1. Stay on the Path: By ancient covenant those on any obvious road, path, or trail are safe so long as they stay on the road. Thus many would be predators attempt to lure the unwary off the path with offers of wealth, threats of force, or seemingly urgent requests for assistance. The traveller in the Fair Lands would do well to remember this simple advice: never, under any circumstances, leave the road. No matter how tempting, no matter how dire, no matter what reasons one might have for leaving the road it is rarely worth the risk. Once off the road not only is a traveller in danger from possible assault or worse, the nature of the Fair Lands is such that a path once left might not be found again, even after only a few steps.
2. Neither eat nor drink the things of the Fair Lands: All things in the Fair Lands are tainted with the magick of the place, and seemingly doubly so the food and drink. One can never be sure of the effects such items will have. At the very least a character who does so may gain the Fey Touched feat, but worse fates are more likely. Alice, in her rash reading of directions, got off easy by simply changing size. In the poem The Goblin Market one of the heroines foolishly exchanges a lock of hair for some fruit, resulting in an addiction and wasting sickness that is only cured by more fruit. A more common occurrence is that mortals that eat of the things of the fey are forever bound to the Fair Lands, unable to return home. Some fey encourage humans to drink, and once they have done so bring the mortal under their control. Fortunately, while a human in the Fair Lands will get hungry and thirsty they will not die from lack of food or water for the very nature of the Land sustains all life.
3. Mind your manners. What is always good advice is especially true in the Fair Lands. The fey value good manners above all else and find bad ones the worst of crimes. Intent seems to be the main issue; thus while one may not know proper etiquette if one attempts to be respectful and demonstrates a desire to be well behaved, it usually is enough. Exceptions do exist, of course, and some evil minded fey will attempt to use breaches of etiquette as an excuse for all manner of trouble. The traveller should remember that the rules of good manners work both ways, and a clever person can turn the trap back on his would be trapper. Fey are so bound by the law of manners that while they may deceive and try to mislead, all answers to direct questions must be the truth as far as they know it to be. This does not mean, however, that they will not try to get out of giving a direct answer.
4. Accept no gifts. An unspoken part of fey etiquette is that a gift binds the recipient to the giver. A gift creates a disparity between the two, allowing the giver to exercise control over the recipient to various degrees. While it would be improper to demand a lifetime of service for a small favour, a year of service could easily be required with total enslavement likely for any gift of value. The very nature of the Fair Lands compels obedience in these matters, but as with all things in the Fair Lands there are ways out of it.
5. Repay in kind, no more and no less. This is a sub-rule of 3 and 4. Anything short of an equitable exchange risks evoking the no-gifts rule. No fey wishes to be part of such an exchange and will be insulted, a violation of rule 3, as a result.
Other writers might have invented a single rule for moving characters into Narnia and out of it. Lewis invented new tricks whenever he felt like it: a wardrobe, a painting, the call of a horn, magic rings. This casual attitude toward the rules of Narnia is one reason Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t love the Chronicles.
Tolkien might have laughed by the time he read The Magician’s Nephew. The magical green rings and gold rings that transport Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer to Narnia and back are a sly tribute to Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. That tribute isn’t the only one. Lewis and Tolkien had a friendship and an informal working relationship that was very important to both men, personally and professionally. It altered their careers. It changed Lewis’s life.
Lewis and Tolkien were brought together by a love of adventure. Armchair adventure, that is. They met in Oxford, where Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English). Both, they discovered, adored Norse myths—Old Icelandic sagas about gods and heroes. Tolkien asked Lewis to be part of a group he was forming that would read these sagas in the original Old Icelandic.
Both men were clubby. Lewis loved rowdy conversations about literature fueled with beer. Tolkien had been forming groups to talk about literature since he was a schoolboy. Both agreed: no girls allowed.
Tolkien’s club was called the Kolbitars (“Coalbiters”), an Old Icelandic term for taleswappers who sat so close to the fire they could bite the coals. Once a week the friends would gather by a fireplace in their slippers, beer at the ready, and read aloud. For Lewis, reading “the mere names of god and giant” in Icelandic was enough to give him a thrill.
Another club, which has since become famous in literary circles, grew out of this friendship in the mid-1930s. It was called the Inklings, which Tolkien said was a pun referring to “people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” One evening each week (and often another morning, too) they met at a pub to drink, talk, and read to each other whatever they were writing.
Even within the club, Lewis and Tolkien had special influence on each other’s work. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but that didn’t matter to either of them. Lewis once observed, “The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.” (The Four Loves, 66)
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FRIENDSHIP
Lewis was a great encourager of Tolkien, who was obsessed with creating a whole set of myths about ancient Britain, despite the lack of interest from his publishers. Then, having encouraged Tolkien, Lewis drew on Tolkien’s creations just as he drew on classical myths and Icelandic sagas. Long before The Lord of the Rings was published, Lewis published books that alluded to it. As far as Lewis was concerned, Tolkien’s myths were as real as the others. He might have held that opinion even if he wasn’t Tolkien’s friend; but of course he knew all about Tolkien’s painstaking scholarship. Naturally, given their many discussions during the course of Tolkien’s work, Lewis’s allusions get right to the heart of Tolkien’s world.
HERE COME THE FLOODS
From childhood, Tolkien was haunted by a dream of a huge, dangerous wave. He came to believe it was an ancestral memory, and that it was connected to the myth of the lost island Atlantis, where a great civilization is said to have been wiped out in an instant. His efforts to understand the dream led him to write myths about Atlantis, which in his version was called Númenor.
One of its first appearances followed a challenge from Lewis during an Inklings meeting. Somehow a discussion led Lewis to say, “One of us should write a tale of time travel and the other should do space travel.” (The Inklings drank a lot during their meetings.) They flipped a coin and Tolkien drew the time travel. Woven into his story “The Lost Road,” was the tale of noble men on an island called Númenor. An evil wizard Sauron—the great enemy of The Lord of the Rings—corrupts the men, which prompts the God of Middle-earth to sink Númenor under a great wave.
Lewis heard about Númenor when Tolkien read the story to his fellow Inklings. He liked Tolkien’s version of the Atlantean myth so much that when he turned his space-travel story into a novel he included references to “Numinor” and “the last vestiges of Atlantean magic.” (The spelling is different because Lewis had only heard the story read aloud.) In the book’s introduction, he gave readers a teaser about Tolkien’s work. “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that exists only in the MSS. [manuscripts] of my friend, Professor J.R.R.Tolkien.” (THS, 7)
PETRIFYING FORESTS
Tolkien hated the way humankind treats nature. His anger is apparent throughout The Lord of the Rings. He got his revenge by bringing a forest to life and turning it into an army that comes to the rescue of the heroes.
There is a great power in them, and they seem able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly, if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather, maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you.
In Prince Caspian, the sudden appearance of the forest is described the same way:
Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild southwester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you . . . their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers. (PC, ch. 14)
The appearance of the living forest has the same effect on the evil armies in both tales. In The Lord of the Rings:
The Orcs reeled and screamed and cast aside both sword and spear. Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind they fled. Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again.
In Prince Caspian:
Tough looking warriors turned white, gazed in terror . . . flung down their weapons, shrieking, “The Wood! The Wood! The end of the world!”
But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the oceanlike roar of the Awakened Trees . . . (PC, ch. 14)
WEDDED RINGS
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien added a twist to the Icelandic sagas he and Lewis shared. Tolkien’s version was to find its way into Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.”
There’s a famous story in the sagas about a magic ring that offers great wealth but is cursed to cause tragedy for any mortal who wears it. Tolkien’s first novel of Middle-earth, The Hobbit, made that ring a small part of the plot. Then, in the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, the importance of the ring grew, and its meaning changed. Tolkien added a Christian interpretation: the rings (there were several in Tolkien’s novel) were made through the trickery of Sauron, whose “lust and pride . . . knew no bounds” and who wants to take God’s role in Middle-earth. His arrogance affects all the wearers of the rings. They, too, deceive themselves into thinking they deserve glory and believing themselves strong enough to control the magic of the ring. Naturally, most of them are led to ruin.
The story of the rings in The Magician’s Nephew reveals a similar arrogance: a foolhardy pursuit of “knowledge” that Lewis, like Tolkien, believed was God’s alone. Lewis’s rings are made from Atlantean dust with “hidden wisdom.” Another sinful ring causes Eustace trouble in the Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (see page 125).
“THE GREATEST MYTH”
If all we did was look at their books, we could be cynical about the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis borrowed a lot from his friend. He sometimes wrote passages that were close to what he’d heard Tolkien read. What he took was at the core of Tolkien’s work. And he published books that drew on Tolkien’s works before Tolkien finished writing. But we’d be wrong to look at their friendship as competitive. Tolkien and Lewis didn’t. Tolkien believed he owed more of a professional debt to Lewis than Lewis owed him. Lewis was a great encourager of Tolkien. Borrowing from Tolkien’s myths was a way of letting Tolkien know he believed the myths were as valid as the classics. Tolkien understood the compliment. He needed that encouragement during the dozen years it took him to write The Lord of the Rings. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby,” Tolkien wrote. “But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion. . .”
The real debt Lewis owed Tolkien was personal. The myths he took from Middle-earth weren’t as important to him as another myth Tolkien gave him one night. On 19 September 1931, Tolkien, along with another friend, Hugo Dyson, brought Lewis back to Christianity. As they had dinner and went for a walk, they discussed mythology and religious faith. Although by 1929 Lewis had moved from an avowed atheism to accepting the idea of the divine, he continued to think of Christianity as just another myth. He didn’t see how Christ was more than a good example to people. The dynamic of death and salvation left him cold. Christianity, to him, was just another story like others before it. Tolkien disagreed. He argued that because man comes from God, there is always an essential truth in pagan myths. Because Lewis was moved by pagan myths of sacrifice to a feeling “profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp,” he should feel the same about the story of Christ. (CLI, 977) In fact, Tolkien argued, he should feel it more profoundly because the story of Christ is true. There’s no record of exactly what evidence Tolkien presented to back up the last part of that argument. As Lewis himself explained many years later, you have to believe in miracles to accept it. But people who want to believe in miracles have no trouble finding evidence for them, and long before the conversation took place Lewis wanted to believe. From conversation to “conversion,” as Lewis called it, didn’t take long. Two weeks later, Lewis told a friend he had once again fully embraced Christianity: “My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
Hadrian set a standard for others to follow across the Empire. He developed the building industry at Rome, reorganized by Trajan, with the year 123 alone widely recognized as an annus mirabilis in the history of the Roman brick industry. According to an ancient biographer, he ‘enrolled builders, geometers, architects, and every sort of expert in construction or decoration on the model of the legions, in cohorts and centuries’. On his provincial travels he commissioned buildings himself and encouraged the architectural efforts of both local patrons and the Roman army. At Stratoniceia, renamed Hadrianopolis after his visit in the same year, he encouraged the local government to repair a neglected private house, rather than leave it to ruin. Despite his own interests in architectural design, he ordered all dining-rooms, porticoes, crypts, and garden areas (topia) existing in Roman camp buildings to be pulled down, on the grounds that they were offensive to the ideal of Roman fortitude, an anecdote which incidentally shows how misguided the conventionally austere image of the Roman camp is and how deep-rooted was the craze for aedificatio, even in such unlikely contexts. Hadrian removed all these trappings of architectural luxury and enforced a much more appropriate idea of construction.
In one of several speeches to the Roman troops at Zara on the border of Mauretania on 9 or 10 July 128, Hadrian admired an auxiliary cavalry detachment, the Ala I Hispanorum, for its proficient building work:
You have brought to completion in a single day [fortifications] which others spread over several days; you have built up a wall of long stonework of the kind made for winter quarters designed to last in a time not much longer than a wall is built from turf, which is cut in equal measure, easily transported from the quarry, handled and built without trouble, smooth and malleable according to its nature: but you [have built it] with huge, heavy, unequal blocks of stone which cannot be quarried or lifted or set in position without inequalities appearing between them; you have driven a ditch in proper fashion, hard and rough with gravel, and made it smooth by scraping the surface.
The emperor’s words mirror the rhetoric of the soldiers’ architecture. The whole imperial address was inscribed for posterity on the pedestal of a commemorative column in the auxiliary camp at Lambaesis in Numidia. Erected at the centre of a large precinct 200 metres square, this monument is comparable in size to other honorific columns erected later at other cities in the empire, particularly those at Hermopolis Magna and Alexandria in Egypt. Even the stonecutter’s work in recording the speech shows how certain parts of the speech were emphasized. He preserved the powerful impact of the language describing the large stonework of the wall by raising the initial letters of the key words, Lapi[dibus] Grandibus Gravibus Inaequalibus (‘with Huge, Heavy, and Unequal Stones’), a phrase which recalls the early Roman epic adored by Hadrian, with its striking rhythm of ascending tricolon and alliteration. The text placed emphasis on the form, size, and texture of the architectural materials used to make even this most routine of architectural creations. Whereas the grassy sods of earth (caespes) used for a typical earth rampart were smooth (planus) and pliable (mollis), the blocks of stone were heavy (gravis), huge (grandis), and of different sizes (inaequalis). A work in stone was a far more impressive achievement, one that deserved to be praised in an oration and recorded on a monument for posterity. Similarly, Apuleius later compared his literary rhetoric to the rapid and haphazard piling up of unworked stones in a wall without any attempt at achieving evenness, regularity, or alignment.The glorification of stones of large dimensions was intended to instil a sense of the ‘monumental’ nature of Roman architecture on the grand scale, and the use of language from ‘monumental’ Latin literature reinforced that. Moreover, once the construction was complete, it was thought to inspire the soldiers for a successful military performance. The epic tone of the emperor’s speech elevated their banausic labours in constructing a fort to a heroic military achievement. It marked the creation of monumental architecture.
The colour of the conical-shaped feature at the top right of the map has been specifically chosen for its literal association. This is indeed the Red Sea. As with several other features a 90° rotation of the main map makes it easier to recognize to our eyes. The Red Sea is a very significant location in the Old Testament. It is where Moses parted the waters to allow the Israelites to escape from the pursuing Egyptian army as they escaped to the Promised Land. Its prominence and colour on this map is clearly intended to invoke this story from the Book of Exodus. A closer look at this section of the map reveals that the Red Sea is actually 'split' with a dry passage shown between. Could the dark blue line on the larger section be intended to represent the wall of water held back by Moses' command until the Israelites had crossed and then released on the Egyptians as they attempted to follow?
Gog and Magog
This mountain-like walled enclave with its single gate represents one of the most apocalyptic stories from the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel had warned of the day when Gog, the chief Prince of the Land of Magog would sweep down from the North and devastate the land foretelling that the Day of Judgement was near. The gates shown were known as the Gates of Alexander and were reputed to be all that held these destructive forces back. The gates were so named because legend had it that it was Alexander the Great who had built them in a narrow pass to seal in the fierce tribes from the north. But it was also part of the legend that these could not last forever and Gog and the Magog would one day break through. It was a story that all Christians of this period would have been familiar with and this section of the map is intended to convey this threatening and ominous presence.
Noah’s Ark
The story of a gigantic flood and a boat in which a small group of chosen people and animals survive appears in many cultures around the world. Not surprisingly it is the biblical version that is portrayed on the Psalter map. The search for the ark itself has fascinated generations and continues today. This map has played its part in informing the search because, as can be clearly seen, the ark is shown marooned high between two mountain peaks with the words 'area noa' and 'armenia'. Just above 'area noa' can also be read the word 'Herat'. This is accepted as being Mount Ararat located on the present-day border of Turkey and Armenia. In the final years of the twentieth century satellites were used to take detailed photographs of the whole area and the images released caused great excitement in some quarters. However, in the thirteenth century when this Psalter map was created, there was no controversy or doubt about the ark's existence or location and it would have been drawn on with the same conviction as any of the other features.
A Psalter is a book containing psalms, and this tiny map, barely 6 inches (15 centimetres) high and 4 inches (10 centimetres) wide, was created in England to illustrate such a book some time between 1215 and 1250. It was never intended to be used for travel purposes and would have been of very limited value if anyone had tried to do so. Rather it is a symbolic map, which was designed to convey and reinforce certain messages, as, of course, were the words of the psalms that accompanied it. Even so, it does provide a wonderful insight into the way the geography of the world appeared when seen through the lens of Medieval Christianity. Despite its size it contains a wealth of detail, some geographically sound, some pure fantasy, and much in between.
The map is dominated by the figure of Christ omnipotently presiding over a world spread out before him, almost like a table. The stars of heaven provide the backdrop, while angels worship him at either side. The two dragons crouching in the dark at the bottom of the world represent another, darker kingdom.
The world itself is presented as a circle surrounded by sea and at its centre is Jerusalem. As with many maps the choice of what is placed in the central position is usually deliberate. Perhaps more significantly, and even subliminally, it also acts as the point from which other features are then viewed and related.
This map is orientated with East at the top. This ensures that the highly symbolic Garden of Eden appears in a prominent position just below the figure of Christ and with the sun directly in between. The somewhat pensive faces of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Temptation can be clearly seen in the Garden, which is enclosed by mountains. Five rivers flow out of Paradise and the familiar names of Ganges, Tigris and Euphrates can easily be read. While the latter two are reasonably accurate in location, the Ganges is clearly not.
The details on the map actually become more familiar to the modern eye if it is rotated clockwise by 90° so that North is at the top. It is then possible to recognize the fan of blue zigzags representing the Nile delta as it enters the Mediterranean Sea. The green of the Mediterranean can also be followed to the West where it flows into the sea that encompasses the whole world. North of the Mediterranean one can make out Greece and its islands in the Aegean Sea, and Italy, although France and Spain seem to have been rolled up together. In relation to its purpose this would have been of little importance to the map's creator. When we look to the south of the Nile, myth and legend rather than fact informs the features presented. The lack of knowledge of this region had led to the belief that the people who lived here were different in form. Those shown here, especially the ones with faces in their chests, would continue to feature on maps of Africa for several hundred years.
With its audience in mind the map gives over half of the world it represents to the Holy Land. It strives to make as many biblical references as possible and invites the viewer to make others. The Rivers of Jor and Dan can be seen flowing into the Sea of Galilee in which a large fish swims. Whether this is an indication of its role as a food source or an invitation to think about the story of Jesus and the loaves and fishes is not known. Perhaps it was both.
This map is almost certainly a copy of an earlier one but the identity of the person( s) who worked on it is lost forever. It is most likely that he undertook the work in a monastery or religious house setting. Representations of the world through Christian teachings are collectively known as Mappaemundi of which only a small number survive. The one shown here is among the smallest of these, which makes the amount of detail contained so remarkable. The fate of the largest one, known as the Ebstorf Mappaemundi (some 11 ½ feet/3.5 metres across), is a reminder of just how precarious their existence has been over the centuries. It was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.
The Basin of Mexico served as the seat of power for the Aztec empire. This lake-dominated valley had been a popular settlement choice for a long succession of sedentary peoples, and indeed Teotihuacan is located in its northern region. Beginning around 1200, several hunting and gathering groups moved south into more fertile regions from the dry northern deserts. Leaving their original homeland of Aztlan (as yet unidentified), seven of these groups stopped at Chicomoztoc, or Seven Caves, and undetermined location in present-day northern Mexico. While historical accounts offer varying ethnic identifications, these groups moved south and settled in key locations around the Basin of Mexico and in valleys to the east, south, and west. These included the Acolhua, who established themselves east of Lake Texcoco; the Tepaneca, who settled to the west of the lake; the Xochimilca and Chalca, who took up residence in the south of the basin, and the Matlatzinca, Tlahuica, and Huexotzinca, who settled in neighboring valleys. In each case, the people and their cultures blended with the resident sedentary populations.
The last to arrive were the Mexica who, after a dramatic arrival and turbulent relationships with resident polities, established themselves on a small island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. They named their city Tenochtitlán; it was to become an enormous metropolis and center of the Aztec empire.
From 1325 until 1428 the Mexica pursued longstanding and widely accepted strategies on their road to ultimate imperial dominance. Renowned warriors, they served as mercenaries to the most powerful polity in the Basin of Mexico, Azcapotzalco (flourished c. 1300– 1428). Their successes on the battlefield earned them lands, tributaries, and wealth, which they used to enhance their resource-poor island settlement. They concentrated on building and expanding their urban center beyond its small island setting and into the lake itself by claiming lands from the shallow lake bed. Ultimately (by 1519) the city would house 200,000 to 250,000 people. During this early period they also negotiated strategic elite marriages, particularly with the Colhuacan dynasty in the southern part of the basin. The Colhua claimed descent from the Toltecs, and establishing genealogical ties to that heritage gave the Mexica an enhanced power base and legitimacy to rule. With this dynastic connection forged, subsequent Mexica rulers successfully sought favorable marriage ties with other dynasties in the Basin of Mexico. In short, their first century in the basin provided the Mexica with the military, political, social, and economic foundation for their second century of imperial dominance.
The London of Ancient Egypt, Ptah Chief of Nine Earth Spirit, God of a Military Aristocracy, Palestine Cave dwellers and Alpine "Broad Heads", Creation Artificers of Egyptians, Europeans, Indians, and Chinese Sun Egg and Moon Egg, The Later Ptah Neith as a Banshee Sokar, God of the Dead Earliest Memphite Deity Ptah and Osiris Manetho's Folk Tales, A Famous Queen The First Pyramid.
Now, when there was corn in Egypt "as the sand of the sea", traders from foreign countries crossed the parched deserts and the perilous deep, instructed, like the sons of Jacob, to "get you down thither and buy for us from thence". So wealth and commerce increased in the Nile valley. A high civilization was fostered, and the growing needs of the age caused many industries to flourish. The business of the country was controlled by the cities which were nursed into prosperity by the wise policy of the Pharaohs. Among these Memphis looms prominently in the history of the early Dynasties. Its ruling deity was, appropriately enough, the artificer god Ptah, for it was not only a commercial but also an important industrial centre; indeed it was the home of the great architects and stone builders whose activities culminated in the erection of the Pyramids, the most sublime achievements in masonry ever accomplished by man.
To-day the ruins of Old Memphis lie buried deep in the sand. The fellah tills the soil and reaps the harvest in season above its once busy streets and stately temples, its clinking workshops and noisy markets. "I have heard the words of its teachers whose sayings are on the lips of men. But where are their dwelling places? Their walls have been cast down and their homes are not, even as though they had never been." Yet the area of this ancient city was equal to that of modern London from Bow to Chelsea and the Thames to Hampstead, and it had a teeming population.
O mighty Memphis, city of "White Walls",
The habitation of eternal Ptah,
Cradle of kings . . . on thee the awful hand
Of Vengeance hath descended. . . . Nevermore
Can bard acclaim thy glory; nevermore
Shall harp, nor flute, nor timbrel, nor the song
Of maids resound within thy ruined halls,
Nor shouts of merriment in thee be heard,
Nor hum of traffic, nor the eager cries
Of merchants in thy markets murmurous;
The silence of the tomb hath fallen on thee,
And thou art faded like a lovely queen,
Whom loveless death hath stricken in the night,
Whose robe is rent, whose beauty is decayed_
And nevermore shall princes from afar
Pay homage to thy greatness, and proclaim
Thy wonders, nor in reverence behold
Thy sanctuary glories . . .
Are thy halls
All empty, and thy streets laid bare
And silent as the soundless wilderness?
O Memphis, mighty Memphis, hath the morn
Broken to find thee not?
Memphis was named after King Pepi, and is called Noph in the Old Testament. Its early Dynastic name was "White Walls", the reference being probably to the fortress erected there soon after the Conquest. Of its royal builder we know little, but his mother, Queen Shesh, enjoyed considerable repute for many centuries afterwards as the inventor of a popular hair wash which is referred to in a surviving medical papyrus.
After Egypt was united under the double crown of the Upper and the Lower Kingdoms, and the Pharaoh became "Lord of the Two Lands", the seat of government remained for a long period at Thinis, in the south. The various nomes, like the present-day states of North America, had each their centres of local administration. Pharaoh's deputies were nobles who owed him allegiance, collected the Imperial taxes, supplied workmen or warriors as desired, and carried out the orders of the Court officials regarding the construction and control of canals. The temple of the nome god adorned the provincial capital.
Ptah, the deity of Memphis, is presented in sharp contrast to the sun god Ra, who was of Asiatic origin, and the deified King Osiris, whose worship was associated with agricultural rites. He was an earth spirit, resembling closely the European elf. The conception was evidently not indigenous, because the god had also a giant form, like the hilltop deities of the mountain peoples. He was probably imported by the invaders who constituted the military aristocracy at Memphis in pre-Dynastic times. These may have been the cave-dwellers of Southern Palestine, or tall and muscular "broad heads" of Alpine or Armenoid type who prior to the Conquest appear to have pressed southward from Asia Minor through the highlands of Palestine, and, after settlement, altered somewhat the physical character of the "long heads" of the eastern Delta. Allowance has to be made for such an infusion in accounting for the new Dynastic type as well as for the influence exercised by the displacement of a great proportion of the mingled tribes of Libyans. The Palestine cave-dwellers may have been partly of Alpine origin.
A people seldom remember their early history, but they rarely forget their tribal beliefs. That being so, the god Ptah is of special interest in dealing with the tribal aspect of mythology. Among all the gods of Egypt his individuality is perhaps the most pronounced. Others became shadowy and vague, as beliefs were fused and new and greater conceptions evolved in the process of time. But Ptah never lost his elfin character, even after he was merged with deities of divergent origin. He was the chief of nine earth spirits (that is, eight and himself added) called Khnûmû, the modellers. Statuettes of these represent them as dwarfs, with muscular bodies, bent legs, long arms, big broad heads, and faces of intelligent and even benign expression. Some wear long moustaches, so unlike the shaven or glabrous Egyptians.
At the beginning, according to Memphite belief, Ptah shaped the world and the heavens, assisted by his eight workmen, the dwarfish Khnûmû. He was also the creator of mankind, and in Egyptian tombs are found numerous earthenware models of these "elves", who were believed to have had power to reconstruct the decaying bodies of the dead. As their dwellings were underground, they may have also been "artisans of vegetation", like the spirits associated with Tvashtar, the "master workman" of the Rig-Veda hymns and the "black dwarfs" of Teutonic mythology. A particular statuette of Ptah, wearing a tight-fitting cap, suggests the familiar "wonder smith" of the Alpine "broad heads" who were distributed along Asiatic and European mountain ranges from Hindu Kush to Brittany and the British isles and mingled with the archaic Hittites in Asia Minor. The Phoenician sailors carried figures of dwarfs in their ships, and worshipped them. They were called "pataikoi". In the Far East a creation artificer who resembles Ptah is Pan Ku, the first Chinese deity, who emerged from a cosmic egg.
Like Ra, Ptah was also believed to have first appeared as an egg, which, according to one of the many folk beliefs of Egypt, was laid by the chaos goose which came to be identified with Seb, the earth god, and afterwards with the combined deities Amon-Ra. Ptah, as the primeval "artificer god", was credited with making "the sun egg" and also "the moon egg", and a bas-relief at Philæ shows him actively engaged at the work, using his potter's wheel.
A higher and later conception of Ptah represents him as a sublime creator god who has power to call into existence each thing he names. He is the embodiment of mind from which all things emerge, and his ideas take material shape when he gives them expression. In a philosophic poem a Memphite priest eulogizes the great deity as "the mind and tongue of the gods", and even as the creator of other gods as well as of "all people, cattle, and reptiles", the sun, and the habitable world.
Thoth is also credited with similar power, and it is possible that in this connection both these deities were imparted with the attributes of Ra, the sun god.
According to the tradition perpetuated by Manetho, the first temple in Egypt was erected at Memphis, that city of great builders, to the god Ptah at the command of King Mena. It is thus suggested that the town and the god of the ruling caste existed when the Horite sun worshippers moved northward on their campaign of conquest. As has been shown, Mena also gave diplomatic recognition to Neith, the earth goddess of the Libyans, "the green lady" of Egypt, who resembles somewhat the fairy, and especially the banshee, of the Iberians and their Celtic conquerors.
The Ptah worshippers were probably not the founders of Memphis. An earlier deity associated with the city is the dreaded Sokar (Seker). He was a god of the dead, and in the complex mythology of later times his habitation was located in the fifth hour-division of night. When sun worship became general in the Nile valley Sokar was identified with the small winter sun, as Horus was with the large sun of summer. But the winged and three-headed monster god, with serpent body, suffers complete loss of physical identity when merged with the elfin deity of Memphis. Ptah-Sokar is depicted as a dwarf and one of the Khnûmû. Another form of Sokar is a hawk, of different aspect to the Horus hawk, which appears perched on the Ra boat at night with a sun disk upon its head.
Ptah-Sokar was in time merged with the agricultural Osiris whose spirit passed from Pharaoh to Pharaoh. Ptah-Osiris was depicted as a human-sized mummy, swathed and mute, holding firmly in his hands before him the Osirian dadu (pillar) symbol. The triad, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, gives us a combined deity who is a creator, a judge of the dead, and a traditional king of Egypt. The influence of the sun cult prevailed when Sokar and Osiris were associated with the worship of Ra.
Memphis, the city of Ptah, ultimately became the capital of United Egypt. It was then at the height of its glory; a great civilization had evolved. Unfortunately, however, we are unable to trace its progress, because the records are exceedingly scanty. Fine workmanship in stone, exquisite pottery, etc., indicate the advanced character of the times, but it is impossible to construct from these alone an orderly historical narrative. We have also the traditions preserved by Manetho. Much of what he tells us, however, belongs to the domain of folklore. We learn, for instance, that for nearly a fortnight the Nile ran with honey, and that one of the Pharaohs, who was a giant about 9 feet high, was "a most dangerous man". It is impossible to confirm whether a great earthquake occurred in the Delta region, where the ground is said to have yawned and swallowed many of the people, or whether a famine occurred in the reign of one pharaoh and a great plague in that of another, and if King Aha really engaged his leisure moments compiling works on anatomy. The story of a Libyan revolt at a later period may have had foundation in fact, but the explanation that the rebels broke into flight because the moon suddenly attained enormous dimensions shows how myth and history were inextricably intertwined.
Yet Manetho's history contains important material. His list of early kings is not imaginative, as was once supposed, although there may be occasional inaccuracies. The Palermo Stone, so called because it was carried to the Sicilian town of that name by some unknown curio collector, has inscribed upon it in hieroglyphics the names of several of the early kings and references to notable events which occurred during their reigns. It is one of the little registers which were kept in temples. Many of these, no doubt, existed, and some may yet he brought to light.
Four centuries elapsed after the Conquest ere Memphis became the royal city. We know little, however, regarding the first three hundred years. Two dynasties of Thinite kings ruled over the land. There was a royal residence at Memphis, which was the commercial capital of the countrythe marketplace of the northern and southern peoples. Trade flourished and brought the city into contact with foreign commercial centres. It had a growing and cosmopolitan population, and its arts and industries attained a high level of excellence.
The Third Dynasty opens with King Zoser, who reigned at Memphis. He was the monarch for whom the first pyramid was erected. It is situated at Sakkara, in the vicinity of his capital. The kings who reigned prior to him had been entombed at Abydos, and the new departure indicates that the supremacy of Memphis was made complete. The administrative, industrial, and religious life of the country was for the time centred there. Zoser's preference for Memphis had, perhaps, a political bearing. His mother, the wife of Khasekhemui,' the last of the Thinite kings, was probably a daughter of the ruling noble of "White Walls". It was the custom of monarchs to marry the daughters of nome governors, and to give their sons his daughters in marriage also. The aristocracy was thus closely connected with the royal house; indeed the relations between the Pharaoh and his noblemen appear to have been intimate and cordial.
The political marriages, however, were the cause of much jealous rivalry. As the Pharaoh had more than one wife, and princes were numerous, the choice of an heir to the crown was a matter of great political importance. The king named his successor, and in the royal harem there were occasionally plots and counterplots to secure the precedence of one particular prince or another. Sometimes methods of coercion were adopted with the aid of interested noblemen whose prestige would be increased by the selection of a near relativethe son, perhaps, of the princess of their nome. In one interesting papyrus roll which survives there is a record of an abortive plot to secure the succession of a rival to the Pharaoh's favourite son. The ambitious prince was afterwards disposed of. In all probability he was executed along with those concerned in the household rebellion. Addressing his chosen heir, the monarch remarks that "he fought the one he knew, because it was unwise that he should be beside thy majesty".
It may be that these revolts explain the divisions of the lines of early kings into Dynasties. Zoser's personality stands out so strongly that it is evident he was a prince who would brook no rival to the throne. His transference of the seat of power to the city of Ptah suggests, too, that he found his chief support there.
With the political ascendancy of Memphis begins the great Pyramid Age; but ere we make acquaintance with the industrial and commercial life in the city, and survey the great achievements of its architects and builders, we shall deal with the religious conceptions of the people, so that it may be understood why the activities of the age were directed to make such elaborate provision for the protection of the bodies of dead monarchs.
