V. DECLINE AND FALL

Tutenkhamon—The labors of Rameses II—The wealth of the clergy—The poverty of the people—The conquest of Egypt—Summary of Egyptian contributions to civilization

Two years after his death his son-in-law, Tutenkhamon, a favorite of the priests, ascended the throne. He changed the name Tutenkhaton which his father-in-law had given him, returned the capital to Thebes, made his peace with the powers of the Church, and announced to a rejoicing people the restoration of the ancient gods. The words Aton and Ikhnaton were effaced from all the monuments, the priests forbade the name of the heretic king to pass any man’s lips, and the people referred to him as “The Great Criminal.” The names that Ikhnaton had removed were recarved upon the monuments, and the feast-days that he had abolished were renewed. Everything was as before.

For the rest Tutenkhamon reigned without distinction; the world would hardly have heard of him had not unprecedented treasures been found in his grave. After him a doughty general, Harmhab, marched his armies up and down the coast, restoring Egypt’s external power and internal peace. Seti I wisely reaped the fruits of renewed order and wealth, built the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak,²⁷² began to cut a mighty temple into the cliffs at Abu Simbel, commemorated his grandeur in magnificent reliefs, and had the pleasure of lying for thousands of years in one of the most ornate of Egypt’s tombs.

At this point the romantic Rameses II, last of the great Pharaohs, mounted the throne. Seldom has history known so picturesque a monarch. Handsome and brave, he added to his charms by his boyish consciousness of them; and his exploits in war, which he never tired of recording, were equaled only by his achievements in love. After brushing aside a brother who had inopportune rights to the throne, he sent an expedition to Nubia to tap the gold mines there and replenish the treasury of Egypt; and with the resultant funds he undertook the reconquest of the Asiatic provinces, which had again rebelled. Three years he gave to recovering Palestine; then he pushed on, met a great army of the Asiatic allies at Kadesh (1288 B.C.), and turned defeat into victory by his courage and leadership. It may have been as a result of these campaigns that a considerable number of Jews were brought into Egypt, as slaves or as immigrants; and Rameses II is believed by some to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.²⁷³ He had his victories commemorated, without undue impartiality, on half a hundred walls, commissioned a poet to celebrate him in epic verse, and rewarded himself with several hundred wives. When he died he left one hundred sons and fifty daughters to testify to his quality by their number and their proportion. He married several of his daughters, so that they too might have splendid children. His offspring were so numerous that they constituted for four hundred years a special class in Egypt, from which, for over a century, her rulers were chosen.

He deserved these consolations, for he seems to have ruled Egypt well. He built so lavishly that half the surviving edifices of Egypt are ascribed to his reign. He completed the main hall at Karnak, added to the temple of Luxor, raised his own vast shrine, the Ramesseum, west of the river, finished the great mountain-sanctuary at Abu Simbel, and scattered colossi of himself throughout the land. Commerce flourished under him, both across the Isthmus of Suez and on the Mediterranean. He built another canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, but the shifting sands filled it up soon after his death. He yielded up his life in 1225 B.C., aged ninety, after one of the most remarkable reigns of history.

Only one human power in Egypt had excelled his, and that was the clergy: here, as everywhere in history, ran the endless struggle between church and state. Throughout his reign and those of his immediate successors, the spoils of every war, and the lion’s share of taxes from the conquered provinces, went to the temples and the priests. These reached the zenith of their wealth under Rameses III. They possessed at that time 107,000 slaves—one-thirtieth of the population of Egypt; they held 750,000 acres—one-seventh of all the arable land; they owned 500,000 head of cattle; they received the revenues from 169 towns in Egypt and Syria; and all this property was exempt from taxation.²⁷⁴ The generous or timorous Rameses III showered unparalleled gifts upon the priests of Amon, including 32,000 kilograms of gold and a million kilograms of silver;²⁷⁵ every year he gave them 185,000 sacks of corn. When the time came to pay the workmen employed by the state he found his treasury empty.²⁷⁶ More and more the people starved in order that the gods might eat.

Under such a policy it was only a matter of time before the kings would become the servants of the priests. In the reign of the last Ramessid king the High Priest of Amon usurped the throne and ruled as openly supreme; the Empire became a stagnant theocracy in which architecture and superstition flourished, and every other element in the national life decayed. Omens were manipulated to give a divine sanction to every decision of the clergy. The most vital forces of Egypt were sucked dry by the thirst of the gods at the very time when foreign invaders were preparing to sweep down upon all this concentrated wealth.

For meanwhile on every frontier trouble brewed. The prosperity of the country had come in part from its strategic place on the main line of Mediterranean trade; its metals and wealth had given it mastery over Libya on the west, and over Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine on the north and east. But now at the other end of this trade route—in Assyria, Babylon and Persia—new nations were growing to maturity and power, were strengthening themselves with invention and enterprise, and were daring to compete in commerce and industry with the self-satisfied and pious Egyptians. The Phoenicians were perfecting the trireme galley, and with it were gradually wresting from Egypt the control of the sea. The Dorians and Achaeans had conquered Crete and the Ægean (ca. 1400 B.C.), and were establishing a commercial empire of their own; trade moved less and less in slow caravans over the difficult and robber-infested mountains and deserts of the Near East; it moved more and more, at less expense and with less loss, in ships that passed through the Black Sea and the Ægean to Troy, Crete and Greece, at last to Carthage, Italy and Spain. The nations along the northern shores of the Mediterranean ripened and blossomed, the nations on the southern shores faded and rotted away. Egypt lost her trade, her gold, her power, her art, at last even her pride; one by one her rivals crept down upon her soil, harassed and conquered her, and laid her waste.

In 954 B.C. the Libyans came in from the western hills, and laid about them with fury; in 722 the Ethiopians entered from the south, and avenged their ancient slavery; in 674 the Assyrians swept down from the north and subjected priest-ridden Egypt to tribute. For a time Psamtik, Prince of Saïs, repelled the invaders, and brought Egypt together again under his leadership. During his long reign, and those of his successors, came the “Saïte Revival” of Egyptian art: the architects and sculptors, poets and scientists of Egypt gathered up the technical and esthetic traditions of their schools, and prepared to lay them at the feet of the Greeks. But in 525 B.C. the Persians under Cambyses crossed Suez, and again put an end to Egyptian independence. In 332 B.C. Alexander sallied out of Asia, and made Egypt a province of Macedon.* In 48 B.C. Caesar arrived to capture Egypt’s new capital, Alexandria, and to give to Cleopatra the son and heir whom they vainly hoped to crown as the unifying monarch of the greatest empires of antiquity.²⁷⁷ In 30 B.C. Egypt became a province of Rome, and disappeared from history.

For a time it flourished again when saints peopled the desert, and Cyril dragged Hypatia to her death in the streets (415 A.D.); and again when the Moslems conquered it (ca. A.D. 650), built Cairo with the ruins of Memphis, and filled it with bright-domed mosques and citadels. But these were alien cultures not really Egypt’s own, and they too passed away. Today there is a place called Egypt, but the Egyptian people are not masters there; long since they have been broken by conquest, and merged in language and marriage with their Arab conquerors; their cities know only the authority of Moslems and Englishmen, and the feet of weary pilgrims who travel thousands of miles to find that the Pyramids are merely heaps of stones. Perhaps greatness could grow there again if Asia should once more become rich, and make Egypt the half-way house of the planet’s trade. But of the morrow, as Lorenzo sang, there is no certainty; and today the only certainty is decay. On all sides gigantic ruins, monuments and tombs, memorials of a savage and titanic energy; on all sides poverty and desolation, and the exhaustion of an ancient blood. And on all sides the hostile, engulfing sands, blown about forever by hot winds, and grimly resolved to cover everything in the end.

Nevertheless the sands have destroyed only the body of ancient Egypt; its spirit survives in the lore and memory of our race. The improvement of agriculture, metallurgy, industry and engineering; the apparent invention of glass and linen, of paper and ink, of the calendar and the clock, of geometry and the alphabet; the refinement of dress and ornament, of furniture and dwellings, of society and life; the remarkable development of orderly and peaceful government, of census and post, of primary and secondary education, even of technical training for office and administration; the advancement of writing and literature, of science and medicine; the first clear formulation known to us of individual and public conscience, the first cry for social justice, the first widespread monogamy, the first monotheism, the first essays in moral philosophy; the elevation ofarchitecture, sculpture and the minor arts to a degree of excellence and power never (so far as we know) reached before, and seldom equaled since: these contributions were not lost, even when their finest exemplars were buried under the desert, or overthrown by some convulsion of the globe.* Through the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the Jews, through the Cretans, the Greeks and the Romans, the civilization of Egypt passed down to become part of the cultural heritage of mankind. The effect or remembrance of what Egypt accomplished at the very dawn of history has influence in every nation and every age. “It is even possible,” as Faure has said, “that Egypt, through the solidarity, the unity, and the disciplined variety of its artistic products, through the enormous duration and the sustained power of its effort, offers the spectacle of the greatest civilization that has yet appeared on the earth.”²⁷⁸ We shall do well to equal it.