Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

That there had been some intermixture may be inferred from the complexion of the Egyptians, and from the thickening of their features.

There is also a moral argument in favour of this supposition in the fact that the Egyptians never, even in their best days, showed repugnance to intermarriage with the Ethiopians, or even to being ruled by Ethiopian sovereigns. They followed Tirhakah and Sabaco into Syria just as readily as they had followed Sethos and Rameses. We see on the sculptures the Ethiopian Queen of Amenophis.

Had the language been manifestly Aryan in its roots and structure, this, under the circumstances, would have been conclusively in favour of our supposition. Its not being so is, however, not conclusive against it. The Northmen, who invaded, and settled in Normandy, abandoned their own language, and adopted that of France. Again, the Norman invasion led to a great modification of the language of England, but the new tongue was not that of the invaders. Indeed, it seems only in accordance with what might have been expected—that the non-Aryan element in the people having been so potent as, to a great extent, to cloud the Aryan complexion, and coarsen the Aryan features, the language which was ultimately formed, should not have been, to any great extent, Aryan.

We find caste existing in Egypt from the earliest times. This becomes intelligible on the supposition of an Aryan origin. It is a parallelism to what took place on the ground occupied in India by another, but later, offset of this race. Caste could not develop itself spontaneously in the bosom of an indigenous, and homogeneous people. It is impossible to conceive such a phenomenon under such circumstances. It must be the result of two causes: foreign conquest, and pride of blood. As to the former, we are sure that there could have been no other means by which the Egyptians could have been introduced into the valley of the Nile, as they were not indigenous Africans; and as to pride of blood, we know that this feeling exists so strongly among Aryan peoples, that it may almost be regarded as one of the characteristics of the race. It was natural, therefore, that, wherever they came to dwell on the same ground with a conquered and subject population of a colour different from their own, they should introduce this, or some equivalent, organization of society. If they had found a dark race in Europe we should have had caste in Europe; but here the hardness of the struggle for existence in old times, aided by the absence of difference in colour between the conquerors and the conquered, made it impossible. In all European aristocracies, whatever may have been their origin, we can detect traces of this old Aryan disposition towards exclusiveness founded on pride of blood.

In religion, which is for those times one of the surest criteria of race, there was so close an approximation of the gods, and of the whole system of Egypt, to those of Greece, that, as has been observed already, the Greeks supposed that the two were identical. They were in the habit of speaking of the deities of Egypt as the same as their own, only that in Egypt they had Egyptian names. Of course, it is impossible for any people to suppose that the religion of another people is identical with its own, unless the fundamental ideas of the two systems are the same. This similarity, then, indicates that they were both offsets from the same stock, and that they parted from the old home after the fundamental and governing ideas of the mythology they carried with them had been elaborated there.

But in this matter we may go much further than Greece. If we view all the Aryan religions collectively, we shall find that the one idea that was the life-giving principle in every one of the whole family was the belief in a future life. The Hindoo and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the Teuton, all alike, as if by a common instinct, agreed in this. This, therefore, is distinctly Aryan, and no religion from which it is absent could belong to that race. How, then, and this is almost a crucial test, does the religion of old Egypt stand in this matter? Exactly as it ought to do, on the supposition that it had an Aryan origin. This was its central, its formative, its vital idea. It was this that built the thousand mighty temples in which the living might learn those virtues, and practise that piety, which would be their passport to the better world to come. It was this that embalmed the bodies of the dead, whose souls were still alive. Without it the religion of old Egypt could never have been a living force, nor anything but the merest mummy of a religion. At all events, without it, it could have had no origin in Aryan thought.

Another point to be considered is that of artistic tastes and aptitudes. These are shown most conspicuously in the architecture of a people, and the subsidiary architectonic arts of sculpture and painting; they may be followed also into the arts which minister to the conveniences and embellishments of everyday life, and which are chiefly exhibited in the style of the dress of a people, and of the furniture of their houses. Here, again, I think the working of the Aryan mind is seen in old Egypt. Their ideas and tastes in these matters were singularly in harmony with the ideas and tastes that have in all ages developed themselves in the bosom of Aryan communities wherever settled. On the whole, our taste approves of what they did in these applications of man’s creative power, the necessary deductions having been made for the trammels which the fixity of their religious ideas imposed upon them; and for the fact that all that they did were but first unaided essays, uncorrected by comparisons with the arts of other people. When we consider what great disadvantages in this respect they worked under, we must come to the conclusion that no nation ever showed so much invention, or more native capacity for art. We cannot suppose that they borrowed from any other people the idea of the pillar with its ornamented capital; the arch; the ornamentation of buildings with the sculptured and painted forms of man, of animals, and of plants; the use of metallic colours; the art of making glass; the forms of their furniture; the art of embalming the dead; the art of writing; and a multitude of other arts which were in common practice among them in very remote times.

The same may be said of their aptitude for science, which has ever been a distinct characteristic of Aryans, and never of Semites. Science is a natural growth among the former, and has appeared among the latter only occasionally, and then evidently as an exotic. The mechanics, the hydraulics, the geometry, the astronomy, of the old Egyptians were all their own.

We also find among them evidences of a genius for organization in a high degree, and of a singular power of realizing to their thoughts, and of working for the attainment of, very distant objects, both of which are valuable peculiarities of the Aryan mind, and in both of which the Semitic mind is markedly deficient.

One point more. Herodotus observes that the Egyptians resembled the Greeks in being content each of them with a single wife. On our supposition, this is just what might have been expected. There are no practices among mankind so inveterate as those connected with marriage; and the ancient Egyptians, having been an offset from the race of mankind which had originally been monogamic, could not, although they had long been settled in the polygamic region, bring themselves to adopt polygamy. The primæval custom of the race could not be unlearnt. We see, too, from the sculptures that the affectionate relation between husband and wife was rather of the European than of the Asiatic pattern. The wife places her hand on the shoulder, or round the arm of the husband, to symbolize unitedness, attachment, and dependence. This is done in a manner one feels is not quite in harmony with oriental sentiment.