directors of the Service of Antiquities in Egypt. All these excavations have brought to light an enormous number of historical monuments and funerary antiquities, and the information derived from them through the exertions of scholars both in and out of Egypt has completely revolutionized the science of Egyptology in all its branches. The objects recovered from the cemeteries at Abydos and the sites in its neighbourhood, and from Nakdah and Gebeln (Jabaln), the date and historical value of which were first recognized by the late, alas ! J. de Morgan, have revealed to us much of the civilization of the Egyptians towards the close of the Neolithic Period in Egypt, and supplied much information about the kings of the earliest Dynasties. The results obtained from excavations in the Delta, in the pyramid-fields at Sakkrah, in the Fayym, in the Thebad, in Nubia and in the Egyptian Sudan, have made it possible to construct a nearly complete list of the kings of Egypt, to write with very considerable accuracy the history of Egypt, and to describe the foreign influences, both Asiatic and European, that transformed the rude and semi-savage aboriginal peoples of the Nile Valley into one of the greatest and most civilized nations of antiquity. The discovery, made by a peasant woman at Tall al-Amrnah in 1888, of a hoard of clay and mud tablets inscribed in a Semitic language (two are written in the language of Mitani, at present unknown), has placed in our hands some hundreds of letters and dispatches which were sent by the kings of Babylonia, Mitani and Assyria and by the governors of cities and towns in the land of the Hittites, Syria and Palestine, to Amenhetep III and his son Amenhetep IV in the XVth century B.C . These illustrate the foreign relations of Egypt during the period when she might be correctly described as a military power and the mistress of the world, and from the historians point of view their value and importance cannot be overestimated. The excavation of the tombs of all periods has also increased to a most remarkable degree our knowledge of the daily life, manners and customs, trade and commerce, and the religious beliefs of the Egyptians. The publication of the newly discovered texts, both historical and funerary, with translations and commentaries, proceeded rapidly in England, France and Germany, and the information which became available as the result compelled the older Egyptologists to revise drastically their opinions on many important points of Egyptian chronology and history. The great pioneer of Egyptology, Samuel Birch, on reading Masperos edition of the texts from the pyramids of Unas and Teta in the Recueil de Travaux, remarked sadly, Ah! The new Egyptology can only be dealt with by strong young men.

Now all these facts were as well known to Dr. Irwin as to myself, and when I told him that The Dwellers on the Nile must be re-written and enlarged he cordially agreed, and the present volume is the result. It was impossible to deal even briefly with the difficult subjects of origin, race, language, chronology, etc., of the Ancient Egyptians in a small work of this kind, and it was therefore decided to concentrate on the daily life of the people, and to add only such fundamental facts as would enable the reader to understand the general character of their History, Religion and Literature. An attempt has been made in this book to describe the life of the Ancient Egyptians from, so to speak, their cradles to their graves. The Introduction contains a brief summary of the growth and development of the rule of the Dynastic kings over a unified Egypt, and a list of their names derived from the monuments. To assign exact dates to the kings who reigned before the XVIIIth Dynasty (about 15801350 B.C .) is at present impossible, for the necessary facts are wanting; accurate dating is not possible until the end of the VIIIth century B.C . It is known now that scores of kings reigned independently in Lower Egypt, and presumably in Upper Egypt also, before the unification of the two Egypts under Nrmer or ha, but the total length of their reigns cannot be even guessed at, and the predynastic monuments are silent on this point.

According to Manetho, who wrote a History of Egypt for Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the IIIrd century B.C ., the first rulers of Egypt were Gods, who were followed by the Demi-gods and the Nekues or Spirits, and the total length of their reigns was 24,836 years. These figures (like those which state that ten kings reigned in Babylonia for 456,000 years) are of course fabulous, but they are useful as showing that Egyptian civilization was believed to be very, very old. From the time of Lepsius, who published his great work on Egyptian Chronology in 1848, Egyptologists have devoted much time and energy in trying to find out when the first dynastic king of Egypt ascended the throne. One after the other has formulated chronological systems, but no two of them agree, and the difference between the dates assigned to the beginning of dynastic rule in Egypt is sometimes as much as 2,500 years, for Champollion-Figeac gives 5869 B.C . and Meyer 3315 B.C . Some scholars have tried to fix dates in Egyptian history by calculations based on astronomical data, and have assumed that the Egyptians were acquainted with and used the Sothic Cycle, but these are not to be depended upon, for the Egyptians were as ignorant of the Sothic Cycle of 1,461 years as they were of the Phoenix Period. This has been well shown by Nicklin (