Chapter VII - Travel and Adventure

Travel and adventure are the subjects of several papyri. The ancient, like the modern Egyptian, was loth to leave his native field even to travel in other parts of his own Nile Valley. A journey in foreign countries, among strange men, strange gods, and strange tongues, naturally appeared a most formidable undertaking. Nevertheless, it is quite a mistake to imagine the Egyptians entirely cut off from intercourse with other races, dwelling in other states. To satisfy the thirst of Pharaoh for gloiy or for booty Egyptian soldiers shed their blood on many a distant battlefield ; diplomatists left their homes to administer Egypt’s foreign possessions, or to carry letters and gifts to the rulers of other empires both far and near. Merchants travelled to buy and sell in unknown regions; slaves and political suspects sought to cross the frontier to escape punishment at the hands of their masters or of the royal court of justice. Self-banishment for the reason last mentioned is still common in the East, and must have been very frequent in antiquity. This is obvious from numerous allusions to fugitive slaves and officials, but above all from a paragraph in a treaty of peace between Ramses IF. and his Asiatic neighbour the Kheta king. Its terms expressly bound each ruler to surrender to the other fugitives and runaway workmen taking refuge in the neighbouring state.

Many dangers attended foreign travel.

“The runner, who goes forth into a strange land, bequeaths his goods to his children, dreading lions and Asiatics,”

runs a passage in a description of various occupations preserved in several copies of about 1250 B.C. He who returned safe and sound from such a journey was regarded at home as a hero. His friends and neighbours hastened, just as they would to-day, to hear his account of his adventures. Like the modern teller of “travellers’ tales,” he was no punctilious stickler for exact truth. Many an incident probably received a more attractive colouring, while many others were clearly invented to give the traveller greater importance in the eyes of his friends and fellow countrymen. Thus, side by side with the simple tale of travel narrating with fair correctness possible events, there was developed in ancient Egypt the tale of marvellous adventure, reminding us in its fantastic adornments of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor or of Lucian’s True Histories.

In the story of Saneha (Sinuhit) we have the earliest known example of a tale of travel which avoids impossibilities and simply narrates facts. It originated during the Middle Kingdom, but was still copied and read more than a thousand years later. No mention of the hero has been found in inscriptions, so that it cannot be decided whether he was a real or a fictitious character. His name Saneha (“son of the sycamore-goddess”) occurs not infrequently during the Middle Kingdom and at the beginning of the New Kingdom. Our Saneha was an important dignitary under the first king of the Twelfth Dynasty, Amenemhat I.

On the death of this Pharaoh and the accession of his son, Usertesen I., Saneha happened to witness an embassy received by the king which was intended to be kept strictly secret. Fearing to be called to account for his knowledge of a state secret, he resolved to make his escape, and hid himself till the king had left the spot. He fled eastward across the flats of the Delta, and slipped past the frontier wall, called “The Wall of the Ruler,” which here formed the boundary of Egypt, and secured the fertile levels of the northern Nile Valley against the raids of the nomadic tribes that swarmed in southern Palestine and in the Sinaitic Peninsula. Saneha journeyed from the

Wall to the Bitter Lakes, and here, on the desolate steppe, he was overpowered by thirst; his throat was parched, and he said,

“This is the taste of death.”

After a brief rest, he plucked up heart, and presently the distant lowing of cattle prepared him for the approach of a Bedawi. The man treated him kindly, gave him water, boiled milk for him, and offered him a home with his tribe. But Saneha felt himself unsafe so near to the Egyptian frontier, and therefore went on his way as far as the Upper Tenu, a district probably to be sought in the south of Palestine. Here he married the eldest daughter of the chief, and dwelt in the land for many years, rich, happy, and respected. But a longing for home took hold upon him as he grew older, and the matter was laid before King Usertesen who granted him permission to return. He was kindly received at court, Egyptian garments were given to him, and a royal command was issued to build for him a magnificent tomb—the greatest honour in the power of the Pharaoh to bestow.

Most vivid descriptions of the land of the Bedawin, their perpetual feuds and other details of their life, are interwoven with the narrative, which has thus a special interest as the earliest known contribution to the history of the civilisation of the Palestinian nomads. Side by side with these idyllic pictures stand crude and wordy eulogies of the monarch in the Nile Valley. These were probably congenial enough to the Egyptian reader, but judged by the standard of modern taste, they form mere interruptions, tedious and irritating, of the simple story of Saneha.

The story of the Shipwrecked Sailor belongs to about the same period as the story of Saneha, but exists only in one papyrus copy now in St. Petersburg. Like the tale of Saneha, this also is told in the first person, the hero being supposed to relate his own adventures; but, unlike the former, it neither names the hero nor gives any details of his previous life.

The narrator had set sail for the royal mines; a storm arose and the ship went down with all hands. He alone succeeded in seizing a plank and by its aid kept his head above water. For three days he was swept onward by a great wave, which at length cast him upon an island, where he found food and offered a burnt offering to the gods. Heating a terrible noise which caused the trees to quiver and the earth to tremble, he looked round and saw approaching him a gigantic snake, thirty ells long, with a beard measuring two ells. Its limbs were inlaid with gold, and its colour was that of lapis lazuli. This creature seized the sailor, carried him to its home and ordered him to tell how he had come to the island.

After listening attentively to his talc, the monster explained that he had been cast away on the island of the Ka (i.e., the soul), the home of the snake and of its brothers and children, seventy-five in all. There dwelt also among them a maiden (probably to be regarded as human), whom chance (?) had brought to their midst. The snake predicted that the sailor should sojourn on the island for four months, and should then be rescued by a passing ship. As a matter of course, this prophecy was fulfilled. When the appointed time had come, the sailor received rich gifts of frankincense, jewels, ivory, dogs, apes and other precious things. These were taken on board the ship and the rescued mariner sailed through Nubia, down the Nile to the residence of the Pharaoh.

Later by more than a millennium than the adventures of Saneha and of the shipwrecked sailor, is a description, dating about 1250 b c., of a journey through Palestine and Phoenicia, preserved in a London papyrus and in the fragments of two other copies. The aim of this story is not to describe the journey itself, though a list is given of the towns visited and individual adventures are narrated. Its intention is rather, by means of a story of an imaginary journey, to satirise the absurdities and the artificial style popular at that time in such descriptions. The story is of great value for another reason besides its noteworthy position as an early piece of literary history. It depicts most vividly the insecurity prevailing in the south of Syria as far as Egypt, at the end of the second millennium, B.C. ; that is, about the time of the conquest of Canaan by the Jews. Although the country had been again and again under the suzerainty of Egypt, and had been strongly influenced by Babylonian-Assyrian civilisation, yet the text shows that a journey through it was still a matter of great difficulty and no small danger.

The wondrous adventures related by the shipwrecked sailor to his fellow countrymen would not by any means be so astounding to them as to a modem audience. The ancient Egyptian believed that even in the Nile Valley there was no lack of ghostly and magic agencies ready at any moment to interfere in his life, quite irrespective of his good or evil deserts. A papyrus of the Middle Kingdom tells how a herdsman espied the spectre of a woman in a lake. Beside himself with terror he urged the other men to depart as speedily as possible from the spot. This necessi tated the driving of the cattle through the water, and meanwhile those of the herdsmen who were expert in magic were told off to repeat the spells intended to secure cattle against any of the dangers of water, especially aganst crocodiles, rbe men did so, but when the procession was in motion the spectre, having torn off her garments and dishevelled her hair, appeared once more to the first herdsman. The conclusion of the story is unfortunately missing, so we know not whether the man escaped or fell a victim to the ghost.