Books on Egypt and Chaldaea EGYPT UNDER THE PRIEST-KINGS, TANITES, AND NUBIANS BY E. A. WALLIS BUDGE, M.A., LITT.D., D.LIT. KEEPER OF THE EGYPTIAN AND ASSYRIAN ANTIQUITIES ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN BRANCH 1902 C PREFACE THE period of Egyptian History treated in the present volume begins with the reign of Nes-ba-Teṭṭet, the first king of the XXIst Dynasty from Tanis, and ends with that of Psammetichus II., the third king of the XXVIth Dynasty, and the narrative describes the principal events which took place in Egypt and the various portions of her Empire from about B.C. 1100 to B.C. 600. It includes the reigns of a number of kings under whose rule the power of Egypt declined and her Empire shrank, and in whose time the various hereditary foes of Egypt succeeded in obtaining their independence. In spite of this, however, we find that the Northern kingdom of Egypt made itself very powerful, and it is interesting to note how this came to pass, viz., by the aid of foreign soldiers and sailors. With the close of the XXVth Dynasty the New Empire came to an end, and the period of Egyptian Renaissance began. Under Shashanq I. the feeble kingdoms of the South and North were once more united, and a Libyan monarch occupied the throne of the Pharaohs. The cult of Bast increased and flourished whilst that of Amen-Rā declined, and the priests of Amen were compelled to seek asylum at Napata in Nubia. Stirred up by these the Nubians provoked the wrath of the great kings of Assyria, and Egypt found herself involved in war with an enemy who was far more terrible than any with whom she had ever come in contact. Sargon and his son Sennacherib turned Syria and Palestine into provinces of Assyria, but it was reserved for Esarhaddon and his son Ashur-bani-pal to enter Egypt and to make the king of Assyria her over-lord. The last-named king sacked Thebes and gave the Egyptians an example of the manner in which the Assyrians were accustomed to treat the inhabitants of a conquered country; but the recuperative power of Egypt was so great that in the country generally the traces of the destruction wrought by "the great king, the king of Assyria," and his host were soon obliterated. As soon as the Nubian pretenders to the throne of Egypt saw that Thebes had fallen and that Åmen-Ra was powerless to protect his city, their opposition to the inevitable ceased, and Egypt rested in tolerable peace under the rule of the twenty governors who were appointed by Esarhaddon, and who were restored to their positions by Ashurbani-pal after the revolt of the Nubian Tirhâkâh. In the period of history treated in this volume there is little besides the political facts to interest the historian, and its art and archaeology afford little instruction to the student. Art of every kind had fallen into a state of apathy and lack of originality, and artists followed the models of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties with servile conventionality. The Egyptian language began to decay in the XVIIIth Dynasty, and in the period under consideration decay of the writing also set in; in the tenth century before Christ the hieratic script was supplemented by demotic, and a few centuries later was almost unknown. With the end of the rule of the XXVth Dynasty the New Empire comes to an end. In connexion with the question of the identification of So or Sib'e with Shabaka I have taken the view that the Muşuri of which he is stated to have been Commander-in-chief, TAR-TAN-NU (var. TUR-DAN-NU) was Egypt, and not a country in Northern Arabia, as has been maintained by Dr. Winckler and by his followers, Prof. T. K. Cheyne and others. I am well aware that it is a serious matter to disagree with the dicta of such a distinguished critic as Prof. Cheyne, but in this particular case he has relied upon the statements of a professed exponent of Assyriology, of which science Prof. Cheyne has, admittedly, no knowledge at first hand. Dr. Winckler's theory has received but little support in Germany itself, and it would ere now have passed into the limbo of forgotten theories but for its adoption and advocacy by Prof. Cheyne in the Encyclopaedia Biblica, where it is made to support his own extraordinary theory of the existence of a "Jerahmeelite" kingdom in Southern |