I. The Hamitic Stock.
The affinity between the Hamitic and Semitic stocks is distinctly shown by their physical traits and the character of their languages. The latter statement, which was long in doubt, has now been acknowledged by the most competent students, such as Friedrich Müller and A. H. Sayce.[53]
Within their own lines the Hamites are divided into three groups, the Libyan, the Egyptian and the East African groups, each distinguished by physical and linguistic differences.
1. The Libyan Group.
Of these the Libyan group occupies the region furthest to the west, and presents the purest type of the stock. From time immemorial it has occupied the land from the Nile Valley to the Atlantic, and from the Mediterranean to the Soudan. In the classical geographies its tribes are referred to as Numidians, Libyans, Mauritanians and Getulians, and at present they are known as Berbers, Rifians, and Shilhas in Morocco, the Tuariks and Tibbus of the desert, the Kabyles and Zouaves in Algeria, the Ghadames, Serkus, Mzabites of the south, the Senegas of Senegal, and many others. The Guanches, who once inhabited Teneriffe, and are now extinct, belonged to the Rifian tribes of this stock,[54] and the rulers of the once powerful empire of Ghanata, which for centuries before the rise of Mohammedanism controlled the valley of the Upper Niger, were allied to the Moroccan family.[55] Arab historians of the seventh century tell us that at that time the Berbers were “the lords of Maghreb (Africa), from the Arabian Gulf to the western ocean, and from the middle sea to the Soudan.”[56]
The physical appearance of the Libyan peoples distinctly marks them as members of the White Race, often of uncommonly pure blood. As the race elsewhere, they present the blonde and brunette type, the latter predominant, but the former extremely well marked. Among the Kabyles in Algeria, I have seen many fine specimens of blondes, with yellow hair, light eyes, auburn beard, and tall stature. An English traveller who visited last year some remote villages in the mountains of Morocco, describes their inhabitants as “for the most part fair, with blue eyes and yellow beards, perfectly built and exceedingly handsome men.”[57] This has been from the earliest times the characteristic of the Libyans, and there is abundant evidence that it was more general in former centuries than it is now. The Guanches of Teneriffe are described by the first voyagers as unusually tall and fair, their yellow hair reaching below their waists.[58]
The Greek poet Callimachus, who was librarian of the famous library at Alexandria two hundred and fifty years before the Christian era, applies the same adjective ξανθος, blonde or auburn, to the Libyan women, which Strabo and other Greeks do to the Goths and blonde Celts of Germany.[59]
Long before this, again, in monuments of the XIXth dynasty of Egypt, the Libyans are painted as of a pronounced blonde type, with light eyes and skins, and are mentioned by a term which signifies fair or blonde.[60] The extended researches of ethnologists on this point have accumulated a mass of facts proving that the ancient Libyans were in appearance strikingly similar to the North Germans and Scandinavians, having a fair skin, yellow or auburn hair, blue or grey eyes, full blonde beards, the face medium, the skull dolichocephalic, the orbital ridges prominent, the chin square and firm, forehead vertical or slightly retreating, the stature tall, and the body powerful.[61]
This identity of type impressed me very much among the Kabyles, and I note that the German ethnologist, Quedlinfeldt, who was among the Berbers in Morocco lately, writes of them: “I very often met individuals with flaxen hair and blue eyes, who in face and form corresponded perfectly to the ordinary type of our North German people.”[62] For this reason, I give it the name of the “Libyo-Teutonic” type.
In the pure-blooded clans who still dwell in the fastnesses of the Atlas and the Djurdjura, this antique type is that which is general; but in the valleys, in the desert and in Tunisia the type is darker, having been corrupted by admixture with negro, Arabic and other stocks.[63] The fact which I wish especially to impress on you is that nowhere do we find a purer type of the white race than in northern Africa, and that this was recognized by the earliest writers and records as that especially belonging to this stock.
The languages spoken by the various Libyan peoples prove on examination to be dialects of one tongue, all so much alike that a few days’ practice will enable the speaker of any one of them to express himself in another. In its grammatical formation, it is inflectional with agglutinative tendencies. Its radicals are made up of consonants, the indications of time and place being formed by changes in the vowel sounds. In this respect it resembles the Semitic tongues, but differs from them in having radicals of one, two, three, or four consonants, while they have usually those of three consonants only. In many other respects it presents analogies to the Semitic dialects, of such a nature that these latter seem to have developed themselves out of conditions of speech as represented by the Libyan. Hence some writers have called it and its allied tongues “proto-Semitic languages.” It stands in distinct relation to the Coptic or ancient Egyptian, and to some East African dialects.
The Libyans have possessed from time immemorial the country in which we find them. They are its indigenous inhabitants—all others, as Carthaginians, negroes and Arabs, being demonstrably intruders. Can we obtain any clue to their monuments in prehistoric times by the aid of archæology and linguistics? Some able students have thought they could, and have brought forward some singular surmises. There is a series of structures of huge stones, called dolmens, menhirs and cromlechs, extending over northern and central France, southern England, northern Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algiers, and central Tunisia. They are much alike, and seem to have been constructed by some one people in very ancient times. The skulls in them are often long, like those of the Libyans and Teutons. Hence several French writers have suggested that the ancestors of the white Libyans moved from central Europe into Morocco, along the line of these megalithic structures.[64]
In spite of a good deal of severe criticism, there remains much in favor of the view that these remains mark a route by which some neolithic people extended their conquests. But it seems to me the trend of migration was in the other direction, toward the east, and not from it. The white race began as such during the glacial epoch; it could scarcely have developed north of the Pyrenees, for the climate was so cold that the reindeer, which to-day cannot breed in Stockholm, found a suitable home in the valley of the Garonne. The Iberian peninsula and the Atlas at that time possessed climatic conditions about like those of Great Britain to-day.
In that peninsula, at that time connected with Morocco by a land bridge at the straits of Gibraltar, are the oldest forms of languages spoken by the race, the Euskaric dialects. There is reason to believe that at the dawn of history these occupied the centre of the peninsula; north of them, in the Cantabrian mountains and along the shores of the Bay of Biscay, were the Celtiberians, the rearguard of the migratory hordes of Aryans; and along the southern shores and in North Africa extended the tribes whose direct descendants are the Libyan peoples. The name Iberi, Iberians applied by the ancients to the inhabitants of the eastern and southern shores of Spain, testifies to this. It means in the Libyan tongue freemen, and in the plural form berberi or Berbers, is that by which the old Egyptians knew them, and which from the same root is their own favorite designation to-day.[65]
That the Iberians were Hamites, and not Basques, has long been suspected, and is plainly the opinion to be derived from the statements of the ancients and the presence of Libyan proper names in the south of Spain.[66]
When the Berber chieftain Tarik crossed the straits in the seventh century, and gave to the great rock his name (Gibraltar, Djebel-el-Tarik), he was but returning to seize anew the land from which his ancestors had been driven by Carthaginians and Romans.
From the remotest times the Libyans have had the same form of government—village communities, united by loose bonds into federations. The Egyptians referred to them as “the Nine Bows,” or Bands,[67] the Romans as the “Quinquigentes,” the Five Peoples, the Arabs as “Qabail” or Kabyles, Confederates. These confederations were sufficiently powerful, even so far back as 1400 years before Christ, to put in the field an army of 30,000 or more men for an attack on Egypt; and that the general culture of their country was quite high is shown by the character of the spoils obtained by the Egyptians—horses, chariots, vessels of brass, silver, copper and gold, swords, cuirasses, razors, etc.[68]
At that date the nations of the North Mediterranean branch were yet in the stone age, and the sites of Greece and Rome were the homes of savages.[69]
It is probable that this defeat of the Libyans by the armies of Rhamses gave a serious shock to their progress, by disintegrating their growing state. It appears that about this time there were various colonies which migrated to sites on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. One of these I have believed to be the Etruscans, who settled on the west coast of Italy about 1200 years before our era. They were tall blondes, dolichocephalic, speaking an un-Aryan language, and by their traditions came by sea from the south.[70]
The Libyans were at times partially under the dominion of the kings of Egypt, and many of them entered the Egyptian armies as mercenaries. They allowed the Phenicians peaceably to found the great city of Carthage on their shores, and from these early colonists they learned the art of writing. The alphabet which is still preserved among some of their hordes is derived from the Punic letters.[71] When Carthage fell, Rome seized the mastery of the coasts and productive valleys, but her legions never penetrated to the inland fastnesses. When the great empire tottered to its fall, Goths and Vandals poured across and over the straits of Gibraltar to found an ephemeral empire in Africa; but these cavalry soldiers, knowing to fight only on horseback, scarcely touched the confines of the Libyan mountain homes. Even the Arabs, sweeping resistlessly across their land in the beginning of the eighth century, failed to penetrate many of these fastnesses. To this day no Arab dares venture into the land of the Rifian Berbers, and many a tribe of the Djurjura keeps its customs and its blood unaltered by the Koranic laws, or the Semitic intruders, or the Code Napoleon of the French invaders.
The ancient elements of their culture are still largely retained. Among the Kabyle and Touareg tribes of to-day, in spite of the liberty authorized by Islam, monogamy is the almost invariable rule, the women are not only respected, but generally possess most of the property, and prostitution is unknown. They are, moreover, usually the learned class, and most of the “tifinar” manuscripts come from the hands of these fair scribes.[72] As to the general character of the Berbers of Morocco, we may take Sir Joseph Hooker’s word when he tells us that they are “decidedly superior in intelligence, industry and general activity to their neighbors.”[73]
The wander-loving Libyan tribes pursued other journeys far to the east. Following the coast of the Mediterranean, they formed settlements on the Syrian shore, and extended their possessions into the Mesopotamian valley, and north into the mountain vales of Asia Minor. The Phenicians and Canaanites, the Amorites, who were blonde Berbers of true Libyan type, the Hittites, and the old Assyrians, who were the builders of Babylon and Nineveh, were of Hamitic stock, as is shown by the accordance of the ancient biblical statement with modern linguistic and archæological research.[74]
From these culture-centres of the Hamitic stock followed the mighty stream of human progress back along the southern shores of the Mediterranean to Cyrene and Carthage, and along its northern shores to Cyprus, Greece, Italy and beyond; while the Accadian and Summerian learning, preserved for all time in the cuneiform writing, made its beneficient influence felt far into India and China, and reacted beneficially on the older wisdom of Egypt, from which it had at first largely drawn its inspiration.
2. The Egyptian Group.
From this all too hasty survey of this most ancient people we must turn to another, akin to it, which has played an important, yes, the most important part in the culture-history of our species. I refer to the ancient Egyptians. They belonged to the Hamitic stock, but wandering eastward from its primal seats certainly more than ten thousand years before our era, had possessed themselves of the Nile valley from the mouth of the stream quite up to and beyond the first cataract.
Their kinship to the Libyans is proved by numerous linguistic identities between the ancient Coptic and the Libyan dialects, and by their physical appearance. In color they are yellowish-white, passing to a reddish-brown though the women who are not exposed to the sun would pass in Europe as merely dark brunettes. In the bony structure, the skull, the face, and the proportions, they assimilate entirely with the white race and the Libyan type. This has been shown by the researches of Virchow and others.[75]
The ancient Egyptian is represented to-day by the modern Fellah or field-laborer of the Nile. The type has been very well preserved, for though the riches of this wonderful valley have attracted myriads of foreigners in peace and war from the earliest times, all have suffered greatly in longevity and fertility compared to the native population. This type is of medium stature, the limbs and body symmetrical and delicately moulded; the skull is long, the face oval, the hair dark and straight, or slightly curly; the eyes are brown and small, the nose straight, the lips rather full, the mouth small, the chin not prominent, the beard scanty.
In all respects, in the pure Copt we must recognize a delicate, thorough-bred member of the Eurafrican race, in spite of his reddish-brown hue. These traits are to be explained by the narrow limits of the Nile valley, shut in by trackless deserts from the rest of the world. Here for thousands of years lived this stock, closely intermarrying, and under climatic conditions of singular uniformity.
Whether they were the first inhabitants of the valley has not been ascertained. Certain it is that at a period long before the date we usually assign to Egyptian civilization, a people dwelt on the Nile ignorant of any implements but those of rough stone. Their relics have been found in the stratified gravels of the hills, and on the summits of the arid plateaus.[76] I know no reason, however, to suppose that the tribes of the Egyptian stone age were other than the ancestors of those who were brought under the control of the founder of the first dynasty, the historic king Mena.
This was about 4000 B. C. But previous to him the ancient Egyptian priests claimed some 25,000 years of occupation under various gods and demi-gods; and the general accuracy of their claim I am not prepared to dispute.[77] Certainly the culture of lower Egypt must have been at a high level for thousands of years before the date of Mena, or he could never have established the state which we know he did. From all that archæology has yet taught us, we must place the beginnings of Egyptian civilization earlier than that in the valley of the Yang tse Kiang, earlier by far than any other on the globe. Its streams have permeated all the lands to which the Eurafrican race have extended; fecund as the waters of its own Nile, its elements have nourished and developed the best intellectual powers of the race through all subsequent ages; to it we owe the seeds of our arts, the germs of our sciences, the forms of our religion, the schemes of our literatures, and the inestimable boon of our written language. Look where you will among the most ancient remains of the Old World culture, you find the impress of Egypt’s Land and mind—in Etruscan tombs, in Guanche mummy caves, in treasure houses of Mycenæ, in Cypriote vaults, in Assyrian mounds, under Carthagenian foundations.[78] The species Man owes nowhere else such gratitude as to these African nations of the Eurafrican race.
The Egyptian presents the best known and complete type of the psychical traits of the Hamitic stock. Unideal, laborious, utilitarian, he was devoted to material progress and the gross animal enjoyments of life. His preferred employment was agriculture, his favorite art the huge in architecture, his religion was a polytheism with numberless images and pictures, his pleasures were those of the appetite, his hopes of immortality were bound up with the preservation of the present body.
3. The East African Group.
The singular uniformity of the Egyptian type does not allow us to divide it into several branches, and on account of its segregated position, it does not seem to have had much intercourse with the east African group of the Hamitic stock, living to the south of it.
At present this east African group of the Hamites includes the Bedjas and Bilins between the Nile and the Red Sea, the Afars or Danakils near the mouth of the Red Sea, Gallas and Somalis between the gulf of Aden and the Indian ocean, and the adjacent tribes of the Agaouas, Adals, Khamirs, and others. In appearance these peoples are usually reddish brown in color, with dark wavy hair, of moderate stature and symmetrical form, the face oval and the skull moderately long, the nose aquiline and the chin well shaped, and heavier built than the Egyptians.
Their life is principally nomadic, living in tents of skin, and governed by chiefs who rule over small communities. The descent is reckoned and property passes on the female side. Some are Mahommedans, but hold the faith lightly, and like the Kabyles, attach more importance to the customs of their clan than to the precepts of the Prophet. In many parts they betray admixture with the Negro tribes to whom they are neighbors, and from whom they have always obtained slaves.
Thus the Danakils are described as sooty black, with scanty beards, thin calves, and thick lips, but with features and hair in other respects quite European, their faces rarely prognathic, and their bodies symmetrical.[79] The Somalis are lighter in color, but like the Danakils, do not cultivate the soil nor establish fixed abodes.