EGYPT THE BIRTHPLACE OF GREEK DECORATIVE ART.
A SCHOLAR of no less distinction than the late Sir Richard Burton wrote the other day of Egypt as "the inventor of the alphabet, the cradle of letters, the preacher of animism and metempsychosis, and, generally, the source of all human civilization." This is a broad statement; but it is literally true. Hence the irresistible fascination of Egyptology–a fascination which is quite unintelligible to those who are ignorant of the subject. I have sometimes been asked, for instance, how it happens that I–erewhile a novelist, and therefore a professed student of men and manners as they are–can take so lively an interest in the men and manners of five or six thousand years ago. But it is precisely because these men of five or six thousand years ago had manners, a written language, a literature, a school of art, and a settled government that we find them so interesting. Ourselves the creatures of a day, we delight in studies which help us to realize that we stand between the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future. Hence the charm of those sciences which unfold to us, page by page, the unwritten records of the world we live in. Hence the eagerness with which we listen to the Story of Creation as told by the geologist and the paleontologist. [Page 159]
But the history of Man, and especially of civilized man, concerns us yet more nearly; and the earliest civilized man of whom we know anything is the ancient Egyptian.
From the moment when he emerges–a shadowy figure–from the mists of the dawn of history, he is seen to have a philosophical religion, a hierarchy, and a social system. How many centuries, or tens of centuries, it took him to achieve that result we know not. Of the time when he was yet a savage we detect no trace. His faintest, farthest footprint on the sands of Time bears the impress of a sandal.
To this nation which first translated sounds into signs, and made use of those signs to transmit the memory of its deeds to future generations, we naturally turn for the earliest information of other races; nor do we so turn in vain.
Before they have any writing or any history of their own, we meet with the Ethiopians, the Libyans, the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of ancient Egypt. And in these inscriptions, graven on the storied walls of temples and pylons older by a thousand years than the opening chapters of classical history, we also find the first–the very first–mention of the people of Greece and Italy.
It would be difficult to find a more interesting subject of inquiry than the relations of prehistoric Greece to Egypt, or than to measure, as far as possible, the extent of that debt which the early Greeks owed to the teaching and example of the ancient Egyptians.
The history of Greece and the Greeks, as told by themselves, may be said to begin with the first recorded Olympiad, seven hundred and seventy-six years before the Christian era. It is at this point that we begin to draw the line between fable and fact. But the first mention of the Greeks upon the monuments of Egypt goes back some seventeen centuries earlier, to a rock-cut tablet of the time of Sankhara, a Theban King of the Eleventh Dynasty who reigned about two thousand five hundred years before Christ. They appear in this memorable inscription as the "Hanebu"– [Page 160] that is to say, "the people of all coasts and islands ;" thereby meaning the coast-folk of Greece and Asia Minor, and the islanders of the Ægean. Now, it is a very interesting fact that "Hanebu," as a generic name for these same tribes, is exactly paralleled by the Hebrew "îyê haggôîm," which is used not only by the prophets, but earlier still in the Mosaic books, where it is said of the sons of Yavan, (41) in the tenth chapter of Genesis, "Of these were the isles of the nations divided in their lands." The Revised Version, here quoted, gives an alternative reading of "coastlands" for islands; "Hanebu" and "îyê haggôîm," being strictly capable of both interpretations. After this, we hear no more of the early Greeks in Egypt till they reappear as the Danai or Danæans, some twelve or thirteen hundred years later, in the reign of Thothmes III. Now, Thothmes III. was the Alexander of ancient Egyptian history. He conquered the known world of his day; he carved the names of six hundred and twenty-eight vanquished nations and captured cities on the walls of Karnak; and he set up a tablet of Victory in the Great Temple. It is in this famous tablet, engraved with the oldest heroic poem known to science, that we find the Greeks mentioned for the second time in Egyptian history.
"I came!" says the Great God Amen, addressing the King, who is represented at the top of the tablet in an attitude of worship, "I came! I gave thee might to fell those who dwell in their islands. Those also who live in the midst of the sea hear thy war-cry and tremble ! The isles of the Danai are in the power of thy will !"
That they are now called Danai or descendants of Danaos, the traditional King of Argolis, is a point to be noted; for it shows that these barbarian Greeks had already a legendary lore of their own. And it does more than this. It shows that in the time of Thothmes III., although we are still distant some eight hundred years from the presumed date of the "Iliad," the name of Danæans (like that of Achæans somewhat later) was already applied in the Homeric sense to the whole Hellenic race. According to no other interpretation [Page 161] could the Danai, who were originally but a small tribe settled on the mainland in Argolis, be described as "those who dwell in their islands." Danai, however, which is a transcription from the Greek, did not supersede "Hanebu," which is pure Egyptian. We accordingly find "Hanebu" again employed about two hundred years later in a colossal bas-relief group of Pharaoh Horemheb and his prisoners of war, among whom may be seen a gang of captive "Hanebu"–men and women–with their race-name inscribed against them. The heads of the men are defaced, but the profile of one woman is yet perfect; and that profile is the earliest portrait of a Greek in the world. The eye is defaced; but the delicate outline of the features is yet uninjured. She wears one long ringlet (presumably one on each side ); and this ringlet is a characteristic feature of female heads in archaic Greek art. It may therefore be assumed that it was a national fashion from the earliest period. I may as well add that the word "Hanebu," as a generic term for the Hellenes, whether Asiatic or European, survived till the time of the Ptolemies, when the Greeks ruled in Egypt. Native Egyptian scribes of that comparatively modern age used it to denote the governing race, just as their remote fore-fathers had used it to denote Greek barbarians taken in battle.
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