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Eygpt 3300 Years Ago: Egyptian

Helmet on head, encased in a coat of mail, and erect in a superb chariot drawn by four magnificently caparisoned horses, the Egyptian hero, amid the acclamations of his soldiers, is driving before * Herodotus, Book II. † Diodorus, Book I. ch. lv.

I Strabo, Book LVI. Pliny Book VI. him a throng of negro and Leuco-Ethiopean captives with which he is going to do homage to the Theban triad.

What meaning must we assign to this terrible expression? Egyptian scholars refuse to see anything in it but the right which war gave to the master over his slave, to the victor over the vanquished, without admitting that this right was ever extended so far as to cover human sacrifice. But those who do not, without some restrictions, ascribe very pure or very exalted light to the Egyptian priesthood; those who remember what pitiless hatred to the foreigner Egypt bequeathed to all the races that inherited either her blood or her doctrines, and what unworthy trophies the warriors of the Nile sought out with frantic eagerness on the battle-field; all, in fine, who acknowledge the fifteenth, sixteenth and twenty-second verses of the first book of Exodus to be historical documents, will, no doubt, think with us that, in the period we describe, the prisoner of war had but feeble guarantees against bloody oblation, and the treatment meted out to the condemned, in the philanthropy of the priests of Egypt, the generosity of her warriors and the gentleness or the clemency of her kings.* * A carved pillar of the reign of Amenoph II., lately found in the temple of Amada in Nabia, unfortunately brings ONE of the bas-reliefs of Beit-el-Wally shows us Mei-Amoun seated in a brilliant naos and causing a long procession, the immediate result of his victories in Ethiopia, to file before him. There are groups of prisoners, among whom figures an Amenoph, the chief ruler of that part of the land of Cush which the inscriptions designate as bad; tables and sideboards covered with gold-dust and golden rings; logs of ebony wood, elephant tusks, ostrich feathers and leopard skins-all those articles of luxury and rarity, in fine, which the nations of the north and the east have never ceased, since the time in questerrible confirmation to the hints we have expressed. Its precise language is this : "After having vanquished his enemies, and enlarged the frontiers of Egypt, his Holiness Amenoph II.) came back from the country of the Upper Ruteni (Upper Assyria) and filled the heart of his father, Ammon-Ra, with joy; for he had, with his own war-club, massacred seven kings captured in the city of Tashis and led in chains on board of his vessel. Six of these kings, after having had their hands cut off, were hung opposite to the pylons of Thebes. "As for the other enemy, he was conveyed by water to Nubia, and hung to the wall of the city of Napata, to display to the evil races of Cush the victories won by his majesty over all the nations of the world, and the manner in which he chastises them." tion, to wear away from Africa, that mother of gold, of slaves and of monsters whose deplorably prolific yield four thousand years of pillage have not been able to exhaust.

The names of some of the tribes subjugated in this expedition have their analogous equivalents on the modern map of Abyssinia and Sennaar; unfortunately, this similarity of names is not the only -one that may be traced between those whom Mei- Amoun conquered, and their descendants living in our own day.

It is well known that the present chiefs of the Eastern Soudan country annually organize murdering and robbing expeditions-ghrazias or razzias as they term them--against the inhabitants of the higher levels of the central table-land of Africa.

Then, too, the narratives that modern travellers give of these acts of plunder sound like a faithful translation of the legends explaining one of the bas-reliefs of Beit-el-Wally destined to transmit to posterity the remembrance of a raid directed by Rameses against the Nahazis, the ancestors of the negroes of the present day.

According to the hieroglyphic recital legible there, "The barbarians, utterly routed, are flying in consternation before the Egyptian hero, who is pursuing them in a chariot, at furious speed, and reaches them with his arrows even in the shelter of their forests. Men, women, children and greybeards, terrified at the sight of the carnage, are vainly endeavoring to escape extermination, and to find a refuge in retreats that they share with the wild beasts."* In connection with this picture, read another description sketched but yesterday, nearly on the same spot, and in which the descendants of the same hostile races figure : "The Abyssinian army had furiously pursued the wretched tribe of Soddo-Gallas, and their horsemen had soon overtaken a crowd of old men, women and children unable to escape. The sight of these unfortunate people, far from awaking in them that sentiment of compassion so natural to us when we behold helpless feebleness, only served to excite their brutal instinct for bloodshed. Some of them came back with their bleeding trophies paraded in the most indecent manner, and vaunted their exploits in obscene recitals; others brought with them the wives and daughters of the helpless wretches whom they had massacred or mutilated.