Chapter VIII - Tales of Ghosts and MAgic

In another later text, parts of which are written on ostraca now in Paris, Vienna and Florence, Khunsu-em-heb, the hero, who was high priest of the god Amon, is anxious to make arrangements for his tomb. The operations of his workmen apparently disturbed an earlier vault, and the mummies whose resting-place had been desecrated, began to converse with him and to tell him, though in phrases difficult to be understood, the stories of their lives. The remains so far discovered are not sufficient to give the connection of the narrative, but fragments evidently written by different hands show that they were used about iooo b.c. as copies for the practice of writing, and must at that time have been part of the more popular reading of the Egyptian people.

The so-called Westcar papyrus, in the Berlin museum, must be considered side by side with these brief fragments of ghost stories. It was written about 1800 B.C., at the beginning of the New Kingdom, evidently from more ancient originals, and is devoted chiefly to tales of magic and enchantment. Beginning and end are wanting as in so many Egyptian papyri, yet enough of the matter has escaped destruction to enable us to form a fairly correct idea of the text as a whole. The papyrus tells how Kheops—the king whom notices of Greek writers have made universally famous as the builder of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh—commands stories of magic to be told to him. The first of these, of which the conclusion only remains, is supposed to have occurred in the reign of King T’eser of the Third Dynasty. The next, which is complete, belongs to the reign of Nebka, a somewhat earlier king.

In those days it came to the ears of a great nobleman that his faithless wife was in the habit of meeting her lover by the side of a lake. Being skilled in magic he modelled a crocodile in wax and ordered one of his servants to cast it into the water. It was immediately transformed into a real crocodile and devoured the lover. Seven days later the king was walking by the lake with his friend the nobleman, when at the command of the latter the crocodile came to the shore and laid its victim at their feet. The king shuddered at the sight of the monster, but at the touch of its maker it became once more a mere figure of wax. Then the whole astonishing story was told to the k ng, who thereupon granted the crocodile permission to take away that which was its own. The creature plunged into the depths of the lake and disappeared with the adulterer, while the guilty wife was burnt to death and her ashes were scattered in the stream.

A tale of enchantment follows, the scene of which is laid during the reign of King Sneferu, the predecessor of Kheops. This king was one day taking his pleasure on a lake in a boat rowed by twenty beautiful maidens, when one of the girls dropped a malachite ornament into the water. The king promised to give her another in its stead, but this did not content her, for she wanted her own jewel and no other. A magician was summoned who repeated a spell by the might of which he piled one half of the lake on the top of the other, so that the water, which at first was twelve ells deep in the middle of the lake, now stood twenty-four ells high. The jewel, found lying in the mud in the dry portion of the lake, was restored to its owner; and the magician having once more mumbled his spell the water returned to its former place.

When Kheops had listened for some time with much interest to the accounts of the strange events that had transpired in the days of his predecessors, then stepped forward Prince Horduduf, who is already known to us from the song in the tomb-temple of King Antef as renowned for his wisdom. He told the king that all marvels were not things of the past, but that even then there was living a magician named Deda, who was one hundred and ten years old, and consumed every day five hundred loaves, a side of beef, and a hundred jars of beer. Kheops was so much interested that he sent the prince to escort the magician to his presence. Deda obeyed the royal summons and performed his chief feat before the king.

This consisted in decapitating a goose, a duck, and an ox, and charming the heads back again on to the bodies so that the creatures lived and breathed as before. Kheops fell into talk with the magician, who told him that the wife of a priest in Sakhebu was awaiting the birth of three sons, children of the god Rā, who should one day sit on the throne of Egypt. Deda sought to allay the king’s natural distress at this information by prophesying that only after the reigns of his son and grandson should the power fall into the hands of the descendants of the Sun-god. But Kheops was not to be so consoled ; he inquired into the details of the story and announced that he would himself travel to Sakhebu, no doubt with the ultimate intention of finding an opportunity to put out of the way the pretenders to his throne.

The scene of the sequel is laid in Sakhebu. The birth and infancy of the three children are described in detail, and all sorts of marvellous incidents are represented as influencing their fate. The gods cared for the safety of the little ones. A maid to whom the secret was known being enraged by a severe punishment inflicted upon her, threatened to betray all to Kheops. Her own brother beat her, and when she went down to the water she was carried off by a crocodile.— Here the papyrus ceases, but it is possible to a certain extent to restore the conclusion. The names of the three children of Ra show that they stand for the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty, the family that followed the house of Kheops. The papyrus must therefore have told how the boys escaped all the snares laid for their lives and in due time ascended the throne for which they were destined. One historical blunder, however, is evident in the text. According to this only two descendants of Kheops reigned after him before the rise of the new dynasty, but the lists handed down from antiquity indicate at least four rulers during the interim.

In the papyrus just described marvellous incidents are brought into connection with the names of those rulers who played a leading part in the golden age of Egyptian history—the period of the builders of the pyramids. Historical personages of later times are treated in a similar way. The London papyrus, from which the love songs were extracted, couples a story with the name of Thutia, a man well known from numerous monuments and inscriptions as one of the generals of Thutmosis III., the most warlike monarch of the New Kingdom. The papyrus relates his success in retaking the city of Joppa, which had rebelled against Pharaoh. Having laid his plans in concert with his king, Thutia marched against Joppa. He took with him a band of picked men, five hundred large jars, and the king’s great cane. Arriving before the town, he represented himself as a traitor to the Egyptian cause. The prince of Joppa, delighted at the prospect of winning over such an important official hastened to meet him, kissed him, took him to his resting-place, and ate and drank with him. As he expressed a wish to see the great cane of Pharaoh,

Thutia sent for it, held it before him as if for his close inspection, and suddenly gave him such a violent blow on the head that he fell down unconscious. Then Thutia commanded two hundred of his men to conceal themselves in two hundred of the jars, and ordered the remaining jars to be filled with cords and fetters. The rest of the army marched up to the walls carrying the jars, and told the inhabitants that Thutia had been taken prisoner, and that they were now bringing him iniwith his men and his goods in the jars. The people of Joppa were deceived and admitted the bearers of the jars.

The bearers thereupon released their comrades and with their help seized the city.—At the first glance we are struck by the resemblance between this tale and such incidents as that of the wooden horse which caused the fall of Troy, or of the oil-jars in the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. In the Egyptian talc a peculiar feature is the somewhat indefinite magic power ascribed to Pharaoh’s cane. It is owing to its influence that the prince of Joppa is so heedless in exposing himself to danger, and that the citizens fail to see through Thutia’s somewhat transparent fiction.

Greek authors, writing on Egyptian antiquity, allude often and in many different connections to legends, the essential interest of which centres in one or more marvellous incidents, and thus they bear witness to the number and variety of such tales in the Nile Valley. It is seldom possible from these allusions to come to any conclusion as to the date of the tales in question. Many may have originated as late as the Greek period, for such literature was extremely popular at that particular stage of Egyptain development. Three voluminous stories of enchantment have already been published from demotic papyri of the Ptolemaic period and of the first decades of the Roman supremacy. Many other works of the same kind will probably be brought to light as the result of more thorough working over of the ex'sting material.

One of the texts already accessible claims to narrate historical facts and dates about the middle of the eighth century B.C. Its subject is the strife for a mysterious coat of mail belonging originally to Heliopolis, but taken away before the story opens by the officer in authority over the Mendesian Nome. The chiefs of many of the divisions of Lower Egypt assembled by the Lake of the Gazelle, in the presence of Petu-bastis, the reigning Pharaoh. Some desired to win back the coat of mail for Heliopolis; the others, with whom Pharaoh was in sympathy, tried to secure it for its present possessor. It was essentially a struggle between the princes of the northern and southern Nomes of the western and central Delta, and in the end the king saw himself forced to give up the armour to the rightful owner.

The papyrus is fragmentary, and this is a regrettable loss to political no less than to literary history. As far as the scanty documentary records of Egypt and Assyria allow us to come to any conclusions, the picture drawn by this papyrus of the confused internal conditions in the Nile Valley during the eighth century b.c. is absolutely correct. It was the period shortly before the invasion of the Ethiopians and the breakdown of the native dynasty, weakened as it now was by the gradually increasing power of the princes of the Nomes. The accuracy of the historical setting indicates that the germ at least of the story is of much earlier date than the copy now in Vienna.

Both the other papyri treat of the personality and the family of Prince Setna Kha-em-ust (Satni Khamois), a son of Ramses II., who, according to the inscriptions, devoted his life chiefly to religious ceremonies- For some years he was heir-apparent to the Egyptian throne, but died before his father, and was probably buried in one of the Apis vaults in the Serapeum at Memphis. Egyptian tradition soon connected his name with the practice of magic, and a spell for conjuring demons was said to have been found by him under the head of a mummy in the necropolis of Memphis. The first text, which has been known to us since 1867, tells that this prince, being skilled and zealous in the practice of necromancy, was one day exhibiting his acquirements to the learned men of the court, when an old man told him of a magic book containing two spells written by the hand of Thoth himself, the god of wisdom.

He who repeated the first spell bewitched thereby heaven and earth and the realm of night, the mountains and the depth of the sea; he knew the fowls of the air and every creeping thing ; he saw the fishes, for a divine power brought them up out of the depth. He who read the second spell should have power to resume his earthly shape, even though he dwelt in the grave; to see the sun rising in the sky with all the gods and the moon in the form wherein she displays herself. Setna inquired where this book was to be found, and learned that it was lying in the tomb of Nefer-ka-Ptah, a son of King Mer-neb-ptah (who is nowhere else named), and that any attempt to take away the book would certainly meet with obstinate resistance. These difficulties did not withhold Setna from the adventure. He entered the tomb of Nefer-ka-Ptah, where he found not only the dead man, but the Ka of his wife Ahuri and their son, thougli these latter had been buried in Koptos.

Ahuri told all the trouble that the possession of the book had brought upon her husband and herself, but her tale of woe produced no effect upon the intruder. Setna persisted in his undertaking, and at length, by the help of magic, he gained his end. But as in many other tales among many other peoples, success brought no blessing to the man who had disturbed the repose of the dead. Setna fell in love with the daughter of a priest at Memphis, who turned out to be a witch, and took advantage of his intimate connection with her to bring him to ignominy and wretchedness. At length the prince recognised and repented of the sacrilege he had committed in carrying off the book, and brought it back to Nefer-ka-Ptah. In the hope of atoning to some extent for his sin he journeyed to Koptos, and finding the graves of the wife and child of Nefer-ka-Ptah, he solemnly restored their mummies to the tomb of the husband and father, carefully closing the tomb he had so sacrilegiously disturbed.—The second text, edited two years ago by Griffith from a London papyrus, is also genuinely Egyptian in its details.

Three magic tales, interwoven one with another, are brought into connection with Saosiri, the supernaturally born son of Setna. In the first, Saosiri, who was greatly Setna’s superior in the arts of magic, led his father down into the underworld. They penetrated into the judgment-hall of Osiris, where the sights they saw convinced Setna that a glorious future awaited the poor man who should cleave to righteousness, while he who led an evil life on earth, though rich and powerful, must expect a terrible doom. Saosiri next succeeded in saving his father, and with him all Egypt, from great difficulty by reading without breaking the seal a closed letter brought by an Ethiopian magician, whom he thus forced to recognise the superior power of Egypt. The last part of the text tells of a powerful magician once dwelling in Ethiopia who modelled in wax a litter with four bearers to whom he gave life.

He sent them to Egypt, and at his command they sought out Pharaoh in his palace, carried him off to Ethiopia, and, after giving him five hundred blows with a cudgel, conveyed him during the same night back to Memphis. Next morning the king displayed the weals on his back to his courtiers, one of whom, Horus by name, was sufficiently skilled in the use of amulets to ward off by their means any immediate repetition of the outrage. Horus then set forth to bring from Hermopolis the all-powerful magic book of the god Thoth, and by its aid he succeeded in treating the Ethiopian king as the Ethiopian sorcerer had treated Pharaoh. The foreign magician then hastened to Egypt to engage in a contest with Horus in magic tricks. His skill was shown to be inferior, and in the end he and his mother received permission to return to Ethiopia under a solemn promise not to set foot on Egyptian territory for a space of fifteen hundred years.