Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

This, it is plain, may be regarded—and as a matter of observation and history is still, and has in all times been, regarded—either as something distinct from, or as a department of, religion.

If treated as a part of religion, then either the very letter itself of the law, or else the principles on which it is founded, and of which it is an application, must be accepted as from God. In the former case God is regarded as the actual legislator, and sometimes going a step further, as the actual executor of His own law. In the latter case He is regarded, because He is the primary source, at all events, of its principles, as ultimately their guardian, and the avenger of their violation.

The Semitic sentiment, looked upon law in the former of these two lights. It formed this conception of it, because the people held in their minds the two ideas, that God was One, and that He was the Creator. A people who have come to regard God as one will necessarily concentrate on the idea of God all moral and intellectual attributes. Out of this will arise a tendency to exclude all merely animal attributes, and, to a great extent, such phenomena as present themselves to the thought as merely human—such, for instance, as were the attributes of Mars, Venus, and Mercury. God then, being the perfection of wisdom, justice, and goodness, is the only source of law. He is, also, the actual Lawgiver in right of His being the Creator. The world, and all that it contains, is His. His will is the law of His creation. The gods of Egypt, however, like those of Greece, were not anterior to Nature, were not the creators of Nature, but came in subsequently to it, and were in some sort emanations from it; the highest conception of them, in this relation, was that they were the powers of Nature.

Now, in this important and governing matter of law, the Egyptian mind did not take the Semitic view. God appeared to the Egyptian, not so much in the character of the direct originator, as in that of the ultimate guardian of the law, in our sense of these words. They had had kings who had been wise legislators, and the complete punishment for violations of the law would be in the life to come.

A review, then, of the whole field makes it appear highly improbable that the Egyptians were Semites.

But if they were neither African nor Semitic, what were they? There are not many alternatives to choose from. The process soon arrives at a complete exhaustion. They must have been—there is no other possible race left—mainly Aryan: that is, of the same race as ourselves.

There is no antecedent improbability in this. That an Aryan wave should have reached the Nile was, indeed, less improbable than that others, as was the case, should have reached the Ganges and the Thames. That one had not, would almost have needed explanation.

That the Egyptians themselves had not the faintest trace, either of a tradition, or of a suspicion, that it had been so, is only what we might have been sure of. No other branch of the race, from the Ganges to the Thames, had preserved any record of their ancestors’ migrations, or any tradition of their old home, or of their parentage. This only shows—which will explain much—that the migration took place at so remote a period, so long before the invention of letters, that we feel as if it might have resulted from some displacement, or variation, of the axis of our earth in the glacial epoch.

That the complexion of the Egyptians is not so fair as that of Europeans, is a remark of no weight. Europeans may have become fairer by the operation of causes analogous to those which made the Egyptians darker. Among the Hindoos, the Brahman, who is indubitably Aryan, is generally as dark as the Egyptian was. The colour of the Egyptian may have been heightened in precisely the same way as that of the Brahman; first, by intermixture with the previous possessors of the soil, and afterwards by exposure through a long series of generations, with but little clothing, to the floods of light and heat of a perennially cloudless and all but tropical sun.

They might, on their arrival, have found an Ethiopic race in possession of the valley of the Nile, and having come from a distance with but few women, may have largely intermarried with the conquered, and displaced aborigines.