EGYPTIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Wilkinson, Rosellini, Lepsius, Uhlemann, Rénan, Guttschmidt, Bugsch, Birch, De Rouget, Bunsen, etc.
In the gray twilight of history, the apparition that first distinctly presents itself is Egypt—that land of wonders, standing on the shores of the "venerable mother the Nile." The Egyptians already form a fully-elaborated, organic social structure, nay, a powerful nation, with a rich material and intellectual civilization, when as yet the commonly accepted chronology begins to write only rudimental numbers.
It is indifferent (so far as the present investigation is concerned) whether this Egyptian culture ascended or descended the Nile—whether its cradle was Meroe, Elephantis, Syene, or Thebes—or whether it first sprang up and expanded around Memphis. So, the first conquerors of Egypt may have belonged to the Shemitic or to the Aryan stock—they may have entered from Asia by the Isthmus of Suez, or by the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, landing first on some spot in Abyssinia or Nubia; or, perhaps, the primitive civilizers of the valley of the Nile were autochthones, who were conquered by foreign invaders. However these things may have been, Egyptian civilization and culture clearly bear the impress of indigenous development.
The founders of the Egyptian civil, social and religious polity considered agriculture as the most sacred occupation of mortals—transforming the roving savage into a civilized man. It was the divine Osiris who first taught men the art of tilling the earth, if indeed he was not its inventor. But the god forged not a fetter for the farmer, and the Egyptian plough was not desecrated by the hands of a slave.
The first rays of history reveal Egypt densely covered with farms, villages, and cities, and divided into districts (noma), townships, and communes—each having its distinct deity, and each most probably self-governing, or at least self-administering: all this in the earliest epoch, previous to the first dynasties of the Pharaohs, and anterior to the division of the population into castes.
The division of a population into castes, however destructive it may be to the growth of individuality and the highest freedom in man, is neither domestic slavery nor chattelhood. These divisions and sub-divisions originally consisted simply in training the individuals to special occupations and functions, and so educating them in special ideas; but not in making any one caste the property of any other. The gradations of caste constituted no form of chattelhood whatever.
The principal castes were the princes, or Pharaohs, the priests, the soldiers, and then the merchants, artificers, farmers and shepherds; and each of these, again, had numerous subdivisions. Together they directed and carried out all the functions, pursuits, and industries necessary in a well-organized community.