In the Bible we read of the “God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.” In the prayer of King Khunaten, dating long before any biblical writing, we find a clear recognition of one God, and a reaching out of the soul after him, embraced in a language without parallel for beauty of expression and grandeur of thought. Ages before the giving of the law on Sinai and the establishment of the Hebrew ceremonial worship, the “Book of the Dead,” with its high moral precepts, was in the possession of every educated Egyptian.
The Jews went out of Egypt with a pure Semitic blood, but with a modified Semitic language. They carried with them in the person of their great leader, Moses, “all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” This is shown by their architecture, religious customs, vestments, persistent kindred traditions. Both Moses and Jesus were of the race whose early lessons were received with stripes from Egyptian masters. The hieroglyphical writings of Egypt contained the possibilities of Genesis, the Iliad, the Psalms, the Æneid, the Inferno, and Paradise Lost. In the thought that planned the Hall of Columns upon the Nile, or sculptured the rock temple of Ammon, was involved the conception of Solomon’s Temple, the Parthenon, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and every sacred fane of Europe and America.
Therefore, travel and exploration in this wonderful land, the remote but undoubted source of letters, morals, sciences and arts, are always interesting. Thebes, Memphis, Zoan-Tanis, Pitom, Tini, Philæ, Bubastis, Abydos, are but as fragments of mighty monuments, yet each discloses a story abounding in rich realities and more striking in its historic varieties than ever mortal man composed. But for the powerful people that made the Nile valley glow with empire, but for the tasteful people that made it beautiful with cities and monuments, but for the cultured people that wrote on stone and papyrus, were given to costly ceremonies, and who dreamed of the one God, the Israelites would have recrossed the Isthmus of Suez, or the Red Sea, without those germs of civilization, without those notions of Jehovah, which made them peculiar among their desert brethren, and saved them from absorption by the hardy tribes of Arabia and Syria.
In going from Europe across the Mediterranean to Egypt, you may think you can sail directly into one of the mouths of the Nile, and ascend that stream till the first cataract calls a halt. But neither of the great mouths of the Nile give good harbors. Like those of our own Mississippi, they are narrow and exposed by reason of the deposits they continually carry to the sea. The two main mouths of the Nile – it has had several outlets in the course of time – are over a hundred miles apart. The Western, or Rosetta, mouth was once the seat of a famed city from whose ruins were exhumed (1799) the historic “Rosetta Stone,” now in the British Museum. It was found on the site of a temple dedicated by Necho II. to Tum, “The Setting Sun;” and the inscription itself, written in three kinds of writing, Greek, hieroglyphic, and enchorial, or running hand, was a decree of the Egyptian Priests assembled in synod at Memphis in favor of Ptolomy Epiphanes, who had granted them some special favor. Its great value consisted in the fact that it afforded a safe key to the reading of the hieroglyphical writings found on all Egyptian monuments.
The Eastern, or Damietta, mouth of the Nile gives a better harbor, but the boats are slow. Beyond this is Port Said, where you can enter the ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez and pass to the Red Sea. But you are not now in the Egypt you seek. There are no verdant meadows and forests of date palms and mulberry, which give to the interior of Lower Egypt – covered with numerous villages and intersected by thousands of canals – the picturesque character of a real garden of God. You only see a vast sandy plain, stretching on either side of the canal. It is a sea of sand with here and there little islands of reeds or thorny plants, white with salty deposits. In spite of the blue sky, the angel of death has spread his wings over this vast solitude where the least sign of life is an event.
Speaking of canals, reminds one that this Suez Canal, 100 miles long, and built by M. de Lesseps, 1858-1869, was not the first to connect the waters of the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. One was projected B.C. 610 by Pharaoh Necho, but not finished till the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, which ran from the Red Sea to one of the arms of the Nile. It was practically out of use in the time of Cleopatra.
The best Mediterranean port of Egypt is Alexandria, the glory of which has sadly departed. It is far to the west of the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, but is connected by rail with Cairo. Though founded 330 B.C., by Alexander the Great, conqueror of Egypt, as a commercial outlet, and raised to a population, splendor and wealth unexcelled by any ancient city, it is now a modern place in the midst of impressive ruins. Its mixed and unthrifty population is about 165,000.
As you approach it you are guided by the modern light house, 180 feet high, which stands on the site of the Great Light of Pharos, built by Ptolemy II., 280 B.C., and which weathered the storms of sixteen centuries, lighting the sea for forty miles around. It was of white marble and reckoned as one of the “Seven Wonders of the World.”
Standing in the streets of Alexandria, what a crowd of historic memories rush upon you. You are in Lower Egypt, the Delta of the Nile, the country of the old Pharaohs whose power was felt from the Mediterranean to the Mountains of the Moon, whose land was the “black land,” symbol of plenty among the tribes of Arabia and throughout all Syria, land where the Hebrews wrought and whence they fled back to their home on the Jordan, land of the Grecian Alexander, the Roman Cæsar, the Mohammedan Califf.
No earthly dynasty ever lasted longer than that of the Pharaohs. We hardly know when time began it, but Brugsch dates it from Menes, B.C. 4400. It fell permanently with Alexander’s Conquest, 330 B.C., and was held by his successors, the Greek Ptolemeys, for three hundred years, or until the Romans took it from Cleopatra, whose name is perpetuated in the famous Cleopatra’s Needles, which for nearly 2000 years stood as companion pieces to Pompey’s Pillar.
The Pillar of Pompey, 195 feet high, still stands on high ground southeast of the city, near the Moslem burial place. But the Needles of Cleopatra are gone. Late investigations have thrown new light on these wonders. They were not made nor erected in honor of Cleopatra at all, but were historic monuments erected by the Pharaoh, Thutmes III., 1600 B.C., at Heliopolis, “City of the Sun.” The two largest pair were, centuries ago, transported, one to Constantinople, the other to Rome. The two smaller pair were taken to Alexandria by Tiberius and set up in front of Cæsar’s Temple, where they obtained the well known name of “Cleopatra’s Needles.” One fell down and, after lying prostrate in the sand for centuries, was taken to London in 1878 and set up on the banks of the Thames. It is 68 feet high, and was cut out of a single stone from the quarries of Syene. The other was taken down and transported to New York, where it is a conspicuous object in Central Park. They bear nearly similar inscriptions, of the time of Thutmes III. and Rameses II.
Egypt fell into the hands of the Saracen invaders in A.D. 625, and has ever since been under Mohammedan or Turkish rule. The Alexandria of the Ptolemeys with its half million people, its magnificent temples, its libraries and museums, its learning and art, its commerce for all the world, has lost all its former importance, and is to-day a dirty trading town filled with a mixed and indolent people.
There is no chapter in history so sweeping and interesting as that which closed the career of Alexandria to the Christian world. It was the real centre of Christian light and influence. Its bishops were the most learned and potential, its schools of Christian thought the most renowned. It was in commerce with all the world and could scatter influences wider than any other city. It had given the Septuagint version of the Bible to the nations. All around, it had made converts of the Coptic elements, which were native, and Egypt’s natural defenders in case of war. But these it had estranged. Therefore the Saracen conquest was easy. Pelusium