by Simon Schama
A classic pre-emptive strike. My own father, Arthur Osea, was known to resort to it shamelessly when, as in the case of Egyptian Osea, he was on the back foot, worrying that the news which followed might not make his son altogether happy. ‘Don’t worry . . . your mother’s a bit upset about this but . . .’ Now what might get his pride and joy, his Shelomam, all bent out of shape? Trouble with pay and kit? Oh, don’t get in a snit. ‘That tunic and the garment you wrote about, they’re made, all right? Don’t get angry with me because I couldn’t bring them to Memphis in time (for your journey south). I’ll bring them so you have them on your way back.’ The pay? Yes, well, bit of a problem there, my boy. ‘When you left Migdol, they wouldn’t send us your money.’ Worse, when Osea made enquiries about the back pay owing, he got the brush-off default mode for the minions of empires. Tremendously sorry, actually not my department, you see, but please do by all means forward your complaint to the appropriate officials. ‘When you come back to Egypt, give them what for and they’ll give you your pay.’ So listen, my son, Osea goes on, brushing off any notion that he’d failed his boy in the crucial matter of the kit: ‘don’t cry. Be a man . . . Your mother, the children, everyone’s well.’
It would be good to know in more detail how Shelomam lived in the frontier world of Jewish soldiers on Elephantine, but the letter stayed there, so perhaps he never made it to Elephantine, never got his tunic or his pay. Or perhaps he did, and left the note behind. At any rate, there it remained for two and a half millennia until an American amateur Egyptologist and ex-journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, Charles Edwin Wilbour, bought clay pots full of papyri from women digging for sebagh fertiliser on the island mounds in 1893. ‘All these pap. from Kom shown me by three separate women at different times,’ Wilbour wrote in his diary. But once he saw the papyri were Aramaic, and twenty-seventh dynasty, he lost interest. Grander, older, pharaonic antiquities were his game.
Twenty years before, he had left Manhattan in a hurry when his crony, the king of city graft Boss Tweed, who had put some nice contracts Wilbour’s way for his paper business, had been booted out of town. In Paris, ancient Egypt gave Wilbour a new life, its stupendous history learned from the eminent scholar Gaston Maspero. He rigged out a dahabiyeh so that he and his wife, Charlotte Beebee, an ardent suffragist, could sail the Nile with all conveniences, stopping by to help with digs in Karnak, Luxor, Thebes. High-domed Germans, French and British Egyptologists found his Yankee enthusiasm entertaining, sometimes even useful. Occasionally Wilbour would go and see Flinders Petrie in his rude tent and thought the British archaeologist ostentatiously spartan for camping like an Arab.
Sporting a prophetic beard, Wilbour made the Nile his living room for nearly two decades. When, near the end of that time, he stood on the mounds of Elephantine amid the grubbing women, he knew that the sebagh they were after for their crops was the pulverised debris of ancient mud bricks, with enough hay and stubble mixed in to give it nitrous potency. But he was certainly unaware that somewhere beneath his feet was a decomposed Jewish city, the first we can reconstruct in the thrumming drone of its daily business: its property-line disputes over rooms and houses, exits and access; its marriages and divorces; its wills and prenups; its food and its dress; its oaths and its blessings. Oblivious to all this, Wilbour took the papyri, neatly folded and bound, addressees on the outside as they had been in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, to the Paris lodging where he expired in 1896.
Ten years later more extensive troves were found by German expeditions who picked at their content, took them to Berlin and Paris, and published a little more. Needless to say the British, whose pith-helmeted dominion Egypt had become, were not far behind. Papyri and inscribed clay potsherds – ostraca – duly ended up in the usual destinations – Oxford and the British Museum – and when the archaeological proconsuls chose to be grandly magnanimous, in Cairo. Some papyri were published in the early twentieth century but it was when the papyrus hoard passed to the Brooklyn Museum that the curtain truly rose on the marvel of Jewish Elephantine.
Fragmentary letters and inscriptions written on pottery shards in classical, linear Hebrew (from three and two centuries earlier than the Elephantine papyri) survive – Judaean shouts and cries half lost in the gusting wind of time: a farm worker whose garment has been nabbed by an unscrupulous creditor; a beleaguered quartermaster facing the oncoming horde of the Babylonians, urgently needing oil and grain; a junior officer in another citadel, peering in vain for the beacon warning flares of neighbouring hill forts.
And the Hebrew Bible? Unless we suppose (along with the ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christians) that it is the directly dictated word of God to Moses and the prophets, much of the stupendous poetic narrative of the scripture is no more than what another archaeologist has characterised as an ‘echo’ of the historical truth. And sometimes, as with the entirely undocumented exodus story, written nearly half a millennium after it was supposed to have happened, it is probably not even that. There is a point in the epic where the storyline and the reality of Jewish history do indeed converge, but the Hebrew Bible is the imprint of the Jewish mind, the picture of its imagined origins and ancestry; it is the epic of the YHWH treaty-covenant with Israel, the single formless God moving through history, as well as the original treasure of its spiritual imagination.
The tawny papyri of Elephantine, with their neat, black scribal hand, give us something entirely different, something more earthily human and mundane: the quotidian record of the lives of the expat Judaeans and Israelites with whom we can keep company as naturally and materially as if we were living in their neighbourhood: tough guys, anxious mothers, slave-girl wives, kibitzers and quibblers, hagglers over property lines, drafters of prenups, scribes, temple officials, jailbait indignant that they were set up for a fall, big shots and small fry. We know their names, such unapologetically Jewish names ending in the theophoric ‘yah’ that embedded YHWH in their identity even as it claimed His protection for their lives: Berechiah, Ananiah, Delaiah, Mahseiah, Shemaiah, Gedaliah, Jedaniah, Mibtahiah, Pelaliah, Malchiah, Uriah, Jezaniah, Gemariah, Azariah, Zechariah.
There they all were, the people of YHWH, jostled together on the club-shaped little island in the Nile. Not a home for lotus-eaters, perhaps, but all things considered, not such a bad place: shady in the slamming heat; famous for the fig trees that never dropped their foliage; the peculiar dom-nut palms with their topknot of sprouting leaves, found only in the south country of the Nile; rushes fringing the shoreline; acacia, cassia and mulberry inland a little – a tight clump of green at the point where the cultivable floodplain on the west bank of the river had receded to a thin ribbon below the golden dunes. On the east bank, still more arid, rose the quarries of Syene, beneath which a camp of Arameans, both soldiers and stone labourers, were housed. Slabs of local grey granite, freckled with rose pink or blood red, were laboriously loaded onto boats and barges and sent downstream for the master builders to make temples and mausoleums, as if the Egyptian lords were still pharaonic masters and not, since the conquest by Cambyses in the late sixth century BCE, the subjugated creatures of Persian whim. One such slab was so enormous that an entire royal shrine could be made from it – or so Herodotus (who could be guilty of exaggeration) tells us. The same slab, he insists, was so imposing that it took three years and the haulage of two thousand men to reach its downstream destination at Sais in the western delta.
Elephantine – ‘Yeb’ to the locals, from the Egyptian Iebw meaning ‘place of elephants’ (though no one, not even Herodotus, knew quite why, although the bald, rounded pale grey rocks in the river certainly suggest the domes of wallowing pachyderms) – was famous as the last place of true Egypt, the edge of its civilisation before it evaporated into Nubian sand and rock. It was where the lethargically oozy river, carrying its cargo of fertilising sludge, suddenly underwent a radical change of personality, running mad over the granite outcrops that sped boats towards the cataract. Only the ‘Boatmen of the Rough W
aters’, neighbours of the Jews whose manners were notoriously as rude as the churning river, were capable of riding its furies, navigating the upstream whitewater with the help of ropes hooked to the sides of the overhanging rocks. The geographer Strabo – every Greek traveller worth his salt came to Elephantine – has them doing water stunts to impress the tourists. The spumy torrent held mysteries: the quick of Egyptian life. For between the twin hills of Crophi and Mophi that rose from the banks, or so Herodotus claimed an Egyptian priest had told him, was the wellspring of the Nile so unfathomable none could sound its bed. Pharaoh Psamtik I had tried not that much before to plumb the depth with a twisted cable a thousand fathoms long, and still touched nothing but its swirling waters. That pull beneath the surface was the fluvial valve that divided the torrent, sending half south to burning Nubia, and half north to feed the flood valley. The ram-headed god Khnum was worshipped in Elephantine, since it was he who assured the annual inundation without which local cultivators were condemned to famine. The sacred rams of Khnum have their own special mausoleum on the island, their mummies reposing where the sculptors enjoyed themselves fashioning fat and fleecy animals from the limestone. A Nilometer positioned at steps leading to the bank measured the constancy of Khnum’s benevolence.
As well as myths and rites, men, money and arms flowed with the river to the island fortress. Together with Syene, it had been the sentinel of the south country, the pressure valve of classical Egypt. It needed maintaining, watching, policing – but what kind of job was that for Judaeans? What were they doing there? Had they been deaf to the warnings of Jeremiah? But few of the books of the prophets had yet been written, and fewer still disseminated, by the time that Israelites and Judaeans, from north and south of Palestine, journeyed down once more to the Nile Valley probably sometime in the late seventh century BCE.
Jewish identity would eventually be formed somewhere between the two cultural poles of the Nile and the Euphrates, but the magnetic needle of attraction and repulsion swung unevenly. Bible writing happened in Judaea and in Babylon, not in Egypt. In the mind and the writings of the Hebrew sages, scribes and the prophets – all those who, between the seventh and the fifth centuries BCE, were anthologising and redacting the memories, oral traditions, folklore and writings that would eventually be turned into the canonical Bible – there was a good migration (Mesopotamia) and a bad (Egypt). Both were captivities by the despotisms of the waterlands: both supporting teeming urban populations from the plains irrigated with flooding rivers; both generating grain and fruit from the alluvium. Both city states were enriched and ordered by hieroglyphs and lettered-writing, laws and epics, pyramids and ziggurats. Although both were brutal annihilators, both in the grip of sacrificial cults (Marduk and Ra) and both equally in thrall to voracious idolatry, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates never figured quite as demonically in the proto-Jewish mind as the Nile Valley. If there was one thing that Egyptian memorialists and the Hebrew Bible writers agreed on, it was the difficulty of living Jewish in Egypt.
To live in Egypt was to live uncleanly, or to be in bondage – so the writers of Genesis and Exodus pictured it. In Deuteronomy, the book that more than any other defined the obligations of Jewish memory, God is defined as He had been in Exodus as He ‘who brought you forth out of the Land of Egypt’. This was most likely written sometime around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, precisely at the moment when Jews went back there. To the ‘Deuteronomists’, who also reworked oral history into the narrative of Judges and Kings, any such return would be a disgraceful violation of the covenant.
Exile in Babylon after the sack of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE, on the other hand, was in some mysterious, punitive way, known to the God who had ordained it, as a return to the well-head: the source of the covenant-urge. The writers of Genesis, chronicling Abraham’s journey towards a visionary communion with YHWH, and the origination of the idea of a separate people under His special guidance and protection, set the place of Abraham’s birth as Chaldea, Mesopotamia. So the ur-cradle of monotheism was Ur, the city state. This is what gave special meaning to the destruction of the polluted Jerusalem Temple by Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE. The people from whom the Israelites had first departed to make their way in history were now made the instrument of YHWH’s manner of reconnecting them with that original covenant. Babylon obliterated the Temple. From Babylon – or its Persian successor empire – would come its purified restoration, when, after half a century of exile, the Persian king Cyrus decreed they be allowed to return to Jerusalem.
In the Bible-writing mind, Babylonia–Persia had been co-opted as the instrument of divine will. Egypt was always the obstinate enemy of YHWH’s plans for history. This feeling of perennial irreconcilability may have been mutual. The very first time that ‘Israel’ appears on any historical artefact is on the famous late-thirteenth-century BCE triumphal inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Rameses II, the latter traditionally identified with the ‘stiff-necked’ pharaoh of the exodus. ‘Israel is laid waste,’ it says, ‘its seed is no more,’ the hieroglyph leaving no doubt that by Israel is meant a people rather than a place. The history of Egypt by the priest-grammarian Manetho (written in the third or second century BCE and known to us through the work of the Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the first century CE) chronicles a departure of the Israelites from Egypt – but as an expulsion of an unclean pariah population of slaves and perhaps banditti, not the victorious exodus of the YHWH-protected Children of God.
In this sense, the liberation epic of the Torah (the five books of Moses that begin the Bible) was a reversal of that indignity – the identity of Israel established not just as a separation from Egyptian bondage, but as a reversal of Egypt’s triumphant master-narrative. Babylon might destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, but it would not wipe out the faith; the divine plan for exile might even sustain it. Egypt was another matter entirely – to go back, as Jeremiah warned when he was taken there, was to court perdition, spiritual as well as physical. Never return to the Nile.
But Jews did just that, over and over again, so often and so incorrigibly that it is difficult to think of Jewish history as in any way separable from Egypt. Egypt was the ultimate Them; but Egypt has also been, generation after generation, unmistakably Us. The most Jewish of all names, that of Moses the deliverer, in whose epic a nation was first defined, was probably Egyptian. Never mind that one of King Solomon’s wives was the daughter of a pharaoh. ‘Go not into Egypt for horses,’ Isaiah warned King Hezekiah of Judah, because he knew that for centuries the Israelites and Judahites had been doing exactly that, buying stud for the great stables in north Palestine.
Whatever the risks, when the Assyrians had embarked on devastating conquests out of Mesopotamia in the late eighth century BCE, the Egyptian connection became critical for survival for the kings and peoples of both Israel and Judah. The last kings of Israel at that time, their capital in Samaria, made a tactical Egyptian alliance (although it was in the end no impediment to their destruction; probably the reverse). Trapped in Jerusalem by Sennacherib’s besieging Assyrian army in the closing years of the eighth century BCE, King Hezekiah built the subterranean water tunnels that might make the difference between capitulation and survival, but still needed help from Egypt.
What happened when Sennacherib’s huge army surrounded Jerusalem in 715 BCE is one of the great mysteries. The Bible and Herodotus tell us that the Assyrian army fell to some unidentifiable plague (Herodotus picturesquely claims an army of mice nibbled through the bowstrings of their archers). Sennacherib’s own triumphal inscription brags of all the Judaean towns destroyed and looted by his army, and of locking up Hezekiah within his royal citadel ‘like a bird in a cage’, but concedes he failed to vanquish him. Most startling of all – but historically plausible – is the claim in Egyptian sources that it was an army under the Nubian pharaoh of the twenty-fifth dynasty that broke the Assyrian siege and preserved both the Kingdom of Judah and its cap
ital, Jerusalem. Egypt had become the rescuer of Judah.
During the two centuries that followed – the epoch when the Bible began to be written – Judah played off Mesopotamians and Egyptians against each other. The turning point for the re-establishment of Jews in Egypt came after Nebuchadnezzar’s first siege of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, when many of the elite of Judah – priests, nobles, scribes – were deported to the Euphrates, leaving common folk – farmers, shepherds, artisans – to fend for themselves. Ten years later, the Babylonians delivered the coup de grâce, destroying Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple and inflicting terrible devastation on the Judaean countryside. Many of those who chose not to stay amid the ashes and the rubble migrated south to what were already well-established colonies of Jews at Tahpanhes, Memphis, and what Jeremiah called Pathros, the south province, whose capital was at Elephantine.
Aware that Jews had gone back to escape the hardship, famine and terror visited on Judaea, Jeremiah went to Egypt to warn against false hopes of sanctuary: ‘it shall come to pass that the sword which you feared shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt and the famine thereof ye were afraid shall follow close after you there in Egypt and there you shall die’. The deliriously fulminating prophet Ezekiel, writing from a Babylonian work camp by the Chebar canal, was if anything even more ferocious in his warnings. Channelling the voice of YHWH, he addressed Pharaoh directly:
