It is to Champollion that we owe the first interpretation of their weird writing; and, but for his life-long labor, we would till now remain uninformed as to the meaning of all these pictured letters, and the ancients would still be considered ignorant by the moderns whom they so greatly excelled in some arts and sciences. “He was the first to find out what wondrous tale the Egyptians had to tell, for one who could read their endless manuscripts and records. They left them on every spot and object capable of receiving characters.... They engraved, and chiselled, and sculptured them on monuments; they traced them on furniture, rocks, stones, walls, coffins, and tombs, as on the papyrus.... The pictures of their daily lives, in their smallest details, are being now unravelled before our dazzled eyes in the most wondrous way.... Nothing, of what we know, seems to have been overlooked by the ancient Egyptians.... The history of ‘Sesostris’ shows us how well he and his people were versed in the art and practice of war.... The pictures show how formidable they were when encountered in battle. They constructed war-engines.... Homer says that through each of the 100 gates of Thebes issued 200 men with horses and chariots; the latter were magnificently constructed, and very light in comparison with our modern heavy, clumsy, and uncomfortable artillery wagons.” Kenrick describes them in the following terms: “In short, as all the essential principles which regulate the construction and draught of carriages are exemplified in the war-chariots of the Pharaohs, so there is nothing which modern taste and luxury have devised for their decoration to which we do not find a prototype in the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty.” Springs—metallic springs—have been found in them, and, notwithstanding Wilkinson’s superficial investigation in that direction, and description of these in his studies, we find proofs that such were used to prevent the jolting in the chariots in their too rapid course. The bas-reliefs show us certain melées and battles in which we can find and trace their uses and customs to the smallest details. The heavily-armed men fought in coats of mail, the infantry had quilted tunics and felt helmets, with metallic coverings to protect them the better. Muratori, the modern Italian inventor who, some ten years ago, introduced his “impenetrable cuirasse,” has but followed in his invention what he could make out of the ancient method which suggested to him the idea. The process of rendering such objects as card-board, felt, and other tissues, impenetrable to the cuts and thrusts of any sharp weapon, is now numbered among the lost arts. Muratori succeeded but imperfectly in preparing such felt cuirasses, and, notwithstanding the boasted achievements of modern chemistry he could derive from it no preparation adequate to effect his object, and failed.
To what perfection chemistry had reached in ancient times, may be inferred from a fact mentioned by Virey. In his dissertations, he shows that Asclepiadotus, a general of Mithradates, reproduced chemically the deleterious exhalations of the sacred grotto. These vapors, like those of Cumæ, threw the Pythoness into the mantic frenzy.
Egyptians used bows, double-edged swords and daggers, javelins, spears, and pikes. The light troops were armed with darts and slings; charioteers wielded maces and battle-axes; in siege-operations they were perfect. “The assailants,” says the anonymous writer, “advanced, forming a narrow and long line, the point being protected by a triple-sided, impenetrable engine pushed before them on a kind of roller, by an invisible squad of men. They had covered underground passages with trap-doors, scaling ladders, and the art of escalade and military strategy was carried by them to perfection.... The battering ram was familiar to them as other things; being such experts in quarrying they knew how to set a mine to a wall and bring it down.” The same writer remarks, that it is a great deal safer for us to mention what the Egyptians did than what they did not know, for every day brings some new discovery of their wonderful knowledge; “and if,” he adds, “we were to find out that they used Armstrong guns, this fact would not be much more astonishing than many of the facts brought out to light already.”
The proof that they were proficient in mathematical sciences, lies in the fact that those ancient mathematicians whom we honor as the fathers of geometry went to Egypt to be instructed. Says Professor Smyth, as quoted by Mr. Peebles, “the geometrical knowledge of the pyramid-builders began where Euclid’s ended.” Before Greece came into existence, the arts, with the Egyptians, were ripe and old. Land-measuring, an art resting on geometry, the Egyptians certainly knew well, as, according to the Bible, Joshua, after conquering the Holy Land, had skill enough to divide it. And how could a people so skilled in natural philosophy as the Egyptians were, not be proportionately skilled in psychology and spiritual philosophy? The temple was the nursery of the highest civilization, and it alone possessed that higher knowledge of magic which was in itself the quintessence of natural philosophy. The occult powers of nature were taught in the greatest secresy and the most wonderful cures were performed during the performing of the Mysteries. Herodotus acknowledges[796] that the Greeks learned all they knew, including the sacred services of the temple, from the Egyptians, and because of that, their principal temples were consecrated to Egyptian divinities. Melampus, the famous healer and soothsayer of Argos, had to use his medicines “after the manner of the Egyptians,” from whom he had gained his knowledge, whenever he desired his cure to be thoroughly effective. He healed Iphiclus of his impotency and debility by the rust of iron, according to the directions of Mantis, his magnetic sleeper, or oracle. Sprengel gives many wonderful instances of such magical cures in his History of Medicine (see p. 119).
Diodorus, in his work on the Egyptians (lib. i.), says that Isis has deserved immortality, for all nations of the earth bear witness to the power of this goddess to cure diseases by her influence. “This is proved,” he says, “not by fable as among the Greeks, but by authentic facts.” Galen records several remedial means which were preserved in the healing wards of the temples. He mentions also a universal medicine which in his time was called Isis.[797]
The doctrines of several Greek philosophers, who had been instructed in Egypt, demonstrates their profound learning. Orpheus, who, according to Artapanus, was a disciple of Moyses (Moses),[798] Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato owe their philosophy to the same temples in which the wise Solon was instructed by the priests. “Antiklides relates,” says Pliny, “that the letters were invented in Egypt by a person whose name was Menon, fifteen years before Phoroneus the most ancient king of Greece.”[799] Jablonski proves that the heliocentric system, as well as the earth’s sphericity, were known by the priests of Egypt from immemorial ages. “This theory,” he adds, “Pythagoras took from the Egyptians, who had it from the Brachmans of India.”[800] Fénelon, the illustrious Archbishop of Cambray, in his Lives of the Ancient Philosophers, credits Pythagoras with this knowledge, and says that besides teaching his disciples that as the earth was round there were antipodes, since it was inhabited everywhere, the great mathematician was the first to discover that the morning and evening star was the same. If we now consider that Pythagoras lived in about the 16th Olympiad, over 700 years B.C., and taught this fact at such an early period, we must believe that it was known by others before him. The works of Aristotle, Laërtius, and several others in which Pythagoras is mentioned, demonstrate that he had learned from the Egyptians about the obliquity of the ecliptic, the starry composition of the milky way, and the borrowed light of the moon.
Wilkinson, corroborated later by others, says that the Egyptians divided time, knew the true length of the year, and the precession of the equinoxes. By recording the rising and setting of the stars, they understood the particular influences which proceed from the positions and conjunctions of all heavenly bodies, and therefore their priests, prophesying as accurately as our modern astronomers, meteorological changes, could, en plus, astrologize through astral motions. Though the sober and eloquent Cicero may be partially right in his indignation against the exaggerations of the Babylonian priests, who “assert that they have preserved upon monuments observations extending back during an interval of 470,000 years,”[801] still, the period at which astronomy had arrived at its perfection with the ancients is beyond the reach of modern calculation.
A writer in one of our scientific journals observes “that every science in its growth passes through three stages: First, we have the stage of observation, when facts are collected and registered by many minds in many places. Next, we have the stage of generalization, when these carefully verified facts are arranged methodically, generalized systematically, and classified logically, so as to deduce and elucidate from them the laws that regulate their rule and order. Lastly, we have the stage of prophecy, when these laws are so applied that events can be predicted to occur with unerring accuracy.” If several thousand years B.C., Chinese and Chaldean astronomers predicted eclipses—the latter, whether by the cycle of Saros, or other means, matters not—the fact remains the same. They had reached the last and highest stage of astronomical science—they prophesied. If they could, in the year 1722 B.C., delineate the zodiac with the exact positions of the planets at the time of the autumnal equinox, and so unerringly as Professor Mitchell, the astronomer, proved, then they knew the laws that regulate “carefully-verified facts” to perfection, and applied them with as much certainty as our modern astronomers. Moreover, astronomy is said to be in our century “the only science which has thoroughly reached the last stage ... other sciences are yet in various stages of growth; electricity, in some branches, has reached the third stage, but in many branches is still in its infantine period.”[802] This we know, on the exasperating confessions of men of science themselves, and we can entertain no doubt as to this sad reality in the nineteenth century, as we belong ourselves to it. Not so in relation to the men who lived in the days of the glory of Chaldæa, Assyria, and Babylon. Of the stages they reached in other sciences we know nothing, except that in astronomy they stood equal with us, for they had also reached the third and last stage. In his lecture on the Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips very artistically describes the situation. “We seem to imagine,” says he, “that whether knowledge will die with us or not, it certainly began with us.... We have a pitying estimate, a tender pity for the narrowness, ignorance, and darkness of the bygone ages.” To illustrate our own idea with the closing sentence of the favorite lecturer, we may as well confess that we undertook this chapter, which in one sense interrupts our narrative, to inquire of our men of science, whether they are sure that they are boasting “on the right line.”
Thus we read of a people, who, according to some learned writers,[803] had just emerged from the bronze age into the succeeding age of iron. “If Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylon presented stupendous and venerable antiquities reaching far back into the night of time, Persia was not without her wonders of a later date. The pillared halls of Persepolis were filled with miracles of art—carvings, sculptures, enamels, alabaster libraries, obelisks, sphinxes, colossal bulls. Ecbatana, in Media, the cool summer retreat of the Persian kings, was defended by seven encircling walls of hewn and polished blocks, the interior ones in succession of increasing height, and of different colors, in astrological accordance with the seven planets. The palace was roofed with silver tiles; its beams were plated with gold. At midnight, in its halls, the sun was rivalled by many a row of naphtha cressets. A paradise, that luxury of the monarchs of the East, was planted in the midst of the city. The Persian empire was truly the garden of the world.... In Babylon there still remained its walls, once more than sixty miles in compass and, after the ravages of three centuries and three conquerors, still more than eighty feet in height; there were still the ruins of the temple of the cloud-encompassed Bel; on its top was planted the observatory wherein the weird Chaldean astronomers had held nocturnal communion with the stars; still there were vestiges of the two palaces with their hanging gardens, in which were trees growing in mid-air, and the wreck of the hydraulic machinery that had supplied them from the river. Into the artificial lake, with its vast apparatus of aqueducts and sluices, the melted snows of the Armenian mountains found their way and were confined in their course through the city by the embankments of the Euphrates. Most wonderful of all, perhaps, was the tunnel under the river-bed.”[804] In his First Traces of Man in Europe, Albrecht Müller proposes a name descriptive of the age in which we live, and suggests that “the age of paper” is perhaps as good as any that can be discussed. We do not agree with the learned professor. Our firm opinion is, that succeeding generations will term ours, at best, the age of brass; at worst, that of albata or of oroide.
The thought of the present-day commentator and critic as to the ancient learning, is limited to and runs round the exoterism of the temples; his insight is either unwilling or unable to penetrate into the solemn adyta of old, where the hierophant instructed the neophyte to regard the public worship in its true light. No ancient sage would have taught that man is the king of creation, and that the starry heaven and our mother earth were created for his sake. He, who doubts the assertion, may turn to the Magical and Philosophical Precepts of Zoroaster, and find its corroboration in the following:[805]