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Transcriber’s Note: The original copy of this book wasn’t very well
proofread, if at all. A large number of printing errors have been
corrected, including transposed full lines of text. In one place (noted
below) at least one line was omitted completely: it wasn’t possible to
source another edition to check what the missing words might have been.
The spelling and hyphenation of Egyptian names are often inconsistent.




[Illustration: CLEOPATRA.]




                              PREDECESSORS
                              OF CLEOPATRA

                                   BY
                               LEIGH NORTH

                       _5 Drawings by G. A. Davis_

                             [Illustration]

                         BROADWAY PUBLISHING CO.
                                   AT
                           835 BROADWAY, N. Y.
                                  1906

                           Copyrighted, 1906.
                                   BY
                        BROADWAY PUBLISHING CO.,
                         _All Rights Reserved._




TO MY HUSBAND




INTRODUCTION.


In attempting even a brief and imperfect outline of the history of
Egyptian queens the author has undertaken no easy task and craves
indulgence for its modest fulfillment. The aim has been merely to put the
little that is known in a readable and popular form, to gather from many
sources the fragments that remain, partly historic, partly legendary, of
a dead past. To present—however imperfectly—sketches of the women who
once lived and breathed as Queens of Egypt, which has been more ably
and completely done—as the period was less remote and the sources of
information fuller, for their royal sisters of other lands.

A short article published some years ago in Lippincott’s Magazine may
be said to be the nucleus of the present volume, the writer’s interest
in the subject having been awakened by the study necessary to its
preparation.

We enter a house through the portico or vestibule. We form acquaintances
on somewhat the same principle. We begin perhaps with the weather, we
exchange comments on trifles, we pass through an introductory stage of
intercourse before we reach the real heart of the man or woman who, in
time, becomes our dearest friend. Skip the introduction if you will,
busy reader, but metaphorically it forms the portico or vestibule of the
Egyptian House.

From the darkness which envelopes the centuries modern research has
brought to light much that was unknown or forgotten. With almost the
creative touch it has made the dry bones to live again and link by link
drawn out the long chain of the years. What was once a mere roll of names
with a wide hiatus here and there has grown to be a record of the words
and deeds of men of like passions with ourselves. We feel once more in
touch with the past, as it is the aim of the highest altruism to beat
responsive to the heart of the present and the by-gone faces look forth
by the side of modern man and claim the universal brotherhood.

Well may we marvel at the faith, the patience, the ingenuity which
has unraveled so much of the tangled skein in “The Story of the
Nations.” Like Cuvier, from a single bone elaborating a whole animal,
the Egyptologist has patiently evolved from shreds of parchment, from
fragments of pottery, from broken plinth and capital a more or less
complete whole. He has woven a tapestry from which some of the figures
start forth with a lifelike vigor.

Few countries claim such antiquity as Egypt and of none were the
estimated dates more widely apart. Sometimes involving periods of
hundreds and thousands of years. An accumulation of difficulties meets
the student as it does the explorer. A cycle of time, beside which modern
life seems like a single breath. A language, at first indecipherable,
and even now imperfectly read. The hasty guesses of scholars anxious to
prove some point or be in the vanguard of discovery; broken monuments,
rifled tombs, and inscriptions, mutilated, erased and altered by the
monarchs of succeeding generations. Among all these difficulties lies the
way. But with patience and care we are rewarded and with “imagination for
a servant,” not a master, one “arrives,” as the French say (at least in a
measure), at last.

The list of authorities consulted by the author would be too long to
enumerate, but among them may be mentioned Rawlinson, Wilkinson, Maspero,
Erman, Ebers and later Edwards, Sayce, Petrie and Mahaffy, whose interest
is so absorbing and the researches of some of whom are of such recent
date. To these may be added the study of all available pictures and
photographs, and the experiences of late travel and travellers.




CONTENTS.


    INTRODUCTION                            i

                  CHAPTER ONE.

    The Black Hand                          1

                  CHAPTER TWO.

    The Queen                              15

                 CHAPTER THREE.

    Mertytefs                              26

                  CHAPTER FOUR.

    Nitocris                               42

                  CHAPTER FIVE.

    Sebek-Nefru-Ra                         57

                  CHAPTER SIX.

    Aah-Hotep                              74

                 CHAPTER SEVEN.

    Aahmes-Nefertari                       91

                 CHAPTER EIGHT.

    Hatshepsut                            110

                  CHAPTER NINE.

    Hatsheput—concluded                   125

                  CHAPTER TEN.

    Maut-a-mua                            142

                 CHAPTER ELEVEN.

    Tyi                                   157

                 CHAPTER TWELVE.

    Tyi—continued                         174

                CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

    Nefertiti                             187

                CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

    Tuaa                                  205

                CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

    Nofutari-Minimut                      218

                CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

    Ur-Maa-Nofur-Ra                       235

               CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

    Tausert                               253

                CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

    Succeeding Queens                     265

                CHAPTER NINETEEN.

    Succeeding Queens—continued           281

                 CHAPTER TWENTY.

    Daily Life                            299

               CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

    Persian Queens                        312

               CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

    Roxane                                335

              CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

    Ptolemy Queens                        348

              CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

    Arsinoe II.                           362

              CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

    Ptolemy Queens—continued              385

               CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

    Ptolemy Queens—continued              396

              CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

    Ptolemy Queens—continued              407

              CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

    Cleopatra VI.                         421

              CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

    Cleopatra VI.—continued               432




Predecessors of Cleopatra.




CHAPTER FIRST.

THE BLACK LAND.


Kem, “the Black Land,” in hieroglyphic, or Kemi, in the later and more
familiar demotic, was so called from its dark and fruitful soil, a loam,
which turned up freshly, after a recent inundation of the Nile, has, as
one traveller describes it, “a brown and velvety lustre.”

Through it winds and flows the great river of which Homer speaks as
“Egypt’s Heaven descended stream” and that more than any other has set
its stamp upon the country and its inhabitants. So potent for weal or woe
is it that one scarce wonders it was worshipped as a deity, and the Arabs
call it “El Bahari,” the sea. It is difficult to find the word travel
in their language, with the Egyptian it is always up and down stream.
From the river he drew the fish which formed part of his daily food,
its fructifying waters, spreading over the land, called forth abundant
harvests, and from the mud on its banks he built the hut in which he
lived, or manufactured the bricks for the construction of his tomb or
other more ambitious edifice. The rushes that grew beside it furnished
his writing material, and its muddy or turbid water, as a beverage, had
for him the charm of a crystal rill.

Leigh Hunt says of the Nile:

    “It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands
    Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
    And times and things as in that vision seem
    Keeping along it their eternal stands.”

The Nile has been said to be less like a river than a sinuous lake with
islands and sand-bars interspersed.

The sacred name of the Nile was “Hapi, the Concealed.” The early
Egyptians believed that its source was in fountains, bottomless and far
away, and the tears of the goddess Isis caused its ebb and flow. The
explorations of comparatively modern travellers have solved the mystery
of its being, and to-day we know that it springs from great lakes which
their discoverers named respectively, Victoria and Albert Nyanza.

Of the three great rivers, the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon, the
first is the longest, the second has the largest number of ramifications,
and the third the greatest volume of water.

A Nilometer, a pillar standing in a pit, chronicles the rise of the tide,
and great festivities attended the opening of the canals which were
dug in all directions to carry its beneficent stream. A human victim
was sacrificed to appease the river god. A young girl was each year
dedicated to this purpose. Bound to a stake, adorned with flowers, and
hailed as “Aruseh, the bride of the Nile,” she stood and watched the
on-coming flood which was to shut out for her the light of day. Perhaps
it was in the terror with which the bounding pulses of youth must ever
regard the great Destroyer. Perhaps with the heroic spirit of a martyr
she awaited her fate, glorying in it and giving herself up a willing
sacrifice, as the Hindoo woman is said occasionally to have done in the
Suttee, when she cast herself on the funeral pile of her husband.

It was a Mohammedan general who put an end to this annual tragedy and
refused to permit the usual offering. The river delayed its rising, and
the murmurs of the people waxed loud against him. In this dilemma he
appealed to the Kadlif Omar, he who destroyed the Alexandria library,
saying that if it agreed with the Koran it was useless to preserve it,
and if it differed it was pernicious. But in this matter he showed
himself larger-minded. He obligingly wrote a letter which was cast into
the water and ran thus: A. D. 640, “From Abd Allah Omar, Prince of the
Faithful, to the Nile of Egypt. If thou flow of thine own accord, flow
not, but if it be Allah, the One, the Mighty, who causeth thee to flow,
then we implore Him to make thee flow.”

The prayer was successful and the inundation began. Henceforth a mud
pillar, originally no doubt in human form, and still called “the Bride
of the Nile,” was substituted for a trembling maiden, and melted away
before the encroaching stream. At the inundation the land looks like a
marsh, the towns, etc., being just above the level of the water, and even
now the crier announces the rise of the current.

The juncture of the White and Blue Nile shows the difference in the
tint of the water for some time after. The Nile has no tides. The dews
are heavy in Lower Egypt and the nights cool and refreshing, while the
temperature is, as a rule, most agreeable. From the low, long, level
shore and with a coast line much the same as three thousand years ago, we
follow the river through a fertile valley, which in time narrows between
mountains and table-lands of sand. At the cataracts the stream surges and
swells round little rocky islands and the rapids cause navigation to be
difficult if not dangerous.

The Delta, so called from its resemblance to the Greek letter, is a level
plain, highly cultivated, varied by lofty dark brown, ancient mounds, on
which villages are often built, surrounded by palm trees. The Greeks and
Romans divided Egypt into the Delta, or Lower Egypt, and the Thebaid or
Upper. The rocks are generally of limestone, till one reaches Thebes,
and then they are of sandstone