THE DOCUMENTARY SOURCES OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY

1. The general course and the gradual development of Egyptian civilization are in some respects roughly traceable in its surviving material documents, in the products of the artist and the craftsman, which we are accustomed to assign to the domain of the archæologist. With these invaluable material documents the present volumes of course do not deal. They purpose to present only those written documents from which the career of the Nile valley peoples may be drawn at the present day. A rapid survey of the materials herein presented may enable the non-Egyptologist to gain some preliminary conception of their general character.

2. Comparatively speaking, but very little of the rich and productive civilization which flourished for at least five millenniums before Christ on the banks of the lower Nile, has survived in written documents for our enlightenment. Accident has preserved but here and there the merest scrap of the vast mass of written records which the incessant political, legal, administrative, religious, industrial, commercial, and literary activities filling the life of this ancient people, were constantly putting forth. We may make one exception: the religious literature, doubtless the least instructive, as a whole, of all their literary documents, has survived in an incalculable mass of temple inscriptions and papyri, which have never even been adequately published, much less exhaustively studied.

3. It is with those documents in which the national career as a whole can be traced that we have here to deal. From the pre-dynastic age onward the kings kept a series of

annals, recording in each year the great deeds and achievements of the Pharaoh which he thought worthy of perpetuation. Of such annals only two fragments have survived: the Palermo Stone, part of a record extending from the earliest times down into the Fifth Dynasty; and the annals of Thutmose III's wars, of which a few extracts were excerpted by a priestly scribe and recorded on the walls of the Karnak temple. Had we the annals of the Pharaohs in complete form, we might perhaps write almost as full a history of Egypt as it is possible to do for the Middle Ages of European history. Without these, we are dependent upon a miscellaneous mass of documents of the most varied character and value, which chance and circumstance have preserved from destruction these thousands of years. In general, such documents show more literary character and picturesqueness than the Assyro-Babylonian records; but the latter dry and formal annals possess greater historical value, and exhibit a preciseness which indues them with a rare availability as sources. The Egyptian records which chance has preserved to us are, as a whole, so vague and indefinite in their references to peoples, localities, persons, and the character of events, that they are often tantalizing in what they do not tell us. Thus in records of whole campaigns of Thutmose III in Syria the hostile Syrian king is designated merely as "that foe" (lit. “fallen one"), and we are uncertain whether the king of Kadesh, of Mitanni, of Aleppo, or of some other realm is meant. The real excerpts from Thutmose III's Annals (II, 391 ff.), however, show that such records contained an elaboration of detail not less precise and historically available than the cuneiform annals. So much the more must we deplore their loss.

4. How hazardous was the life of such a document may be well illustrated by the great building inscription, upon a

huge stone stela, erected by Sesostris I nearly two thousand years before Christ, in his new temple at Heliopolis. The great block itself has since perished utterly; but the practicecopy made by a scribe, who was whiling away an idle hour in the sunny temple court, has survived, and the fragile roll of leather (§§ 498 ff.) upon which he was thus exercising his has transmitted to us what the massive stone could not preserve.

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5. That we possess any documents at all from the Old Kingdom (2980-2400 B. C.) is chiefly due to the massive masonry tombs of that age, in which they were recorded. The exceptions are inscriptions on foreign soil, and a few scanty fragments of papyrus containing accounts and letters. The vast quantity of such papyrus documents which once existed is evidenced by the constant appearance of the scribe with his rolls, his pens, and his ink palette, in the tomb reliefs. Such hints from the numerous reliefs in the tombs of this age are the source of our knowledge of the material culture of the time. The chief inscriptions which accompany them consist almost exclusively of the name and many titles of the owner of the tomb. Now and again the legal enactment by which the tomb was endowed and maintained is recorded on the wall. Such wills and conveyances are, of course, invaluable cultural documents.

6. Gradually the nobles were inclined to add a few biographical details to the series of bare titles. The first of such scanty biographies appears at the end of the Third Dynasty (§§ 170 ff.), after which there is a growing fondness for recording at least the chief honors received by the deceased from the Pharaoh, especially the furnishing and equipment of his tomb at the king's expense. The daily intercourse of the deceased with the king, the privileges which he enjoyed in connection with the royal person, or now and then the copy

of a letter from the king to his favorite-all these serve to make such biographies of inestimable value in completing our picture of the culture of the time. In the Sixth Dynasty these biographies become real narratives of the career of the departed noble, or at least of his most notable achievements in the service of the Pharaoh. The most important documents of this character are the biographies of Uni (§§ 291 ff.), and the nobles of Elephantine (§§ 325 ff., 355 ff., 362 ff.), one of whom has included therein a personal letter from the king (§§ 350 ff.).

7. As the aggressiveness of the Pharaohs increased, their foreign enterprises found record on the rocks in a number of distant regions (outside of Egypt proper), where they still exist. In the Peninsula of Sinai they appear in the First Dynasty (began 3400 B. C.); by the Fifth Dynasty (ended by 2580 B. C.) the officials who led such expeditions commenced to add their own records below the mere relief depicting the triumphant king, a scene to which heretofore only the name of the king was appended. From the Fourth Dynasty such memorials begin to appear in the alabaster quarries of Hatnub, behind Amarna; and from the reign of Isesi, in the Fifth Dynasty, they become more and more numerous in the quarries of Hammamat in the eastern desert, on the road from Coptos to the Red Sea. Practically all that we know, for example, of the power and deeds of the Eleventh Dynasty (2160-2000 B. C.) is drawn from records in these quarries.

8. They soon become so regular that their stoppage is almost certain evidence of an interruption in the orderly course of government in the Nile valley. Similar inscriptions on the rocks at the first cataract (§§ 316 ff.) begin in the time of Mernere, of the Sixth Dynasty (2625-2475 B. C.). The earliest inscription (§§ 472, 473) above the cataract in