Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

Egypt had no horses until about the 17th century BC. The book treats the horse's late arrival as a chronological bombshell: "the noblest conquest that man ever made remained unknown in Egypt until the seventeenth century preceding our era; and this fact alone suffices to annihilate any system of history" giving Egypt foreign campaigns before the eighteenth dynasty. Its "healthful domestication on the borders of the Nile" is counted a greater gain than any annexed territory. Read it in the book →
Rameses had his monuments inscribed to boast that no Egyptian helped build them. Diodorus reports that the hardest of the works were done by prisoners brought from abroad, and that "he took care that the lapidary inscriptions should remind the reader that no Egyptian had a hand in them." Read it in the book →
The tombstones of sacred bulls were used to correct the dates of the Pharaohs. In the Serapeum of Memphis — "that strange necropolis peopled with statues of Apis or sacred bulls" — Mariette read epitaphs precise enough to fix disputed reigns, bringing "the undeniable testimony of these humble four-footed creatures to bear in proving or disproving the existence of royal dynasties and monarchs claiming to be the children of gods." Read it in the book →
A library in the Ramesseum was labelled "The office of the soul". Champollion, matching Diodorus' description of the "tomb of the Osymandyas" to the Ramesseum's fragments, found every particular including "the second library designated by the inscription: The office of the soul," its "ultramarine blue vault studded with golden stars, and decorated with an astronomical picture." Read it in the book →
A court poet of Rameses may have taught the Hebrew Bible how to sound. The book quotes de Rougé's claim that "the peculiar turn of verses and the parallelism of the ideas" that mark Hebrew poetry is recognisable in Egyptian texts, and that the earliest sacred writers borrowed expressions from the priestly annalists: "it is no mean glory for the poet Penta-our... to have had a considerable share in the literary education of the Hebrew legislator." Read it in the book →
For its last four hundred leagues the Nile receives not one drop of tribute. Alone among great rivers, "it is not swollen by any affluent in the last third of its course, which it pursues in solitary grandeur" between deserts whose sands "greedily absorb its waters without yielding it, in return, the tribute of the feeblest rivulet or torrent." That isolation, the author argues, made Egyptian society — and eventually unmade it. Read it in the book →
Champollion believed he found blue-eyed Greeks among Rameses' enemies at Karnak. Among the barbarous nations carved at Karnak and the Rameseum, in northern dress "with shaven heads or their hair raised in a single lock or wisp," he "read the title of these Iouni whose blue eyes and golden hair" Homer would celebrate centuries later — an ancient Greek–Egyptian war that "would no doubt have awakened singular incredulity among the contemporaries of Themistocles or Plato." Read it in the book →
Egyptian burial customs are explained here as a public-health measure. Among the four common bonds of the early Nile populations the author lists a method of burial "singular, but imperatively required by a long and cruel experience of the periodical inundations of the river," and of the "poisonous effluvia" arising from water in contact with the dead. Read it in the book →
The Hittite king took his librarian into battle, and lost him there. Among the faithful warriors who fell around Khetasar as he defended the bridge were "Grabatusa his squire, and Khirapsar, his librarian or rhapsodist" — the footnote adds simply, "Writer of Books, says the text." Read it in the book →
The Egyptians' name for themselves meant "the race of man". On monuments sorting the world's peoples, the men of dark red skin standing under the god's special protection are honoured with the name "Rut-n-Rom — the germ, or the race of man"; the Asiatic peoples are lumped together as Aamus, the Libyans as Tamhus. Read it in the book →
A temple offering: a cedar ship 280 cubits long, gilded outside and silvered within. Diodorus' inventory of the king's works includes "a vessel of cedar wood two hundred and eighty cubits long, and plated it with gold on the outside and with silver within," plus two obelisks engraved with the statistics of his armies, revenues and tribute, and thirty-cubit statues of himself and his wife each cut from a single block. Read it in the book →
A single surviving syllable placed one of Rameses' battles far to the east. The name of the besieged Hittite city is broken on the Theban monument, but the author makes much of what remains: "that termination is quite significant, for it reads: apur, and this Sanscrit ending alone indicates some locality far to the Eastward." Read it in the book →
Rameses invaded Ethiopia partly because Egypt had no trees fit for shipbuilding. Wanting a navy to police the Arabian Gulf, he had to go upriver for timber, "because the soil of Egypt and of Lower Nubia lacking timber fit for naval construction, it was necessary to seek that material upon the broad plateaux watered by the tributaries of the great river above Meroe." Tribute was then exacted in "gold, ivory, ebony, and building-timber." Read it in the book →
Napoleon, dictating at St Helena, is the book's authority on Egyptian irrigation. "The last and the greatest of Egypt's conquerors" argued that no country's prosperity depended so completely on administration: bad government means choked canals and poor dykes, and "Other governments have no control over the snow or the rain that falls in this province or in that," while in Egypt the state effectively governs the inundation. Read it in the book →
The battle-roar was compared to the great serpent snapping his chains. The Egyptian account of the fight for the bridge has spears in forests and arrows in clouds meeting "with such re-echoing uproar that the Earth trembled to its depths, as though Apophis, the great serpent, had broken away from the chains" by which the gods had fastened him to the foundations of the world. Read it in the book →
Scholars had to knock 4,600 years off the age of two Egyptian temples. The author predicts the same fate for other "mythical legends" as befell the centuries "that our fathers so generously accorded to the temples of Esneh and Denderah — centuries which we had to reduce from sixty-four and from thirty-eight to seventeen or eighteen at the utmost." Read it in the book →
At his coronation the king announced himself as the last god in the procession. Prostrating himself at Ammon's altar amid incense and "a shower of flowers," Rameses spoke words the author calls "at once so haughty and so simple": "I come to my father Ammon at the end of the procession of gods which he forever admits to his presence." Read it in the book →
Memphis had been quarried for centuries and was still overwhelming in the 1200s. The Arab writer Abdallatif noted that despite every attempt "to wipe out the slightest traces of its existence by transporting to other points the stones," its ruins "still present to those who contemplate them a combination of wonders that confounds the intelligence." Today, the book says, the city "sleeps... completely buried beneath the slime of the inundations and the sands of the desert." Read it in the book →