It might seem therefore that the question of Egyptian origins was settled by the mere statement of the case, and that there could be no hesitation in saying that the Egyptian Hamites were evolved on Egyptian soil, consequently are the true autochthones in the Nile valley. Yet there is no ethnological question more hotly discussed than this of Egyptian origins and culture, for the two seem inseparable. There are broadly speaking two schools: the African, whose fundamental views are thus briefly set forth, and the Asiatic, which brings the Egyptians with all their works from the neighbouring continent. But, seeing that the Egyptians are now admitted to be Hamites, that there are no Hamites to speak of (let it be frankly said, none at all) in Asia, and that they have for untold ages occupied large tracts of Africa, there are several members of the Asiatic school who allow that, not the people themselves, but their culture only came from western Asia (Mesopotamia). If so, this culture would presumably have its roots in the delta, which is first reached by the Isthmus of Suez from Asia, and spread thence, say, from Memphis up the Nile to Thebes and Upper Egypt, and here arises a difficulty. For at that time there was no delta[1119], or at least it was only in process of formation, a kind of debatable region between land and water, inhabitable mainly by crocodiles, and utterly unsuited to become the seat of a culture whose characteristic features are huge stone monuments, amongst the largest ever erected by man, and consequently needing solid foundations on terra firma. It further appears that although Memphis is very old, Thebes is much older, in other words, that Egyptian culture began in Upper Egypt, and spread not up but down the Nile. On the other hand the Egyptians themselves looked upon the delta as the cradle of their civilisation, although no traces of material culture have survived, or could be expected to survive, in such a soil[1120]. Moreover it is not necessary to introduce Asiatic invaders by way of Lower Egypt. F. Stuhlmann postulates a land connection between Africa and Arabia, but even without this assumption he regards the Red Sea as affording no hindrance to early infiltrations[1121]. Flinders Petrie, while rejecting any considerable water transport for the uncultured prehistoric Egyptians (whom he derives from Libya), detects a succession of subsequent invasions from Asia, the dynastic race crossing the Red Sea to the neighbourhood of Koptos, and Syrian invasions leading to the civilisation of the Twelfth Dynasty, besides the later Hyksos invasions of Semito-Babylonian stock[1122].
Theory of Asiatic Origins.
The theory of Asiatic origins is clearly summed up by H. H. Johnston[1123]. He regards the earliest inhabitants of Egypt as a dwarfish Negro-like race, not unlike the Congo Pygmies of to-day (p. 375), with possibly some trace of Bushman (p. 378), but this population was displaced more than 15,000 years ago by Mediterranean man, who may have penetrated as far as Abyssinia, and may have been linguistically parent of the Fulah[1124]. The Fulah type was displaced by the invasions of the Hamites and the Libyans or Berbers. "The Hamites were no doubt of common origin, linguistically and racially, with the Semites, and perhaps originated in that great breeding ground of conquering peoples, South-west Asia. They preceded the Semites, and (we may suppose) after a long stay and concentration in Mesopotamia invaded and colonised Arabia, Southern Palestine, Egypt, Abyssinia, Somaliland and North Africa to its Atlantic shores. The Dynastic Egyptians were also Hamites in a sense, both linguistically and physically; but they seem to have attained to a high civilisation in Western Arabia, to have crossed the Red Sea in vessels, and to have made their first base on the Egyptian coast near Berenice in the natural harbour formed by Ras Benas. From here a long, broad wadi or valley—then no doubt fertile—led them to the Nile in the Thebaid, the first seat of their kingly power[1125]. The ancestors of the Dynastic Egyptians may have originated the great dams and irrigation works in Western Arabia; and such long struggles with increasing drought may have first broken them in to the arts of quarrying stone blocks and building with stone. Over population and increasing drought may have caused them to migrate across the Red Sea in search of another home; or their migration may have been partly impelled by the Semitic hordes from the north, whom we can imagine at this period—some 9000 to 10,000 years ago—pressing southwards into Arabia and conquering or fusing with the preceding Hamites; just as these latter, no doubt, at an earlier day, had wrested Arabia from the domain of the Negroid and Dravidian" (p. 382).
Proto-Egyptian Type.
That the founding of the First Dynasty was coincident with a physical change in the population, is proved by the thousands of skeletons and mummies examined by Elliot Smith[1126], who regards the Pre-dynastic Egyptians as "probably the nearest approximation to that anthropological abstraction, a pure race, that we know of (p. 83)." He describes the type as follows (Chap. IV.).
The Proto-Egyptian (i.e. Pre-dynastic) was a man of small stature, his mean height, estimated at a little under 5 ft. 5 in., in the flesh for men, and almost 5 ft. in the case of women, being just about the average for mankind in general, whereas the modern Egyptian fellah averages about 5 ft. 6 in. He was of very slender build with indications of poor muscular development. In fact there is a suggestion of effeminate grace and frailty about his bones, which is lacking in the more rugged outlines of the skeletons of his more virile successors. The hair of the Proto-Egyptian was precisely similar to that of the brunet South European or Iberian people of the present day. It was a very dark brown or black colour, wavy or almost straight and sometimes curly, never "woolly." There can be no doubt whatever that this dark hair was associated with dark eyes and a bronzed complexion. Elliot Smith emphatically endorses Sergi's identification of the ancient Egyptian as belonging to his Mediterranean Race. "So striking is the family likeness between the Early Neolithic peoples of the British Isles and the Mediterranean and the bulk of the population, both ancient and modern, of Egypt and East Africa, that a description of the bones of an early Briton might apply in all essential details to an inhabitant of Somaliland." But he points out also that there is an equally close relationship linking the Proto-Egyptians with the populations to the east, from the Red Sea as far as India, including Semites as well as Hamites. Rejecting the terms "Mediterranean" or "Hamite" as inadequate he would classify his Mediterranean-Hamite-Semite group as the "Brown Race[1127]."
A most fortunate combination of circumstances afforded Elliot Smith an opportunity for determining the ethnic affinities of the Egyptian people.
The Hearst Expedition of the University of California, under the direction of G. A. Reisner, was occupied from 1901 onwards with excavations at Naga-ed-Dêr in the Thebaid, where a cemetery, excavated by A. M. Lythgoe, contained well-preserved bodies and skeletons of the earliest known Pre-dynastic period. Close by was a series of graves of the First and Second Dynasties; a few hundred yards away tombs of the Second to the Fifth Dynasties (examined by A. C. Mace), with a large number of tombs ranging from the time of the Sixth Dynasty to the Twelfth. "Thus there was provided a chronologically unbroken series of human remains representing every epoch in the history of Upper Egypt from prehistoric times, roughly estimated at 4000 B.C., up till the close of the Middle Empire, more than two thousand years later." To complete the story Coptic (Christian Egyptian) graves of the fifth and sixth centuries were discovered on the same site.
"The study of this extraordinarily complete series of human remains, providing in a manner such as no other site has ever done the materials for the reconstruction of the racial history of one spot during more than forty-five centuries, made it abundantly clear that the people whose remains were buried just before the introduction of Islâm into Egypt were of the same flesh and blood as their forerunners in the same locality before the dawn of history. And nine years' experience in the Anatomical Department of the School of Medicine in Cairo," continues Elliot Smith, "has left me in no doubt that the bulk of the present population in Egypt conforms to precisely the same racial type, which has thus been dominant in the northern portion of the Valley of the Nile for sixty centuries[1128]."
Armenoid Type.