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No. 722.

lib. xv.

citizenship; while they were at once granted to every Greek, and soon to every Jew, who would settle there. Hierog. The same hieroglyphical word stood for Greek and for Lower Egyptian; Lycophron seems to speak of the Egyptian nation under the name of Macedonians; and whenever, during the reigns of the Ptolemies, Polybius, the citizens of the capital of Egypt met in public assembly in the Gymnasium, they were addressed, "Ye men of Macedonia." Inasmuch as they were Macedonians, they were of course Dorians; and a Theocritus, woman, crowding to see the procession of Isis in the streets of Alexandria, when blamed for her talkativeness, would answer that there was no law against Dorians talking Doric.

Idyll. xv. 94.

Diod. Sic. lib. xix.

(35) By the treaty just spoken of, Ptolemy, in the thirteenth year after the death of Alexander, was left undisputed master of Egypt. During these years he had not only gained the love of the Egyptians and Alexandrians by his wise and just government, but had won their respect as a general by the skill with which he had kept the war at a distance. He had lost and won battles in Syria, in Asia Minor, in the island of Cyprus, and at sea; but since Perdiccas marched against him, before he had a force to defend himself with, no foreign army had drunk the sacred waters of the Nile.

(36) It was under the government of Ptolemy that the wonders of Upper Egypt were first seen by any Greeks who had leisure, a love of knowledge, and enough of literature, to examine carefully and to describe what they saw. Loose and highly-coloured accounts of the wealth of Thebes had reached Greece even before the time of Homer, and again through Herodotus and other travellers in the Delta; but nothing was certainly known of it till it was visited by Hecateus of Abdera, who, among other works, wrote a history of Lib. i. 47; the Hyperborean or northern nations, and also a history or rather a description of Egypt, part of which we now read in the pages of Diodorus Siculus. When he travelled in Upper Egypt, Thebes, though still a populous city, was more thought of by the antiquary than by the statesman. Its wealth, however, was still great; and when under the just government of Ptolemy, it was no longer

lib. i. 46.

necessary for the priests to hide their treasures, it was found that the temples still held the very large sum of three hundred talents of gold, and two thousand three hundred talents of silver, or above one million sterling, which had escaped the plundering hands of the Persian satraps. Many of the Theban tombs, which are sets of rooms tunnelled into the hills on the Libyan side of the Nile, had even then been opened to gratify the curiosity of the learned or the greediness of the conqueror. Forty-seven royal tombs were mentioned in the records of the priests, of which the entrances had been covered up with earth and hidden in the sloping sides of the hills, in the hope that they might remain undisturbed and unplundered, and might keep safe the embalmed bodies of the kings till they should rise again at the end of the world; and seventeen of these had already been found out and broken open. Hecatæus was told that the other tombs had been before destroyed; and we owe it perhaps to this mistake that they remained unopened for more than two thousand years longer, to reward the searches of modern travellers, and to unfold to us the history of their builders.

(37) The Memnonium, the great palace of Rameses II., was then standing; and though it had been plundered by the Persians, the building itself was unhurt. Its massive walls had scarcely felt the wear of the centuries which had rolled over them. Hecatæus measured its rooms, its courtyards, and its avenue of sphinxes; and by his measurements we can now distinguish its ruins from those of the other palaces of Thebes. One of its rooms, perhaps after the days of its builder, had been fitted up as a library, and held the histories and records of the priests; but the golden zodiac or circle. on which were engraved the days of the year, with the stars which were seen to rise at sunrise and set at sunset, by which each day was known, had been taken away by Cambyses. Hecatæus also saw the three other palacetemples of Thebes, which we now call by the names of the villages in which they stand, namely, of Luxor, of Karnak, and of Medinet Abou. But the Greeks, in their accounts of Egypt, have sadly puzzled us by their careless alteration of names from similarity of sound. To Miamun Rameses they gave the common Greek name Memnon; and the city of Hiroth they called Heroopolis, as if it meant the city of

heroes. The capital of Upper Egypt, which was called the city, as a capital is often called, or in Coptic, Tape or Thabou, they named Thebes, and in their mythology they confounded it with Thebes in Boeotia. The city of the god Kneph they called Canopus, and said it was so named after the pilot of Menelaus. The royal quarries of Toorah, opposite Memphis, so named from Ouro, the king, they called the Trojan Mountain. One of the oldest cities in Egypt, Stephanus This, or, with the prefix for city, Abouthis, they called Abydos, and then said that it was colonised by Milesians from Abydos in Asia. In the same careless way have the Greeks given us an account of the Egyptian gods. They thought them the same as their own, though with new faces; and instead of describing their qualities, they have for the most part contented themselves with translating their names.

Byzantinus.

(38) If Ptolemy did not make his government as much feared by the half-armed Ethiopians as it was by the welldisciplined Europeans, it must have been because the Thebans wished to guard their own frontier rather than because his troops were always wanted against a more powerful enemy; but the inroads of the Ethiopians were so far from being checked that the country to the south of Thebes was unsafe for travellers, and no Greek was able to reach Syene and the lower cataracts during his reign. The trade through Ethiopia was wholly stopped, and the caravans went from Thebes to Cosseir, to meet the ships which brought the goods of Arabia and India from the opposite coast of the Red Sea.

Antiq. xii. 1.

(39) In the wars between Egypt and Asia Minor, in which Palestine had the misfortune to be the prize struggled for, and the debateable land on which the battles were fought, the Jews were often made to smart under the stern pride of Antigonus, and to rejoice at the milder temper of Josephus, Ptolemy. The Egyptians of the Delta and the Jews had always been friends; and hence, when Ptolemy promised to treat the Jews with the same kindness as the Greeks, and more than the Egyptians, and held out all the rights of Macedonian citizenship to those who would settle in his rising city of Alexandria, he was followed by crowds of industrious traders, manufacturers, and men of letters. They chose to live in Egypt in peace and wealth,

rather than to stay in Palestine in the daily fear of having their houses sacked and burnt at every fresh quarrel between Ptolemy and Antigonus. In Alexandria, Josephus, in Apion. ii. a suburb by the sea, on the east side of the city, was allotted for their use, which was afterwards included within the fortifications, and thus made a fifth ward. Here the genius of the Jewish nation for trade was for the first time fully shown. In their own country their laws had more particularly directed them towards agriculture, to which they have always seemed least fitted; but in Egypt, where the cultivation of the soil was so admirably understood by the natives, the Jews found a free course for their own skill in

commerce.

ch. xii.

ch. iii. 23

1. 22.

(40) With these conquests of Jerusalem the chain of Jewish genealogies in the Hebrew scriptures was brought to a close. The genealogy of the Levites, which had been Nehemiah, added as part of the book of Nehemiah, and that of the sons of David, as part of the book of 1 Chron. Chronicles, end at this time. One of the last Josephus, among the Jews there mentioned removed into in Apionem Egypt under the patronage of Ptolemy; namely, Hezekias, the heir to David's throne, who was not more looked up to for his rank than for his eloquence and knowledge; and with him came Mosollam, who was known for his bravery and skill as an archer. Hecatæus, who wrote a history of the Jews, gained his knowledge of the nation from the learned men who then followed Ptolemy into Egypt. He mentions Mosollam once riding out with a troop of soldiers, who as they rode were watching the flight of a bird that had been let loose by a soothsayer, to foretell what was going to happen; and Mosollam brought it down with an arrow from his bow, wittily remarking that, as it could not foresee its own death, it certainly knew nothing about the fortunes of the soldiers.

(41) No sooner was the peace agreed upon between the four generals, who were the most powerful kings Diod. Sic. in the known world, than Cassander, who held lib. xix. Macedonia, put to death both the Queen Roxana and B.C. 311. her son, the young Alexander Ægus, then thirteen years old, in whose name these generals had each governed his kingdom with unlimited sway, and who was then of an age that the

soldiers, the givers of all power, were already planning to make him the real king of Macedonia, and of his father's wide conquests.

(42) The Macedonian phalanx, which formed the pride and sinews of every army, were equally held by their deeprooted loyalty to the memory of Alexander, whether they were fighting for Ptolemy or for Antigonus, and equally thought that they were guarding a province for his heir; and it was through fear of loosening their hold upon the faithfulness of these their best troops that Ptolemy and his rivals alike chose to govern their kingdoms under the unpretending title of lieutenants of the king of Macedonia. Hence, upon the death of Alexander Ægus, there was a throne, or at least a state prison, left empty for a new claimant. Polysperchon, an old general of Alexander's army, then thought that he saw a way to turn Cassander out of Macedonia, by the help of Hercules, the natural son of Alexander by Barce; and, having proclaimed him king, he led him with a strong army against Cassander. But Polysperchon wanted either courage or means for what he had undertaken, and he soon yielded to the bribes of Cassander, and put Hercules to death.

Diod. Sic. lib. xx. 20.

(43) The cities on the southern coast of Asia Minor yielded to Antigonus obedience as slight as the ties which held them to one another. The coast of Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia had been occupied by Greek colonists, while the interior of the country was held by Asiatics. The two races and languages were in part mixed. The tomb of King Mausolus, sculptured by Scopas, showed that Greek taste was quite at home in Caria. Among the Lycians, sculpture, though less beautiful, was earlier; and their early use of the long vowels leads us to think that the Greek colonists in Asia may have been teachers to their countrymen in Athens in some of the arts of civilization. The cities of Pamphylia and Cilicia in their habits as in their situation were nearer the Syrians, and famous for their shipping. They all enjoyed a full share of the trade and piracy of those seas,

and were a tempting prize to Ptolemy. The treaty Lib. xx. 27. of peace between the generals never lessened their jealousy nor wholly stopped the warfare; and the next year Ptolemy, finding that his troops could hardly keep their

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