Position 39 - Brick Making, The Task Of The Hebrews, As Seen To-day Among The Ruins Of Crocodilopolis.

Just north of the chief ancient city of the Fayûm, we stand looking nearly eastward, but a trifle northward also, over the ruins of the ancient city of Crocodilopolis (Map 6). Behind us stretches the Fayûm, rising at last to the vast waste of the Sahara, spreading out to the far Atlantic, while beyond the trees that mark the skyline before us, the Nile is some twenty-five miles away.

Forty-five miles distant on our left is Memphis, while on our right are Thebes and the splendid cities of the upper river. And this is the fertile Fayûm, you ask—these wastes of dust and dried mud! Far from it. The fertile levels of the Fayûm do not differ essentially from those of the rich bottoms in the Nile valley, which you have already seen; hence we shall not spend our time on them.

The ruins of the city and the accumulations of débris have raised the surface here to such a height that irrigation is impossible, and the ground is furthermore so cumbered with walls and sub-structures that it is out of the question to think of employing this immediate region for agriculture. It lies open to the burning sun, with nothing to relieve the scorched and parched condition from year's end to year's end. But like every such ruin, it has a story to tell us.

Deep down under these ancient, crumbling walls lie the scanty remains of a town at least as old as the 12th Dynasty kings, who nearly 2,000 years before Christ recovered this district from the waters of the lake. They built a temple here sacred to the crocodile-god Sebek, after whom the city was called by the Greeks “Crocodilopolis,” the city of the crocodile. Though rebuilt by Ramses II some six hundred years later, the temple was not one of the great sanctuaries of the Pharaohs, and the town never rose under them to any great power or political significance. But when the Greek kings, the Ptolemies, came into power, they used the rich fields of the Fayûm as gift lands with which to reward their soldiers.

The second Ptolemy (Philadelphus) refounded this town in the 3rd century B. C., built temples and schools, introduced the Greek language, and completely Hellenized the place. He named it after his queen Arsinoe, whom he made the patron-goddess of the town, and under his protection it rapidly grew until it contained in later times some 100,000 inhabitants. To the houses of this age belong the walls which you see rising almost as far as the eye can reach. The various vicissitudes which later overtook the city, combined to preserve in these ruined houses, just such documents as we should find under your house, if it should suddenly be razed to the ground.

Being largely above the reach of the inundation, these documents have lain here undisturbed some two thousand years. They are written upon papyrus, which for many centuries before and after Christ, was the paper not only of Egypt, but also of the whole classic world. They are chiefly concerned with the civil and social life of the time. You find deeds, leases, receipts, bills, wills, transfers, tax-lists and all the documents of every-day business life.

The letters from one member of a family to another are of especial interest; a brother writes to his sister, telling of his safe arrival at Memphis; a son writes to his father complaining that the fodder for the livestock, which was to have been sent to him, has not been sent, and demanding that it be dispatched at once; all the matters of every-day life are found in these moldy old bits of papyrus as they are found in our own letters of to-day.

But more important than any of the letters or the business documents are the monuments of Greek literature which have been discovered in yonder houses and similar cities near the Fayûm. Some of the greatest products of Greek thought and literary genius, supposed to have been irretrievably lost, have turned up among such house ruins; such as the Constitution of Aristotle, poems of Sappho, works of Isocrates and Bacchylides, and innumerable fragments of Homer. Many a lost work of the early days of Christianity has also been restored to us from those sombre walls out there; even traditional sayings of Jesus, not found in the New Testament, and many a fragment which throws a flood of light on early Christianity, have thus been reclaimed. Silent and grim, these desolate streets have nevertheless a message for the modern world such as few ancient sites have preserved.

But all this time we have been ignoring a modern industry here directly before us, which is not less ancient in its origins than the beginnings of the city. Almost as far back as we can trace Egyptian civilization, we meet the sun-dried brick. We find it as the material for the earlier royal tombs of some 3400 B. C., far back of the pyramid builders; we have seen it in the pyramids of the 12th Dynasty (Position 34); we have found it in the store-chambers of Pithom, where the Hebrew bondsmen toiled; the walls of yonder houses of the centuries just before and after Christ are built of them; and finally we see here the modern natives engaged in their manufacture, precisely on the same methods employed by their fathers five thousand years ago.

At the extreme right across the road along which the donkey train is passing, the soft mud is being mixed under the feet of a fellah, while another at a table molds it into bricks, two at a time. These are taken while still in the molds and carried to the yard by a third native, who gently detaches them from the molds and leaves them to dry in long rows, as you see them inside the enclosure on the left. Just to the right of the enclosure are also two pottery kilns, with numerous newly fired jars, many of them broken in firing.

The smoke beyond these is from the corn-stalk fuel in another kiln. But to return to the bricks. In spite of the lack of firing they make a very durable wall, and in a practically rainless climate they stand well, as you have already noticed at other places.

Here the roofs of the ancient houses are gone, to be sure, having long since been taken for the sake of the wood, but the walls still stand, in places almost to the original top course, in spite of the fact that the natives, and not skilled excavators, have dug out this town in their quest of sebach, as they call the rich dust and débris of these ancient towns, which contains a large proportion of potash and ammonia salts of the greatest value as fertilizer for the fields of the fellahin.

Our next stop is to be nearly a hundred miles south of the Fayûm, and on the opposite or eastern side of the Nile, in order to visit the Benihasan tombs. Find these tombs on our general Map 3. We shall be looking slightly east of north.