The advantage of thus exploring those historical and philological labyrinths will make itself clear in succeeding chapters. Philology has explained the signification of various other ancient ethnic and national names, among others, "Hebrews," "Aryas" or "Aryans," "Pelasgi," "Greeks," "Canaanites," etc., and such explanations have frequently proved of the highest value in letting us into the secret of their origin, character, and the direction of their activity. But there is no vestige of the antique language of the Egyptians that would lead us to suppose that absolute distinctions of race, or chattelhood based thereon, formed features of the primitive life in the Nile valley.
From various paintings, inscriptions, and philological data, science has endeavored to reconstruct the ethnological conceptions entertained by the Egyptians seventeen centuries B.C. The red race occupied Egypt (chiefly lower Egypt), Arabia, and part of Babylonia; the yellow race was spread over Palestine and Syria, reaching Africa; the white race stretched north and north-west of Egypt, inhabiting a part of Libya and the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, etc.; the black and brown race occupied Egypt, Abyssinia, Nubia, and Southern Arabia. Nah es. u or Nah si. u was the name given to all negroes or blacks who were not Egyptians, while to the whole red-colored race they applied the term ret, ret-u, signifying "germ."
The Egyptian pantheon was of course the creation of the superior priests. It made each human race the creation of a separate god; and very probably all the numerous elements in the complicated social structure of the Egyptians, that is, every caste or function, even the lowest, which was still an integral part of the whole, had each its separate deity. The creator of the black race was either a god represented symbolically by a blackbird, or the god H'or (or Horos), son of Osiris, and his avenger, who dwelt in the firmament with all the other deities.
The negro physiognomy appears on the Egyptian monuments; and this not only in the representations of common persons, but even in the case of kings, as, for instance, those of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, in the statues of Totmes III. and Amenophis III. The Egyptian king Sabakos was an Ethiopian by birth, and many other Pharaohs married black African princesses—Nah es. u. There can be no doubt of intermarriages having been common, between red and black Egyptians proper; and through such unions, legal and illegal, it was that the brownish rather than entirely black color of the Egyptian man of the people, as represented on the monuments, was produced. (A similar slow but uninterrupted transition and modification may be verified at the present day and under our own eyes—crisped hair, thick skulls,[5] still prevailing). Finally, eunuchs are represented of a yellowish hue, perhaps nearer in tint to that of the yellow than the black race.
Some psychologic ethnologists affirm that the African or pure negro is to be considered as constituting a passive race, requiring fecundation by an active one. If this be the case, then the Egyptians solved the question. The red and dominant race drew no impassable lines of demarcation by chattelhood; and the black population formed the most vital element of the social structure.
At the threshold of what our limited knowledge considers as positive history, therefore, we meet a highly developed society and nation, which for long centuries enjoyed a political existence, normal when compared with contemporaneous and surrounding nations, and domestic slavery neither lay at the basis of the structure, nor formed an integral element of Egyptian life. In the monuments, paintings, and inscriptions which remain as records and reminiscences of Egypt's palmy ages, no traces are found in the regular national and domestic economy, of agricultural or industrial labor which could have been performed by slaves or chattels. Slaves and slavery existed in Egypt, not as an intrinsic and integral part of society, but as an unhealthy excrescence—not under the sanction of right or law, but as the result of a violation of both. Egyptian slavery was an atonement for social and personal crime—an abnormal monstrosity, and not the normal and vital force of Egyptian activity. If slavery had been a normal social institution, it would have had its deity and its rites; but, as exclusively the result of a disease, it was regulated and dealt with as such.
Egyptian slaves consisted of prisoners of war made on the field of battle, or captives taken in forays made into neighboring or distant countries. In early times, also, all strangers whom accident or tempest threw on the shores of Egypt, and who had no claims to a legal hospitality, were enslaved; for, for centuries Egypt was closed against the intrusion of foreigners—certain merchants and traffickers only being specially excepted. Furthermore, conquered countries paid their tribute partly in children, who thus became slaves. All these slaves were the property of the Pharaohs, who employed them in various ways, distributed them to their officials, sold them to their subjects of all castes, or to domestic and foreign traffickers. But the exportation of slaves belongs to a later period—the epoch of Egypt's historical decay. Slaves were imported, but not exported, as there was no special economical slave-breeding for this or other purposes.
It is unnecessary to dwell on the generally known fact of the captivity and enslavement of the Jews, or to detail the researches concerning the Hycksos—first slaves, then masters and rulers, and finally again overpowered and reduced to captivity. But beside these Shemites, Hebrews—be they Hycksos or not—all other races and nations were at some time or other captives and slaves in Egypt. The Pharaohs warred with Asiatics, and especially with what is now called Caucasian races; and the monuments show that red, white, and yellow slaves taken in war were far more numerous than the blacks.
Egyptians condemned for any kind of criminal offence became slaves, or were condemned to public hard labor. As equality before the law prevailed in Egypt, a person belonging to the superior caste (red-skin) was liable thus to become a slave in his own country. Contrary, however, to the custom of almost the whole of antiquity, and even of earlier Christian times, the Egyptians never reduced debtors to personal slavery. A debtor was not personally responsible, and could not be sold into slavery by his creditor.