Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick.

  • James Bonwick
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    doubter. Egyptologists cannot read so perfectly as to leave no indecision. While the Judah-Melek at Karnac, that was conquered by the king of Egypt, was conjectured to be the king of Judah, Roug^ and Brugsch conclude the word to refer to a town of Palestine. The Hycsos, according to the best authorities, reigned on the Nile from the fourteenth to the eighteenth dynasties ; though Dr. Birch limits their space, saying, “The rule of the Hycsos did not extend much beyond Memphis.” He adds: “ They are neither Semitic nor Ara- mman, and would, but for other considerations, pass for good Egyptian Pharaohs.” He admits that they “ have even been supposed to be the Saaj'U or Troglodytes of Mount Seir.” Lepsius warns his readers that they were not there when Joseph entered the country. Dr. Smith’s “Ancient History” makes them only masters for 200 years, being subdued by the king of Thebes, who then added* Lower to Upper Egypt. But there seems good evidence that they ruled 400 years before Ramses II. The “ Encyclopaedia Britannica” limits their reign to the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties, calling the seventeenth a Theban dynasty. All did not leave the land, for the Delta was the Poland of the nineteenth dynasty. It is singular, however, to find later kings with Semitic names, and called after the Hycsos god Set, as Setis or Sethos, etc. The father of the great Ramses was one. The wife of Amenophis III. was of the race ; and so was the queen of Ramses II. Then we get another set of facts, at variance with the tales of Manetho. Monumental history proves the Hycsos, while reverencing Set, their ancestral deity, by no means inimical to Egyptian theology. On the contrary, they adopted it, encouraged it, and left memorials of this devotion on their tombs. Mariette Bey thus discourses on the subject: “ Up to this, on the authority of Manetho, we had believed that the Hycsos were only savage invaders, irreconcilable enemies of the power of the Pharaohs. But the Sphinx of San (discovei'ed by Mariette Bey, and proved to be a Hycsos figure) carries legends in the official Egyptian language, written in the name of one of those kings. We shall see, later on, that far from having mutilated and des- troyed the statues of the national sovereigns they expelled, the Shep- herd Kings respected those statues, and ornamented them with their own names written in hieroglyphics. Injured national self-love has thus impelled Manetho to exaggerate the disasters of the Asiatic invasion. There came a time when the conquerors, submitting in their turn to the laws of the conquered, adopted their writing, their arts, and, in part, their religion.” Professor Owen traces them to the country and race of Abraham, the Syro-Araraa;an. The Philistines were thought by Mr. Birch to
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