I. PROLEGOMENA

 

SOME thirty years after the defeat of Xerxes, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who had travelled much in the lands of the barbarians as well as in Greece, set himself to write down for the men of his own time and for posterity the events of the great struggle and also to describe, as completely as he could, the long series of events, cause upon cause, effect after effect, which had led up to the final catastrophe. And he began from the beginning of ancient story, from the Trojan War and before that from the rape of Io. For he rightly saw that the Great Event had indeed had its ultimate origin in the furthest recesses of time, when the ancient civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean first evolved themselves out of chaos, and the peoples of the Nile-land, of Western Asia, and of the Aegean first came into contact with each other. So he told first all he knew of the peoples of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and also Scythia, and of their history, and intended, we know, to tell the story of Assyria also. Everywhere he tried to trace back the first contact of his own people with these barbarians, and to identify this or that element of culture which his Greeks, whom he knew to be far younger as a nation than the Orientals, owed to the East which they had defeated. And then he gathered all the threads of his various tales together, as Xerxes gathered the peoples themselves together, for the final story of the collision of East and West, and his history marches straight without digression now, to Salamis, Plataeae, and Mykale.

In dealing with the early history of Greece he groped darkly, because, though he had all the varied store of Hellenic legend to his hand, he had no knowledge of what we know now in some degree, the real story of the first development of Greek civilization. We know that Egyptian priests could tell him the history of Cheops and of Rhampsinitos, but that no Greek could tell him that of the strong men who lived before Agamemnon. Nor do we know the true facts of their history as we do that of Cheops or Rhampsinitos, but we may do so one day, when we read the Minoan writing as we can that of ancient Egypt. Till then, we also must grope, but not so darkly as Herodotus, for modern archaeological discovery has told us the development of the heroic culture of Greece, which we can now trace back to its origins, contemporary with those of Egypt itself. So much further beyond the Trojan War and the Phoenician rape of Io can the modern λόγιοι trace the causes of the quarrel of East and West. But until eighty years ago we were as ignorant as Herodotus, and he, with the Biblical history of the Jews beside him, was our sole good authority for the ancient history of the Near East: the Sacred Record and the “profane” ίστορίης πρύτανις told us all that mattered of what we knew.

 

2. The Increased Modern Knowledge of Ancient History

But now our knowledge of the early history of mankind is increasing apace. Nowhere is this vast accession of knowledge more noticeable than in the domain of the historian of the ancient peoples of the Nearer East, the portion of the world of which Greece marks the western and Persia the eastern boundary, of which the southern border marches with the lands of the Blacks and the northern is formed by the steppes and deserts of the Scythians and Cimmerians. Now, within the short space of eighty years, the whole history, as distinct from untrustworthy legends of Greek or Jewish origin, of the mighty monarchies of Egypt and of Mesopotamia, of Media and of Persia, has been recovered from oblivion for us, and, what is still more interesting, we are now just beginning to realize that Greece itself was, long before the classical culture of the Hellenes was ever heard or thought of, the seat of a civilization at least the equal of that of Egypt or Chaldaea and possibly as ancient. Nor is it in Mesopotamia, in the Nile Valley, and in Greece alone that man's knowledge of the earliest history of his race has been so vastly increased during the last eighty years: yet another system of culture, exhibiting in different points resemblances to the three foregoing, while in others perfectly distinct from them, has been shown to have existed at least as early as 1500 BC in Central Asia Minor; this extended its sway on the west to Sipylus, on the east to the borders of the Canaanites and to Carchemish on the Euphrates.

Furthermore, on the northern and eastern confines of the Babylonian culture-system, new nations pass within our ken; Vannic men of Armenia, ruled by powerful kings; Kassites of the Zagros, whose language seems to contain elements which if really Aryan are probably the oldest-known monuments of Indo-European speech (c. 1600 BC); strange-tongued Elamites, also, akin neither to Iranian nor Semite. Nor does it seem to us remarkable that we should read the trilingual proclamations of Darius Hystaspis to his peoples in their original tongues, although an eighteenth-century philosopher would have regarded the prospect of our ever being able to do so as the wildest of chimeras!

And when we read the story of Egypt, of Babylon, and Persia as it really happened, and not through the mouths of Greek or Jewish interpreters, we wonder not so much at the misinterpretations and mistakes of our former guides, but at the fact that they were able to get so close to the truth as they actually did.

In the cases of Egypt and Greece the new knowledge has taken us back to the beginning of things, to the days before history, but this is not the case with Babylonia. Even as far back as we can go, to about the middle of the fourth millennium BC, we are still within the age of knowable history, and the in­scriptions still contain the names of kings and temples which we can decipher. So far are we from reaching any prehistoric period that instead of attaining the beginning of Chaldaean civilization we have apparently dug only as far as the latter end of its early period; we have reached and passed the beginnings of Semitic rule in Mesopotamia only to find our­selves witnessing in this, the most ancient stratum of the known history of the world, the latter end of the pre-Semitic culture to which the civilization of Babylonia owed its inspiration. These evidences of human barbarism which elsewhere in the world precede the traces of civilization are in Babylonia absent; hardly a single weapon of flint or chert testifies to the existence there of a Stone Age; when we first meet with them the Babylonians were already metal-users and already wrote inscriptions which we can read.

In dealing with Mesopotamia, therefore, we never get beyond the domain of true history; we are from the beginning arranging and sifting written contemporary records in order to collect from them the history of the country. In the case of Egypt, however, we go right back to the period before writing began, and have to reconstitute the story of the earliest ages from the evidence which archaeological discovery has recovered as to the earliest development of civilization. And in Greece and Anatolia we depend largely upon the evidence of archaeology alone, for there, though we possess the inscriptions of Greeks and Anatolians who lived in a high state of civilization contemporaneously with Egyptians and Babylonians whose records we read almost as well as our own, they remain a sealed book to us. We cannot yet read a word of them, and so have to guess at the probable course of the history of their authors, with the help of archaeological discovery and the few hints which the Egyptian and Mesopotamian records afford us.

Yet archaeological discovery alone suffices to give us the main outlines of the history of early Greek civilization, though we know nothing of the actual events which moulded its development, and have never heard the names of the authors of these events. Archaeology alone has revealed to us in Greece the monuments of a civilization, “prehistoric” because we cannot yet read its history, which was as highly developed and as important in the annals of the world as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And from the study of these monuments and remains we have been enabled to arrive at a knowledge of the cultural relations of early Greece which are nothing less than revolutionary. We see that, instead of belonging originally to the central and North-European “Aryan” race, the group of peoples speaking Indo-European languages to which we ourselves belong, and being in its origins radically distinct from the civilization of Egypt and of Asia, the oldest culture of Greece really belongs to the Mediterranean basin, where it originated, and so is from the beginning part of the culture of the other Mediterranean peoples, to which the civilization of Egypt also attaches itself to some extent. We know now that the Mediterranean peoples have always been and are to this day more or less allied to each other racially. In reality the brunet Italian and Greek of today are racially far more closely related to the Palestinian and the Egyptian than to the Celt, the Slav, or the Teuton, although now they speak, and for three thousand years past they have spoken, languages akin to those of their northern neighbours. These languages were imposed upon them by Aryan conquerors, and the period at which this conquest took place is approximately fixed, in Greece at least, by the dark age which intervened between the “prehistoric” and the classical civilizations of Hellas. The Greek civilization which we have always known is the product of the mingling of the invading northern culture of the Aryan-speakers, with the remains of the ancient “Mediterranean” civilization not distantly related to that of Egypt, which had grown up from its earliest beginnings in the Aegean basin, as that of Egypt had grown up in the Nile Valley. That the Aegean “Mediterraneans” were from the first Aryan-speakers is not in the slightest degree probable. We can trace their culture from its Neolithic beginnings, and can even discern a possibility that these beginnings may have been derived from Neolithic Egypt: nobody has yet supposed that the Mediterranean, far less the Nile Valley, was the original home of the Aryans. Yet that seems the necessary corollary of a supposition that the prehistoric Greeks were Indo-Europeans. And we know that almost to the last there survived on the north Mediterranean shores isolated patches of non-Aryan speech (the Basque still survives) which are naturally to be regarded as the survivors of a general pre-Aryan language-stratum.

Archaeology alone has thus assigned the early culture of Greece rather to the Near East, or at any rate to the Mediterranean, than to Europe, to the non-Aryan races than to the Aryan.

The entry of Greece into the ranks of the ancient civilizations of the Near East as the fellow of Egypt and Babylon is one of the most striking results of modern archaeological discovery.

It cannot be denied that the increase of knowledge thus roughly sketched is very considerable, nor can it be doubted that the names of the first discoverers of the New World of ancient history, Champollion and his peers, are full worthy to rank with those of Columbus, of Galileo, of Newton, or of any other discoverer of new worlds of human science.

 

3. Archaeology and History

There is no need now to recapitulate the steps by which these discoverers arrived at their knowledge, which is now accepted science. The languages of ancient Egypt, of Assyria, of Elam, even of pre-Semitic Babylonia, are now sufficiently known to enable us to translate their ancient inscriptions with an accuracy sufficient for all practical purposes, and from these, the ancient records, combined with the critical analysis of such traditions as have been handed down to us by classical authors, we derive our knowledge of the actual events of the ancient history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Although the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Anatolia are not yet translated with certainty, the use by the ancient Anatolians of the cuneiform (Babylonian) script side by side with their own hieroglyphs has enabled us lately to obtain glimpses of their history. Only in the case of prehistoric Greece are we denied first-hand knowledge of events, and are forced to content ourselves with a knowledge of the development  of culture, derived solely from archaeological discoveries and comparisons. Greek legends no doubt would tell us much, had we any firm standpoint of known history from which to criticize them. As it is, they can but give us doubtful and uncertain hints of the events which they shadow forth. In the case of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia, more especially in the case of Egypt, the archaeologist is the chief auxiliary of the historian, for he makes it possible, by means of his excavation of the actual remains of ancient civilization, to supplement the record of events with the story of the development of culture. In the case of early Greece we have this story, though it is as yet far from complete, without any framework, any skeleton of known events which it would clothe; with the exception of a few facts supplied us by the Egyptian records. In Greece and in Anatolia the archaeologists go on discovering, besides the actual remains of the culture and art of the “Minoans” and “Hittites”, tablet after tablet, inscription after inscription, which we cannot read. But in Egypt and in Mesopotamia they are every day bringing to light new documents which we can read, and from which we are every day learning new facts of history. If most of the larger monuments of Egypt have always been above ground, and needed but the skill of the copyist and the knowledge of the decipherer to make them yield up their secrets, this was by no means the case with Assyria, where the famous excavations of Layard resulted in the discovery of Assyrian history. And during the last thirty years excavation throughout the Nearer East has resulted in the discovery not only of new inscriptions to be read, but also (and this more especially in Egypt and Greece) of the actual remains of ancient art and civilized life which enable the archaeologist, properly so-called, to reconstruct the story of the development of human culture without the aid either from classical historian or ancient inscription. The work of the Egypt Exploration Fund, with which the names of Naville and Petrie will always be associated, and that of Maciver, Reisner, Garstang, and Legrain in Egypt, that of the French expeditions of M. de Sarzec at Telloh in Babylonia, and of M. de Morgan in Persia, of the Palestine Exploration Fund, of the Austrian Dr. Sellin and the German Dr. Schumacher, and now of the American Reisner in Palestine, that of Dr. Winckler at Boghaz Kyoi in Anatolia, and, last but not least, that of Schliemann in Greece, and of the Italians Halbherr and Pernier, and the Britons Evans and Mackenzie (besides others, Italian, British, and American) in Crete,—all this work of actual excavation during the last three decades has resulted in the production of historical material of the first importance. And the historians await each new season’s work of the excavators with impatience, knowing that something new is sure to be found which will add to their knowledge and modify their previous ideas.

Our knowledge of the early history of the Near East is still in the making, and the progress effected after the lapse of some years may well be noted by a comparison of the original and the modern editions of the two great rival histories of Professors Maspero and Eduard Meyer, besides the successive landmarks provided by the Egyptian histories of Brugsch (1879), Wiedemann (1884), Petrie (1894-1905), Budge (1901), and Breasted (1906), and the histories of Assyria and Babylonia by Rogers (1901), Goodspeed (1903), and King (1910).

 

4. Classical Sources

The work of the modern historians is based almost entirely upon our modern knowledge of the ancient records. The accounts of the Greek writers, while of the highest interest as giving the impressions of men in whose time the ancient civilizations still survived, are of little value to the historian. Though they lived when Egyptian was still spoken and the Egyptian culture and religion were still vigorous, they could neither read nor understand Egyptian, while we can. The monuments were a sealed book to them and, indeed, to most of their Egyptian informants. Their material was chiefly folk-tradition, which, in Egypt at least, passed current for history. With our full knowledge we can see how sometimes they are giving us a very fair version of the truth, while at other times they are wandering in realms of fable. Herodotus, while his story of Egypt is curiously jumbled and unequal in value, has in the case of Media provided us with material of first-rate importance which must have been communicated to him by an unusually accurate authority. The work of Ktesias the Knidian, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, is, on the contrary, though he had first-hand knowledge of Persia absolutely valueless for history, and appears to be little more than a mere tissue of fables, at least as far as the pre-Persian period is concerned. Diodorus’ sketch of Assyrian history is of little value, and seems to be chiefly based upon Ktesias. His history of Egypt, however, is of much greater value; it is not so accurate on the whole as that of Herodotus, and there is much of the purely legendary and even of the fantastic interwoven with his narrative, but it is interesting as giving us an account written by a visitor to Egypt, independent of either Herodotus or Manetho. That this account is partly derived from Ephoros seems extremely probable. In one matter Herodotus seems to be followed: the misdating of the kings who built the Pyramids of Giza. Herodotus placed them entirely wrongly, and Diodorus repeats his mistake. But the latter makes some estimates as to the length of the Pharaonic period which, we now know, may have been curiously near the truth. Herodotus gives, on the whole, a very good account for his time of the different salient periods and characteristic kings, but he has got them in a curiously mixed-up order; he puts the great Pyramid-builders of the IVth Dynasty (c. 3500 B.C.) after Rhampsinitos (Rameses III) of the XXth (c. 1200 B.C.), and is followed in this mistake by Diodorus. An explanation may be given of this curious blunder. It may be of Egyptian origin, and we may be blaming the Father of History unjustly for what is not his fault at all. When we come to deal with the Saite period of Egyptian history, the period of the Psammetichi and Amasis, shortly after the close of which Herodotus visited Egypt, we shall see that one of the most curious and characteristic phenomena of the time is the curious archaism which had set in, and not only in the domain of art. The period selected for imitation was that of the Pyramid-builders, whose gigantic monuments, surrounded by the necropoles of their faithful subjects, still towered above Memphis, and insistently com­pelled the regard and curiosity of all men, as they do to this day. Not only did the artists and architects of the Saite renascence turn away from the caricatures of the work of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties which had been the pride of their immediate predecessors, and seek new models in the ancient triumphs which were constantly before their eyes: the officialdom of Egypt also reverted to ancient and forgotten titles and dignities, with the result that the Saite period was a kind of parody of the IVth and Vth Dynasties, which had nourished three thousand years before. The idea might then well have grown up among the people generally that the period of the Pyramid-builders was not so very many years before their own time, in any case much nearer to them than the age of Rhampsinitos, the period of the great Theban kings. Herodotus’s blunder may then be based upon some such popular mistake as this.

 

5. Native Sources

It remains to speak of the work of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian historians. Besides the contemporary monuments of various periods, we have at our disposal ancient annals, often fragmentary, and usually telling us nothing more than the succession of the kings and sometimes the length of the dynasties. The most ancient official archive that we possess is Egyptian : part of a stele which when complete contained a regular history of the events of the reigns of the early Egyptian kings up to the time of the Vth Dynasty, when it was compiled. Only a fragment of it is now preserved (in the Museum of Palermo) : so far as it goes it is the most complete ancient “history” known, and is probably very accurate; its fragmentary condition is the more tantalizing on this account. The later official lists of kings which we find inscribed on the walls of temples and tombs of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties are complete enough, but give us nothing but a bare string of names. Nevertheless, these have been of the greatest use to us, and in conjunction with the work of the priest Manetho, of which we shall shortly speak, have formed the framework upon which our knowledge of the history of the reigns from the contemporary monuments has been built up. At the same time we have been able to see that one of these lists, that of Karnak, compiled in the reign of Thothmes III, is very inaccurate and of little use; while those of Abydos and Sakkara, of the reigns of Seti I and Rameses II, are of remarkable accuracy, and have rarely been contradicted by the monuments. The compiler of the Karnak list had included simply prominent traditional names in a guessed order. But Seti’s historian, and the priest Tunrei who made the list at Sakkara, were accurate annalists. It seems probable that shortly before the time of Seti the monuments of the most ancient kings at Abydos had been identified, and this may have caused some careful study of the antique archives. We have a written list of kings on papyrus, now preserved at Turin, which is of the same date as the king-lists of Abydos and Sakkara, and, were it in better condition, would be almost as valuable. It should have been more valuable, since it adds the regnal years of each king, and gives the sum-totals of the years of the several dynasties; but, unluckily, these statements of years do not always agree with the evidence of the monu­ments. Its mutilated fragments have been studied with care, notably of recent years by Professor Eduard Meyer, and though opinions may differ as to its general value, there is no doubt that it may be used with discretion to supplement the other lists. With these our native sources for Egyptian history before the Greek period close. No real historian is known to us in Pharaonic Egypt, nor is it likely that one will ever be discovered. The Egyptian had very little historical sense, and to him, as to his modern descendant, a popular legend was as worthy of credence as the most veracious chronicle.

The Babylonian scribe was, however, of a more critical and careful turn of mind, and collected what he could of genuine history with great industry. To him we owe several fragmentary chronicles, and a list of kings compiled in the time of the second Babylonian kingdom (sixth century BC); and to the official scribes of King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (seventh century) we owe an interesting document, a diplomatic memorandum on the ancient relations between Babylon and Assyria, which is known as “The Synchronous History”. These Mesopotamia!! sources are far more historical in character than anything Egyptian save the “Palermo Stone”: when they gave more than the bare names of kings they give obvious facts, not mere old wives' tales, like the Egyptians.

We now turn to native historiographers who wrote in Greek and under Greek influence. When Greek kings sat on the throne of the Pharaohs and it became fashionable to inquire into the past history of the extraordinary country which had been brought willy-nilly within the pale of Hellenism, a learned priest named Manetho, “The Gift of Thoth” (Manethoth), or possibly “The Gift of Buto” (Manutjo), of Sebennytos in the Delta, was commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphos to collect all that was known of the Egyptian annals and translate them into Greek as Egyptiaca. This was done, and until the discoveries of Champollion Manetho’s work, half destroyed as it now is, imitated and garbled by generations of ignorant copyists, was, with the exception of the sketches by Herodotus and Diodorus, the sole Egyptian authority on the history of Egypt. A similar role with regard to the history of Mesopotamia was played by the work of a Babylonian priest named Berossos, who is said to have been a contemporary of Antiochus ii (250 B.C.). Like that of Manetho, his work is only known to us through the labours of copyists and compilers. The value of Manetho’s work has been differently estimated by different writers. It is quite true that the mistakes of his copyists have caused con­siderable divergences in many cases as to length of individual reigns and sum-totals of dynasties, but in general it must be said that his work has proved remarkably useful. His arrangement in dynasties, which has been preserved in almost identical form by Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George the Synkellos, formed the basis of the arrangement by Champollion and Lepsius of the names of the actual kings which had been recovered by the new science of Egyptology from the monu­ments, and it is worthy of note that these names have fitted on the whole extremely well into the Manethonian dynasties. The number of the kings in each dynasty is usually correct, even if the years of their reigns vary in the different versions, and even if the sum-totals are often added up wrong; and the number of dynasties has been found to be practically correct also, the only apparent mistake being in the intermediate period between the Xlllth and XVIIIth Dynasties; here we seem to have too long a period assigned to the intervening four dynasties. This jumble is, no doubt, primarily due to confusion in the native records from which Manetho drew his materials; the period was one of foreign invasion and conquest. Further, the more important the period is, the more flourishing the dynasty, the more accurately it is given by Manetho; his lists of the XIIth, XVIIIth, and XIXth Dynasties, for instance, the most flourish­ing periods of Egyptian history, are by no means very widely removed from the truth. In fact, Manetho did what he could: where the native annals were good and complete, his abstract is good; where they were broken and incomplete, his record is incomplete also and confused; and when we take the mistakes of copyists and annal-mongers into account, it will be seen that, as is also the case with Herodotus, so far from stigmatizing Manetho’s work as absolutely useless, we may well be surprised at its accuracy, and be grateful for the fact that it agrees with the testimony of the monuments so much as it does! The work of Berossos as it has come down to us is of a slighter character than that of Manetho, and contains much that we should be inclined to assign to the realm of mythology rather than history, but what there is that is historical agrees very well with what has since been discovered. It could never, however, have served as a skeleton whereon to build up the flesh and blood of Mesopotamian history, whereas the scheme of Manetho, frag­mentary and disjointed as it is, has actually formed the skeleton which modern discovery has clothed with tangible flesh. The dynasties of Manetho are the dynasties of history.

Other chronographers there were who dealt with Egypt and Assyria, such as Eratosthenes with the one and Abydenus with the other, but their work has not proved very important. With them our survey of the ancient authorities closes.

6. Chronology

Neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians ever devised a continuous chronological scheme based upon a fixed era. The Sothic cycle of 1461 years, though it was used to regulate the calendar, was never used by the Egyptians as an era. The early Egyptians and the Babylonians spoke of individual years as “the year in which (such-and-such an event) took place”, later on the Egyptians reckoned by the regnal years of each individual king. Such a reckoning is singularly useless for the purposes of continuous history, when we have no certain information as to how long a king reigned. In Egypt the only list of regnal years we possess, the fragmentary “Turin Papyrus”, often disagrees with the evidence of contemporary monuments, while the Ptolemaic chronicler Manetho’s figures have, as we shall see, been so garbled by later copyists that they are of little value. In Assyria it is otherwise. There, the years of the king's reign were currently noted by the yearly appointment of an official, who gave his name to the year. The office of this official was called limmu. Of these officials of the limmu we have long lists, dating from the reign of Adad-nirari II (911-890 BC) to that of Ashurbanipal (669-625 BC), some of which give an account of events which happened during their years of office. At the same time, on the cylinders and other clay records of Assyrian history, after the account of the events of a particular year, the name of the limmu-official is usually given. It is then evident that, with the lists of the limmi in our hands, if one of these eponymies can be fixed, we can accurately date the events dated by their means in the records. Now we are told that in the eponymy of Pur-shagali (?), in the month Sivan (May-June), there was an eclipse of the moon. This eclipse has been astronomically reckoned to have taken place in 763 BC. The correctness of the identification is confirmed by the fact that the “Canon of Ptolemy” (a list used by the geographer Ptolemy, giving the names and regnal years of the kings of Babylon from Nabonassar to Alexander the Great, with the eclipses observed during their reigns) assigns to the thirtieth year of the era of Nabonassar ( = 709 BC) the accession of “Arkeanos”. Now Sargon of Assyria, who must be “Arkeanos”, ascended the Babylonian  throne about this  time, and the year of his accession is that of the thirteenth of his rule in Assyria, and of the eponymy of Mannu-ki-Ashur-li. Therefore this eponymy must fall in 709 BC. And if we trace back the lists of eponymies from Mannu-ki-Ashur-li to Pur-shagali, we find that the year of the latter falls in 763. The dates of the limmu are then absolutely certain.

Therefore, as far back as the tenth century B.C., Assyrian dates are certain, and the value of this certainty when we are dealing with the confused chronologies of the Biblical writers may easily be understood. Thus, when we find that Ahab was one of the allies defeated by Shalmaneser II at Karkar in 854 BC (an event not mentioned in the Old Testament record) we know that Ahab was reigning over Israel in 854. BC, and any chronological theorizing as to Old Testament dates which takes no account of this fact is utterly worthless. Then when we find that the same King Shalmaneser received in 842 tribute from Jehu (an event recorded on the famous “Black Obelisk”. now in the British Museum), we know that Jehu was reigning in 842. So that the current Biblical chronology which makes Ahab reign from 899 to 877 and Jehu from 863 to 835 is obviously confused. But with the help of the infallible Assyrian eponym-list we can restore the real dates with some success, with the result that Ahaziah seems to have in reality succeeded Ahab in 851, and was succeeded by Jehoram about 844, while Jehu attained the throne in 843-2, the year of his embassy to Shalmaneser. Reckoning back, we find that the division of the Hebrew kingdom after the death of Solomon must be assigned to somewhere between 950 and 930 BC. And this fact gives us a very important Egyptian date, that of the beginning of the XXIInd Dynasty, when Sheshenk I invaded Southern Palestine.

That this prince is the Shishak of the Biblical record there is no doubt. If Shishak’s date is nearer 930 than 950 BC, we have approximately settled an important landmark in Egyptian chronology; and know that the last Theban dynasty, that of the “Priest-Kings”, came to an end cir. 940 BC.

The regnal years assigned to Solomon, David, and Saul are too obviously traditional for us to place much reliance upon them, but their reigns were evidently long, so that we can reasonably assign to them the duration of a century: we thus find that the earliest possible date for the election of Saul the son of Kish is 1050 BC, about the time of the division of Egypt between the dynasties of the priest-kings at Thebes and their lay rivals at Tanis. Palestine, as we know, had always been Egyptian territory since the conquests of Thothmes I, and it was not until the Pharaonic kingdom had fallen into utter weakness under the roi’s fainéants of the XXth Dynasty, and their kingdom had been divided between their ecclesiastical Mayors of the Palace at Thebes and the practically independent viceroy of the Delta, that the last remnant of Egyptian empire in Asia fell away, and the Hebrews were enabled, in default of a legitimate overlord in Egypt, to elect a king of their own. The date of 1050 B.C. is then indicated by both Egyptian and Jewish records for the end of the XXth Dynasty, the decease of the last legitimate Ramesside, and the constitution of an independent kingdom in Palestine.

Egyptian sources do not give us much information which will carry us farther back with much certainty: we must again have recourse to Assyrian help to enable us to reconstitute the chronology not only of Assyrian but of Egyptian history also. As has been said, the Egyptians possessed no continuous era of any kind. They did not even proceed as far as the Babylonians and Assyrians in this direction. It is true that on a stele from Tanis mention is made of the year 400 of King Nubti, which corresponded to an undetermined year of Rameses II. But no other instance of an era is known in Egypt, and this era, which is dated from the reign of an almost unknown Hyksos king, Set-aa-pehti Nubti, whose only contemporary monument is a scarab in the British Museum, is never found repeated. The only date ordinarily used is that of the year of the king, and when, as was often the case, the heir-apparent was associated with the reigning monarch on the throne, complications ensue: the year 5 of one king may be the same as the year 25 of another, and so on. All we can do is simply to reckon back the known number of years of each king, taking into account known co-regencies and collateral reigns as we come to them, and checking the result by the years of kings and dynasties as given by Manetho, and by the known synchronisms with the more definitely fixed dates of Babylonian and Assyrian history. Attempts have been made to find a heroic remedy for these difficulties with the help of astronomical data. Unluckily the Egyptians seem to have attached no particular importance to eclipses, and never chronicled them. Another, and regular, astronomical event was, however, often recorded. This was the heliacal rising of the star Sothis or Sirius. Properly speaking the heliacal rising of a star means its rising contemporaneously with the sun, but it is obvious that such a rising could not be seen or observed: in practice the heliacal rising means the latest visible rising of the star before the sunrise, about an hour before sunrise. Sirius rises heliacally about the time of the beginning of the inundation, which was from the earliest times regarded as a convenient time from which to date the beginning of the year. The Egyptian year, which had originally consisted, like the Babylonian year, of lunar months, had, at a very early period, been re-arranged in an artificial scheme of three seasons, each of four months of thirty days each, with five epagomenal days to make up 365 days. A leap year, to make up the loss of a day in four years, owing to the real length of the year being 365 days, was never introduced. The first season was that of the Inundation, the second that of the Sowing, the third that of the Harvest. The first month of the first season, originally the month of Mesore, was in later times the month Thoth, and the 1st Thoth was, after the time of the XIIth Dynasty, nominally the beginning of the year. But the actual feast of the New Year was always celebrated on the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius at the beginning of the inundation. When the calendar was introduced this day must have been the 1st day of the 1st month. But eight years later it was the 29th of the preceding month (the 4th of the Harvest Season), because in eight years the calendar, being unprovided with an extra day every fourth year, had lost two days. And so on; and it was not till 1461 years had passed that the heliacal rising of Sirius and the real opening of the year once more fell upon the 1st day of the 1st month, a whole year having been lost out of the 1461. In the meantime the official names of the seasons had of course gradually come to bear no relation to the real periods of Inundation, and Sowing, and Harvest, and then had gradually come into line again.

We are informed by a Latin writer of the third century A.D. named Censorinus that the rising of Sirius coincided with the 1st Thoth in the year 139 AD, so that a new Sothic cycle of 1461 years began in that year. We have also an Alexandrian coin of 143 A.D. which commemorates an epoch with the word ΑΙΩΝ. In the Decree of Canopus (238 B.C.) the rising of Sirius appears as occurring on the 1st of Epiphi, the tenth month: if this were so, the rising would happen on the 1st Thoth in 143 A.D. Thus 143 A.D. seems a more probable date for the beginning of a new cycle than 139; but in any case we see that this event must have taken place about 140 A.D.

The fact that the months came round full circle again after a period of 1461 years had no doubt been noted by the Egyptians, as we find that Theon of Alexandria, who evidently computes from the date 139 A.D., makes the preceding cycle begin in 1322 B.C., and calls it the "Era of Menophres". And the name Menophres is extremely like the “throne-name” of Rameses I, Men-peh-ra, whom on other grounds we should be inclined to place very near this date.

But this does not mean that the Egyptians ever used the Sothic cycle as an era: they never computed by its years. This, however, in no way affects the fact that the cycle of the risings of Sirius may be of considerable use to us in reconstructing Egyptian chronology. Thus, were it unknown that the Decree of Canopus was inscribed in 238 B.C., we should have been able, taking Censorinus’ date for the end of the cycle, to have arrived very near the correct date by calculating when the star rose heliacally on the last day of Epiphi.

Now, leaving out of account the date of Menophres (since, though he is probably Men-peh-ra, we do not certainly know this), we find that in a certain year of the reign of Thothmes in the New-Year feast fell upon the 28th day of the eleventh month (Epiphi). This can only have been between the years 1474 and 1470, which must therefore have fallen in his reign.

Going farther back, we find that in the ninth year of Amenhetep I, the feast fell upon the 9th Epiphi, which means that his ninth year falls between 1550 and 1546 B.C. Now this period of eighty years between Amenhetep I and Thothmes III is very much what we should have expected from our knowledge of the history of the time.

The date for Thothmes III is confirmed by the identification of two New-Moon festivals in his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years (on the 21st Fachon and 30th Mekheir) with those of May 15, 1479, and Feb. 23, 1477, according to Meyer.

These two very important dates for Thothmes III and Amenhetep I are amply confirmed by evidence from the Babylonian side, which makes it impossible for us to place Thothmes later than the earlier half of the fifteenth century. We know from the great collection of cuneiform tablets con­taining the official correspondence of the Egyptian kings Amenhetep III and Akhenaten, of the XVIIIth Dynasty, with the kings and governors of Western Asia, which was discovered at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt in 1888, that King Ashur-uballit of Assyria communicated with Akhenaten. Assyrian chrono­logical evidence assigns to Ashur-uballit the date of circa 1400 B.C.

Ashur-uballit was the great-great-great-grandfather of the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninib. Now, Sennacherib made a copy upon clay of an inscription of Tukulti-Ninib which had been cut upon a lapis-lazuli seal; this seal had been carried off to Babylon by some successful conqueror of Assyria, and Sennacherib found it there after he had vanquished the Baby­lonians and had captured their city. We know that Sennacherib reigned from about 705 to 681 B.C., and he tells us in a few lines added to his copy of the writing on Tukulti-Ninib’s seal that the lapis-lazuli seal was carried off to Babylon 600 years before his own time. This “600 years” is obviously a round number, but it shows that Tukulti-Ninib must have reigned about the middle of the thirteenth century B.C. Further, in an inscription recently found at Kala Sherkat, the ancient Ashur, Esarhaddon says that King Shalmaneser I renewed the temple of the god Ashur 580 years before his time, i.e. about 1260 B.C. And Tukulti-Ninib was the successor of Shalmaneser, which gives the same date, about 1250 B.C., for him as Senna­cherib's statement.

Ashur-uballit can hardly have lived less than 100 years before Tukulti-Ninib; thus it is clear that the date which we must assign to the reign of Ashur-uballit, and therefore to that of Amenhetep HI, cannot be much later than 1400 B.C. And between Thothmes III and Amenhetep III about half a century had elapsed. Incidentally, Esarhaddon's date for Shalmaneser (confirmed by Sennacherib’s for Ashur-uballit) gives us the correct date of the Egyptian king Rameses II. For we know that Shalmaneser was a contemporary of Kadashman-turgu and Kadashman-buriash of Babylonia, and that these were contemporaries of the Hittite king Khattusil, a well-known contemporary of Rameses II, who therefore was reigning in 1260 B.C.

Before these synchronisms and astronomical dates were known, Heinrich Brugsch, the greatest master of Egyptological science of his time, had devised for his epoch-making book, Egypt under the Pharaohs, a chronological system which, starting from the synchronism of Sheshenk with Rehoboam (which he placed too early, at 975 BC), proceeded by simple computation of the known generations of the kings, and with the allowance of probable generations to those whose exact position was unknown, to the round date of 1460 B.C. for Amenhetep ill and 1400 for Horemheb, who restored the orthodox religion after the heresy of Akhenaten. This was a remarkable approximation to the true date, which is evidently to be placed only half a century later.

These astronomically ascertained dates therefore agree both with each other and with the other evidence, a fact which makes it difficult to discredit them upon grounds of possible mistakes of observation or calculation on the part of the ancients or of possible deliberate alterations in the calendar. We are therefore justified in accepting them as a sound foundation for the chronology of Egypt as far back as the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty, which will thus be placed about 1580 BC. The end of the dynasty, and reign of Menpehra Rameses I, will then coincide with the “Era of Menophres” (1322 or 1318 BC). To this time is to be assigned the apogee of the Hittite kingdom, whose great princes, Shubbibiliuma, Mursil, and the rest were contemporaries of Rameses I and his successors.

The settlement of the date of the XVIIIth Dynasty means the fixing of the age of the prehistoric antiquities of Greece. The apogee of the prehistoric culture of Crete, the Second Late Minoan period, when the great palace of Knossos was built as we now see it, was contemporary with the XVIIIth Dynasty, and the Third Late Minoan period, the age of decline, began before the end of that dynasty. This we know from archaeological evidence which admits of one interpretation only, and from contemporary representations of Cretan envoys, bearing vases of Late Minoan form as gifts, to the courts of Hatshepsut and Thothmes III. We can pretty accurately date the destruction and abandonment of Knossos, which ended the Second Late Minoan period and marked the beginning of the Third, to about 1400 B.C.

With the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty we have reached the limits of comparative certainty in Egyptian chronology. We may place the Hyksos king Set-aa-pehti about 1650 BC, on the authority of the Stele of Four Hundred Years, which puts him four centuries before Rameses II, and this date agrees entirely with the evidence sketched above, which puts the end of the Hyksos period about 1580, and with that of his sole contemporary monument, a scarab (already referred to) which from its style cannot be much older than the time of Aahmes, the expeller of Hyksos. This date of  1650 seems to be the most ancient Egyptian date of which we can be sure with a small possible margin of error.

But the astronomical calculation, based upon a mention of a rising of Sothis, appears to come to our aid again and to provide us with a certain date of 1876 or 1872 B.C. for the seventh year of Senusert III, of the XIIth Dynasty, and therefore, since the length of the reigns of that dynasty are certainly known with the very definite date of 2000-1788 B.C. for the XIIth Dynasty. Could it be accepted entirely without cavil, this date would be of enormous importance to our knowledge of Egyptian history. There are facts that speak in its favour. There is no doubt that the art of the early XVIIIth Dynasty differs very little from that of the XIIIth: the fact is very well shown on a small scale in the evolution of the scarab-seal. And the evidence from Crete shows that no very long period of time elapsed between the Second Middle Minoan period of the Aegean culture, which was contemporary with the XIIth Dynasty  and the First Late Minoan period, which was with the beginning of the XVIIIth. On the other hand, as will be seen when we come to discuss the history of the Intermediate period (Ch. VI.), there are also facts that speak against it. It seems almost impossible to force all the kings of the XIIIth-XVIIth Dynasties into so small a space as 250 years, cut down their reigns as we may. The XIIIth Dynasty gives us the impression  of having reigned for a considerable period; and the new kings, probably to be placed at the beginning of the XVIIth Dynasty, whose statues have lately been found at Karnak, cannot have  been purely ephemeral monarchs if they reigned long enough for their colossi to be erected at Thebes. The difficulties in the way of the acceptance of this Sothic date are therefore great. Prof. Petrie cuts the knot by boldly assuming that the calculation is right, but that the date must be pushed back a whole Sothic period of 1461 years earlier, so that Senusert III reigned about 3300 BC! It is curious that the distinguished professor should have committed himself so definitely to so difficult a proposi­tion. We cannot make the period between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties last sixteen hundred years. One must pause to think that sixteen hundred years is an immense period of time, reckoned by human standards. Sixteen hundred years separated Julius Caesar from Queen Elizabeth, Diocletian from Queen Victoria. What changes of civilization and language, what abolitions and creations of peoples, has the world not seen in sixteen hundred years? And the civilization and art of the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty hardly differs from that of the end of the Xllth: is in no way so different from it as is that of the I Vth. Also the compilers of the king-lists made the XVIIIth Dynasty follow immediately the XIIth, ignoring the intermediate period as that of the rule of pretenders, usurpers, and foreigners.

We cannot suppose that any very long period really elapsed, yet the narrow two centuries and a half which are demanded by the usual interpretation of the new Sothic date seem an impossibly short period. Another century only, and our allegiance to it might have been conceded willingly. Our knowledge of the facts of the history of the time seems to forbid our acceptance of a much less or a much greater period of time than three and a half centuries between the end of the XIIth Dynasty and the beginning of the XVIIIth. It does not seem impossible that our interpretation of the date given by the Kahun temple-book has been in some way faulty. Another calculator has computed the year as 1945 BC, which is seventy years earlier than the date given by Drs. Borchardt and Meyer. Or some deliberate alteration of the calendar may have taken place in ancient times before the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty: such an alteration, which is not impossible, as we see by Mr. Gardiner's discovery that Mesore, later the twelfth, was till the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty the first month of the year, might throw all our calculations into confusion. It would therefore seem wise to refrain from a complete acceptance of the new Sothic date till further information confirms it. We may rest content for the time with the round date of circa 2000 B.C. for the mid-point of the XIIth Dynasty. This gives us a vaguely approximate date for the Cretan “Middle Minoan” period, when the palace of Phaistos was built. The interesting piece of evidence quoted by Prof. Meyer, the fact that under the XIIth Dynasty an officer sent to Sinai to seek for turquoise notes in his inscription that in the months of Phamenoth-Pachon, when he was there, it was high summer, and the heat “like fire”, would suit Prof. Meyer’s date or one a century or two earlier equally well, while it would not suit so well the earlier dates adopted years ago by Brugsch.

Brugsch’s dates for the Middle Kingdom are too high, as they are based upon an exaggerated estimate of the length of the period between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasty, due to a too conservative treatment of the statements of Manetho’s copyists, who attribute to the Hyksos 510 years and to the XIIIth Dynasty 453, making an absolutely impossibly long period of 963 years between the two dynasties. Brugsch did not go to this length, but archaeology as well as historical probability show us that he overestimated the length of the second Intermediate period.

The Manethonian year-numbers for the first Intermediate period, between the VIth and the XIth Dynasties, are again exaggerated. But Brugsch accepted them, with the result that his date for Mena goes back to the figure of 4400 B.C., only four centuries later than that to which Prof. Petrie pins his faith.

Babylonian history gives us no help now. We have reached the time when the two kingdoms had little or no connexion with one another, so that synchronisms of kings no longer present themselves, nor are likely to do so. For the dates of the old Egyptian kingdom we must simply employ a dead reckoning, supplementing our knowledge derived from the monuments by the lists of Manetho and the Turin papyrus, back from the beginning of the XIIth Dynasty. The XIth Dynasty lasted less than 150 years; the period of civil war that preceded it can hardly have endured more than a similar period, as the style of tomb-construction and tomb-furniture in vogue under the XIth Dynasty is little different from that usual under the VIth. So that we can hardly seek earlier than 2500 BC for the end of the VIth Dynasty. And this date agrees very well with that indicated for the beginning of the IVth by the dates scribbled in red paint on the casing-blocks of the pyramids of the kings Sneferu and Khufu at Meidum and Gizah: the months given must have fallen at that time in the summer, as it was only in the summer, when the peasantry were not engaged in agricultural work and the Nile was high for transport across the plain, that quarrying could be carried on and great stones transported by river to the desert-marge. The date thus indicated is about 3200-3000 BC. And a dead reckoning would attribute about 500 years to the IVth-VIth Dynasties.

The first three dynasties seem, by dead reckoning, to have lasted over 400 years. We therefore reach circa 3600-3500 B.C for the beginning of the 1st Dynasty and the foundation of the kingdom. This is of course somewhat of a guess; but it is unlikely that the 1st Dynasty is to be put very much earlier Prof. Meyer’s date, based upon the Sothic date of the reign of Senusert III, is 3315 BC, which, if one doubts the validity of this date as computed by him, seems too low and also too definite. He is a bold man who would reckon the date of Menes in anything more closely defined than round centuries

But it must be remembered that, if we do not accept the placing of the Sothic date of the Kahun book so late as 1945 or 1876-7 BC, we have no really firm ground for any Egyptian chronology at all before the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty. We can only guess, and it is guesswork founded upon what we know of the history of art and civilization as well as of the history of kings’ reigns, that brings us to a date for the 1st Dynasty not so very much earlier than that adopted by Prof. Meyer. And it claims to be nothing more than a guess. This being so, those who consider they have no right to reject Manetho’s statements as to the length of the two intermediate periods on the strength of purely archaeological evidence, may continue, if they prefer so to do, to use the chronological system of Brugsch. But it must be remembered that this system is a very arbitrary one, that the thirty-year generations on which it is computed are too long, and that its results for the period before the XVIIIth Dynasty are only in the widest sense approximate. It can only be used as a sort of chronologimeter, giving a general idea of time: its dates were never intended by its author to be accepted too strictly. This being so, we can also resort to guesswork, based when possible upon historical and archaeological evidence, otherwise upon probability

We guess then that the two primitive kingdoms of Northern and Southern Egypt, which preceded the foundation of the monarchy, are to be dated before 3600 BC, and, seeing that the development of culture was swift in those early days, we may suppose that in 4000 B.C. the inhabitants of Upper Egypt were Neolithic barbarians, and those of Lower Egypt and the Delta little better. Prof. Meyer thinks that in the year 4241 B.C., when a Sothic period began, the calendar was first established by the New-Year feast being fixed on the occasion of the heliacal rising of Sothis, that the day was called “the 1st Thoth”, and the very arbitrary system of the Egyptian months and seasons was then instituted. Such an arrangement need not have been beyond the mental powers of people in the Neolithic stage of culture, but it would seem more probable that the calendar was really put into its regular shape on the occasion of the Sothic “aeon” of 2781 BC, about the time of the Vth Dynasty.

To guess the age of the Cretan civilization before the time of the Middle Minoan period and the XIIth Dynasty is impossible. We can only vaguely place the “Early Minoan” period and the beginnings of Cretan culture in the fourth millennium BC.

We have to guess the age of Babylonian history in much the same way. Since the reign of Khammurabi the great law­giver has been fixed by Mr. L. W. King to somewhere between 1950 and 1900 BC (to the confusion of Nabonidus’ Babylonian scribe, who said that Khammurabi lived 700 years before Burraburiash, whereas in reality he lived but 500 years before him), 2050 BC, for the beginning of the Ist Dynasty of Babylon, Khammurabi’s dynasty, is the earliest Mesopotamian date of which we have any real certainty. The well-known date of Nabonidus for Sargon of Agade and Naram-Sin, which is 3750 BC, has no authority whatever to support it. All the other known evidence on the subject goes against it, and indubitably it is grossly exaggerated. We cannot extend the known history of Babylonia before 2050 BC by means of a probable dead reckoning further than about 3000. The patesis of Lagash who played the leading role in Babylonia in the period which immediately followed the epoch of Sargon and Naram-Sin cannot on the basis of our present knowledge be placed earlier than 2500; Gudea, the best known of them, must be dated about 2450. How can we, on the authority of Nabonidus’ simple statement, admit a gaping void, a hiatus without content of any kind, of thirteen hundred years between Gudea and Naram-Sin? An important testimony against this supposition (which in itself is so improbable) is the fact that the clay tablets of the two epochs hardly differ in shape, and that the forms of the characters with which they are inscribed are almost identical in both periods. Palaeographic evidence makes it possible to accept any gap between the first Sargonids and the pates s of Lakish much less a gap of 1300 years! The thing is as unlikely as Prof. Petri’s 1600 years’ interval between the XIIth and XVIIIth Egyptian dynasties.    Nabonidus must be wrong, nor is it unlikely that he was wrong. The sixth century was far remote from the time of Sargon and Naram-Sin, and in the late Assyro-Babylonian period mistakes were made as to early dates. Thus we find that an inscription of Esarhaddon (seventh century), describing the rebuilding of the temple of Ashur by Shalmaneser i (fourteenth century), states that 560 years had elapsed since its first rebuilding by a chief named Irishum. But a contemporary inscription of Shal-maneser’s states that 739 years had elapsed since the same event. We cannot doubt that Shalmaneser is more likely to be right than Esarhaddon, since he lived seven centuries nearer to the time of Irishum. But when we are confronted with such discrepancies we may well wonder whether the statements of kings of the later period as to early dates are of much value, and may decide to accept them only when they agree with the archaeological evidence. We reject, then, Nabonidus date of 3800-3750 B.C. for Sargon and Naram-Sin on archaeological grounds and place them, following Mr. L. W. King, about 2600 BC, or, emending Nabonidus’ figures by altering his “3,200 years before my time” to “2200 years”, as Prof. Lehmann-Haupt proposed to do, make him reign about 2.750 BC. We are dealing with a piece of false and exaggerated history, which was no doubt quite to the taste of the late Babylonian literati, chief of whom was the king Nabonidus. The earlier kings of Sumer, from Ur-Nina to Urukagma of Lagash, and his contemporary the conqueror Lugal-zaggisi of Erech, will then be placed between 3000 and 2800 BC, and the oldest Babylonian rulers of whom we have any knowledge will fall not long before 3000 BC at the earliest.

Apparently, Babylonian history is not so ancient as that of Egypt by some five hundred years. This is, however, an uncertain point, as we do not know how long before 3000 BC the ancient Babylonian Sumerian culture first began to develop. We have no traces of a Neolithic age in Babylonia, while the Egyptians of 3500 B.C. had not long emerged from the neolithic stage. The Egyptian writing of 3500 BC is still an extremely primitive pictorial script; the Babylonian writing of 3000 BC had already developed into a conventionalized and formal system which bore little resemblance to the original pictures from which it was derived. The Babylonians may well have passed into the age of metal at an earlier period than did the Egyptians, and have evolved their “cuneiform” writing before the Egyptians, at the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, began to codify and stereotype their script.

We might therefore begin our survey with Babylonia but that a more convenient arrangement is afforded by the reverse order, in which prehistoric Greece first claims attention. The whole of the history of the Greek Bronze Age being “prehistory”, without records, we take it first from its beginning to its end, returning to the known history of Egypt and Babylonia in the order named.

 

CHAPTER II

THE OLDER CIVILIZATION OF GREECE