Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The last questions are—Where did they come from? and, How did they get into Egypt? I have at times thought that they came from the mouth of the Indus, or from the Persian Gulf, and entered Egypt by the way of the Red Sea. If Abydos was the first centre of Egyptian power, and the balance of historical argument inclines towards it, there seems to be no other way of accounting for its having been so than by supposing a landing at Myos Hormos, or Berenice, as they were afterwards called. In one of those harbours I can imagine the May Flowers of that old, old world, hauled up upon the beach, and the stout hearts, that had crossed in them the Indian Ocean, preparing for their inland march across the desert hills to the wondrous river. The distance is not great. On the third day they will drink its water. The natives they are to encounter are gentle, and industrious. They will dispossess them of their land, and enslave them. They will take their daughters for wives. They will increase rapidly in their happy valley. The language they brought with them will be lost, and a new language formed by their descendants, which will be mainly that of the people they subdued, and with whom they intermarried. The religion, however, and the arts they brought with them, they will never forget; and as the centuries roll on, and they have increased greatly in numbers, and come to have many goodly cities, and much wealth, they will add largely both to their religion, and to their arts. But by the time they have added to their other arts that one which will enable them to perpetuate the memory of events, so long a time will have passed, that they will have lost all tradition of how their first fathers came into the valley, and how they possessed themselves of it. For them, therefore, the history of Egypt will commence with the discovery of letters; but for us, who are able to recover something of the history of words, of races, and of mythologies, it will reach back into far more distant tracts of time.

There is no reason which should lead us peremptorily to decide against their having come by sea. There is no antecedent improbability. The distant voyages and settlements both of the Phœnicians, and of the Normans, show what can be achieved in very small vessels. Evidence to the same point was again supplied by the insignificant capacity of many of the vessels employed by some of our early trans-Atlantic explorers, and circumnavigators. And in the spirit-stirring and invigorating era of the Aryan migrations we may believe that some enterprises of this kind were undertaken. At all events, there is nothing to preclude our believing that, in the prehistoric period, Indian and Arabian vessels were wafted by the reciprocating monsoons, to and fro, across the Indian Ocean. Nor, indeed, are we at all obliged to suppose that those vessels were of insignificant capacity.

But this entrance into Egypt must have taken place at so remote a date that the physical features of that part of the world might then have been somewhat different from what they are now. The Dead Sea might not then have been thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and the isthmus we have just seen canalized might then have been navigable water.

But it will make the point in question more distinct if I endeavour to speak more precisely about it. The immigration into Egypt could not possibly have been an offset of the Aryan immigration into India, which resulted in the formation of the Hindoo, or of its westward outflow, which resulted in the formation of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. These dispersions must, we know, speaking broadly, have been contemporaneous. Their date, however, as has been already observed, was so remote that no one branch of the race retained the slightest trace of a tradition of its original seat, or of the way in which they themselves came to their new home, or of any particulars of the occurrence. We will suppose, then, that the event to which they all belong, and of which each is a part, occurred 10,000 years ago. I merely use these figures to make myself intelligible. But the Aryan immigration into Egypt belongs to a still more remote epoch, and to another order of events. In the stratifications of history its place is far lower down. It is a part of what forms a distinct and more primitive stratum. Again, for the purpose of making my meaning distinct, I will say that it belonged to a series of events which took place 15,000 years ago. The peoples and civilization of Europe, as they now exist, are to be traced back to the first-mentioned of these two world-movements. To that which preceded it may possibly be referred some fragments of a previous condition of things in Europe which have been enigmas to historians and ethnologists, as the Etruscans, the Finns, the Laps, and the Basques. The Egyptians may have been a part of that first original wave coming down freely of their own accord into Egypt. Or they may have been driven out of Persia, or from the banks of the Indus, at the epoch of the rise and outflow of the second wave. At all events, this is clear, that they were no part of the second wave itself; because their language was older than the Aryan tongue of that epoch. And if, as appears probable, it was also older than that of the Semitic peoples, they, too, must have come into being after the Egyptians.[2]

CHAPTER IV.
EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD.

Nec vero terræ ferre omnes omnia possunt.—Virgil.

Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While nature had separated it from other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on the hint. Their general policy was to seclude themselves, to which, however, their history contains some conspicuous exceptions; and to exclude foreigners; which policy, however, they, ultimately, completely reversed in the reign of Psammetichus, as the Japanese have done in our own day; and from the same motives. They carried the mechanical arts, and all that ministers to material well-being, to a high degree of perfection. Like the Japanese, they did this with what they could win from nature within the boundaries of their own country, and under what we are disposed to regard as very crippling disadvantages. Though, indeed, in respect of absolute independence in the origination of characteristic trains of thought, and of inventions, Japan, on account of the connexion of its early civilization with that of China, is estopped from entering the lists against Egypt. The moral sentiments of the Egyptians, and their social and domestic life, were entirely their own: the results of the working of their own ideas. It is this originality that makes them so interesting and instructive a study of human development. All their customs, and all that they did, were devised by themselves to meet their own especial wants. They were self-contained, and confident in themselves that they would always be able to find out both what would be best for them to do, and what would be the best way of doing it.

Their success justified this self-reliance. All the ordinary, and many of the more refined wants of man, were supplied so abundantly, and in so regular and well-ordered a fashion among them, that a modern traveller would find no discomfort, and much to wonder at and admire, in a year or two spent in such a country as was the Egypt of Rameses the Great. He would, indeed, be a very great gainer if he could find the Egypt of to-day just what Egypt was three thousand years ago.

There are no other moderately-sized countries in the world so well prepared by nature for a system of isolation, and self-dependence, as Japan and Egypt. On a large scale China and the United States possess the same advantage.