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Manners and Customs of the Egyptians: Egyptian

LXXXVIII. The third style of embalming, for the accommodation of the poor, is this: the embalmers make an injection of horse-radish into the intestines, and dry the body in carbonate of soda for seventy days; then they deliver it. XC. Whoever is found dead after having been seized by a crocodile, or swept away by the river, be he Egyptian or stranger, and whatever the town where his body was picked up, is entitled to consecrated burial at the hands of the inhabitants. They perform the funeral rites in the costliest manner and deposit the body in their burial chambers. Neither its friends nor its neighbors are permitted to touch it, but the priests of the Nile take charge of it and bury it as a more than human body.--Herodotus, Book II.

The foregoing facts were gleaned by the historian of Halicarnassus in the midst of Egyptian society when it had grown old and was in full decay: they may be completed by other information deduced from the paintings on the walls so abundant on the monuments which that same social organization reared in the days of its youth and development. In this respect, what is there more curious or more striking from the point of view afforded by the private and civic life of the primitive Egyptians than the sepulchral grottoes of APPENDIX.

Beni Hassan, excavated on the right bank of the Nile, not far from the ancient Artemidos? Below we give, according to Champollion, an enumeration of the subjects represented on the walls of these hypogees.

I. Agriculture. - Designs representing ploughing done by oxen or by human labor; sowing, the treading of the ground by rams, and not by pigs as Herodotus says; five kinds of carts; digging and the harvest of grain and flax; the sheaving of these different kinds of plants; the stacking, the threshing and pounding, the measuring and the housing of the same in barns; two designs of different kinds of large barns; flax carried by asses; a host of other agricultural toils, and among them the gathering of the lotus; the cultivation of the vine, the vintage, its transportation, the seeding, the winepress of two kinds, one by manual power, the other by machinery; the bottling of the wine, or putting up in jars, and its conveyance to the cellar; the manufacture of shrub, etc., garden culture, the gathering of fruit, the cultivation of the onion, irrigation, etc.; all, like the following pictures, with explanatory hieroglyphic legends; and, more. over, the superintendent of the country house and his clerks. II. Trades and Manufactures. -A collection of paintings, mostly in colors, so as to the better determine the nature of the articles, and representing the carver in stone and the carver in wood, the painter of statues, the painter of architectural objects; furniture and cabinet work, the painter with his pallet executing a picture; scribes and clerks busied with writings of all kinds; workmen at the quarries carrying blocks of stone; the potter's trade with all its operations; workmen kneading clay with their feet, others with their hands; the placing of the clay on the conical wheel and the wheel on the turning lathe, the potter making the belly and the neck of the vase, etc.: the first baking in the kiln, the second drying in the oven; makers of canes, oars and paddles; cabinet makers; joiners; carpenters; wood-sawyers; curriers; the leather and morocco dyers; the shoemaker; spinning; the weaving of cloths of different manufacture; APPENDIX. the glassblower and all his operations; the goldsmith, the jeweller; the blacksmith.

III. The Military Caste. The education of the military caste and all its gymnastic exercises, represented in more than 200 pictures, in which are reproduced all the positions and attitudes that two skillful antagonists can assume, attacking, defending, receding, advancing, standing up, prostrate etc.; people may see from these whether Egyptian art contented itself with mere profile designs, legs joined and arms tightly pressed against the haunches.

I copied all this curious series of naked warriors struggling together; and, besides, some sixty figures representing soldiers of every arm and of every rank; sham fights; a siege; the tortoise and the battering ram; military punishments; a field of battle and the preparations for a military meal; finally, the manufacture of spears, javelins, bows, arrows, war clubs, battle-axes, etc.

IV. Singing, Music and Dancing. picture representing a vocal and instrumental concert; a singer whom a musician accompanies on the harp, is seconded by two choirs, one of four men, the other of five women, and the latter beat the time of the measure with their hands: it is a whole opera; harp players of both sexes; players of the German flute, of the flageolet, of a species of conch shell, etc.; dancers executing different figures with the names of the steps they are dancing; in fine, a very curious collection of designs representing dancing women (or almés of ancient Egypt) dancing, singing, playing tennis and performing divers feats of strength and skill.

V. A considerable number of designs representing the education of animals; cowherds with oxen of all kinds, cows, calves; milking; butter and cheese making; goatherds ; keepers of asses; shepherds and their sheep; scenes relating to the veterinary art; finally, the barn yard, comprising the management of a great variety of geese and ducks, and of a species of swan that had been domesticated in ancient Egypt.

APPENDIX.

VII. Designs relative to games, exercises, and amusements. Among these may be noticed a sort of "hot cockles," "sledge-hammer," jackstraws, the game of pegs driven into the ground, etc.; different games of strength; the chase of wild beasts, a picture representing a grand hunt on the desert, and in which from 15 to 20 kinds of quadrupeds are depicted; scenes representing the return from the chase; the game carried in dead or brought alive; many pictures representing the pursuit of birds with the net; one of these paintings is of very large dimensions and is filled out with all the colors, and the movement of the original. Finally, drawings on a large scale, of the different kinds of traps to take birds, are given these instruments of the chase are painted, separately, in some hypogees. Then, there are many pictures that relate to fishing; line angling; the line and fishing rod; fishing with the trident or bident; with the net; the preparation of fish, etc.

VIII. Domestic Justice. - Under this head, I have arranged some fifteen designs of bas-reliefs representing offences committed by servants; the arrest of the culprit: the charge against him; his defence; his conviction by the superintendents of the household; his condemnation and punishment, which is restricted to the bastinado, the minutes of which, along with all the particulars, have to be deposited with the body of the trial in the hands of the master of the house by his superintendent.

IX. The House and Housekeeping. I have brought together in this series, which is very numerous already, everything that relates to private or interior home life. These very curious designs represent, 1st, different Egyptian houses, more or less sumptuous; 2nd, vases of different forms, utensils and furniture, all colored, because the colors invariably indicate the material; 3d, a splendid palanquin; 4th, a kind of small room with folding doors borne along on a sledge and serving as vehicles for the great personages of Egypt in ancient times; 5th, monkeys, cats and APPENDIX. dogs which formed part of the household, as well as dwarfs and other human deformities who served to clear the spleen of the Egyptian lords 1500 years B. C. just as they did for the old style barons in Europe 1500 years after the birth of the Saviour; 6th, the officers of a great establishment, superintendents, clerks, etc.; 7th, servants carrying in supplies of all kinds for the table; the maids likewise bringing various eatables; 8th, the mode of slaughtering beef and cutting it up for home use; 9th, a series of designs representing cooks preparing dishes of different kinds; 10th and last, servants bringing the dishes all prepared to the master's table. XII. Navigation. An assortment of designs representing the construction of vessels and barks of different kinds, and the games of the sailors, altogether analogous to the contests of strength and skill that take place on the Seine on great holidays.--Champollion's Letters from Egypt and Nubia. In a crypt of the strange necropolis that has furnished these details, the mortal remains of a governor of the nome of Sah had been sealed up for all eternity. The deceased informs us, by the history of his life written on the walls of his eternal abode, what were the duties and conduct of an important functionary of the military caste, at that remote period. As a general, he had accompanied the king (an Usertesen of the 15th dynasty) into the land of Cush, and had penetrated to the extremities of the earth. Subsequently, at the head of a troop of 400 men, he had brought back from the mines on the Peninsula of Sinai a convoy of gold to the city of Keft (Coptos.) As nomarch (or governor of a nome) he had earned the praises of his sovereign and the gratitude of his constituency. ، "I," he says, was a master full of goodness and amiability; a governor who loved his country. For years I exercised my power in the nome of Sah. All the works for the royal house were executed through my care. Thanks were APPENDIX. extended to me on the part of the royal house for the tribute brought in by me in horned cattle. I carried the fruit of all my toil to the royal house. Nothing was stolen from me in all my workshops. I labored and the whole nome was in activity. Never was a little child distressed by me; never was a widow maltreated by me; never have I troubled a fisherman on the waters or a shepherd in the pasture fields. Never was there a pentarch (foreman of five) whose men I turned aside from their work. Never was there a scarcity in my time, never a starving mouth under my administration, even if these were famine years. For, see, I had tilled all the fields of the nome of Sah clear to its frontiers on the north and on the south. I made its inhabitants live upon its products, and thus there were no starving people in it. I gave equally to the widow and to the married woman, nor did I set the great before the little in the distributions that I made. And, see, the Nile was in great inundation; the owners of the fields and of the orchards were full of hope for a fertile year, and I did not cut the branches of the canal. etc. etc."