CHAPTER V.
COMPARISON BETWEEN EGYPT AND CHALDÆA.
In the ages that rolled away before the commencement of the period that we call antiquity, the eastern world saw the birth of three great civilizations; the civilization of Egypt, the civilization of Chaldæa, and the civilization of China. All three are primitive in character. So far at least as we can judge, no other form of civilized life had preceded them in those countries; the past had left no examples to guide them on their way. In the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Yang-tse-kiang, three natural theatres in which all was prepared for the work to be performed upon their stages, man emerged from barbarism much sooner than he did in any other part of Asia or Africa; he there formed organized societies whose beginnings are lost in so impenetrable a past that we have no little difficulty in deciding on which hearth the flame of civilized life was first kindled.
Although these civilizations had each a physiognomy of its own, they had, nevertheless, more than one common feature. It would take too long to notice all the resemblances, but we may point out two by which the historian can hardly fail to be impressed as soon as the idea of making a comparison suggests itself to his mind.
All three nations learnt to write, and to write in ideographic characters. These characters are by no means alike in Egypt, Chaldæa, and China. In each case they began by representing the thing whose idea they wished to convey, and with time they reduced and simplified the images thus created until they had a certain number of conventional forms. This work of simplification did not always proceed on the same lines. The direction it took and the final result were greatly affected by the materials employed. Writing traced upon rice paper or papyrus, with a reed pen, gradually put on an appearance very different to that of characters punched in clay with a point or stylus. The three systems were in the end perfectly distinct; and when, by dint of long and patient effort, you have mastered all the difficulties of Chinese writing, you are no nearer than you were before to a comprehension of the wedges or the hieroglyphs.
And yet these three creations of man’s genius are identical in method and principle. Their point of departure was the same. They began by figuring every object to which a distinctive name had been given. The next step was to invent expedients by which these concrete signs could be used for the expression of abstract ideas, and the next again to employ them for the notation, not of ideas, but of sounds. In one country the passage from the direct to the metaphorical use of a term, and from the pure ideogram to the phonetic character, was made with more skill and rapidity than in another. Here the corrections and retouches suggested by practice were more cleverly used to remedy the vices of the system than there. But the fact to be remembered is that, without previous concert, all three societies solved the problem put before them in the same fashion, and that problem was how to fix their thoughts and transmit them to future generations. They began with naïve and roughly executed images, like those made by modern savages. From this stage, in which so many less gifted races stuck fast, all three nations emerged with equal decision and good fortune. By the same roads and by-ways they arrived at the expression of the most complex ideas with a most imperfect instrument. But in spite of all their good will and their subtle intellects, neither Egypt nor Chaldæa nor China succeeded in reducing the word to its elements, and fixing upon a special symbol for each of the fundamental articulations of the human voice. A kind of hidden force, a secret instinct, seems to have urged them on to the required analysis, while they were held back by some fatality or prejudice of their birth or early education. They were all three on the point of touching the goal, but they never quite reached it, and it is to another race that the glory of having invented the alphabet must be given.
These civilizations have a second characteristic at which the observer cannot but feel surprise, namely, their singular longevity and immobility. No doubt when we examine them closely we see that they changed, like everything else that is born, that lives and dies; but the changes only took place with extreme slowness. In the course of three or four thousand years beliefs and mental ideas could hardly remain quite stationary, but the forms and ceremonies of religion varied in no appreciable degree.
We may say the same of manners and social institutions. These could not, of course, remain quite the same during such a lapse of time; a single word, for instance, may have changed its meaning more than once in so many centuries; but it is none the less true that the conservative spirit, as we should call it, had a permanent force that it seems to have lost in the west, amid the rapid transformations and perpetual mobility of our modern world.
And we must recollect that these societies did not escape any more than others from the disorders of civil war, of political revolutions or barbarian inroads. Like all other human systems, they were subject to catastrophes which must have thrown everything into confusion for a time. But after each crisis had spent its force the ranks were closed and dressed, like those of a well-disciplined regiment after receiving a destructive volley. When quiet had come again men returned to their places in the framework of a society closely bound together by habits formed during countless generations. This framework had been so patiently elaborated and co-ordinated, it was so elastic, and, at the same time, so full of resistance, that even a foreign master found it more politic to preserve it and fall in with its ways than to destroy it; he was content, in most cases, to step into the place occupied by the prince whom he ousted. Affairs thus fell into their accustomed groove as soon as a conquest was complete; classes were reconstituted on their old bases; property and people took up their former conditions; the only difference lay in the fact that a new group of privileged individuals shared the wealth created by agricultural, industrial, and commercial activity. The sovereign and his chief officers might be of foreign race, but the social machine rolled on over the same road and with the same wheels as before.
The effect of this uniform and continuous movement did not stop here: it had another consequence in the rapid assimilation of heterogeneous and accidental elements, which adapted themselves in a very short time to the mould into which they were pushed and pressed by the never-sleeping action of an intense organic life, until, in time, they became fused and lost in the life they had meant to dominate.
Thus we find that Egypt, from the time of Menes to the end of the Roman domination, appropriated, and, as it were, digested and absorbed all the emigrants who came to establish themselves within her borders. Some of these came sword in hand, after having destroyed all opposition; others crept in humbly, demanding nothing better than permission to live in peace. Some were barbarian mercenaries in the pay of Pharaoh, some shepherds or agricultural labourers attracted by the splendid fertility of the soil, others were artizans in search of wealthy patrons, or merchants who sought a profit in distributing the products of the Egyptian soil or industry over foreign lands. No matter to what race they belonged, all these strangers and foreign sojourners, from the Hyksos to the Phœnicians and the Greeks, came under the spell of Egypt and exercised but little influence over her constitution, her manners, and ideas. To dissolve a body that appeared indestructible required two great religious revolutions—the rise of Christianity, and, but a few centuries later, that of Islamism.