Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

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.