“O Solon, Solon,” said the oldest Egyptian priest to that sage. “You Greeks are ever childish, having no ancient opinion, no discipline of any long standing!” And very much surprised, indeed, was the great Solon, when he was told by the priests of Egypt that so many gods and goddesses of the Grecian Pantheon were but the disguised gods of Egypt. Truly spoke Zonaras: “All these things came to us from Chaldea to Egypt; and from thence were derived to the Greeks.”
Sir David Brewster gives a glowing description of several automata; and the eighteenth century takes pride in that masterpiece of mechanical art, the “flute-player of Vaucanson.” The little we can glean of positive information on that subject, from ancient writers, warrants the belief that the learned mechanicians in the days of Archimedes, and some of them much anterior to the great Syracusan, were in no wise more ignorant or less ingenious than our modern inventors. Archytas, a native of Tarentum, in Italy, the instructor of Plato, a philosopher distinguished for his mathematical achievements and wonderful discoveries in practical mechanics, constructed a wooden dove. It must have been an extraordinarily ingenious mechanism, as it flew, fluttered its wings, and sustained itself for a considerable time in the air. This skilful man, who lived 400 years B.C., invented besides the wooden dove, the screw, the crane, and various hydraulic machines.[813]
Egypt pressed her own grapes and made wine. Nothing remarkable in that, so far, but she brewed her own beer, and in great quantity—our Egyptologist goes on to say. The Ebers manuscript proves now, beyond doubt, that the Egyptians used beer 2,000 years B.C. Their beer must have been strong and excellent—like everything they did. Glass was manufactured in all its varieties. In many of the Egyptian sculptures we find scenes of glass-blowing and bottles; occasionally, during archæological researches, glasses and glassware are found, and very beautiful they seem to have been. Sir Gardner Wilkinson says that the Egyptians cut, ground, and engraved glass, and possessed the art of introducing gold between the two surfaces of the substance. They imitated with glass, pearls, emeralds, and all the precious stones to a great perfection.
Likewise, the most ancient Egyptians cultivated the musical arts, and understood well the effect of musical harmony and its influence on the human spirit. We can find on the oldest sculptures and carvings scenes in which musicians play on various instruments. Music was used in the Healing Department of the temples for the cure of nervous disorders. We discover on many monuments men playing in bands in concert; the leader beating time by clapping his hands. Thus far we can prove that they understood the laws of harmony. They had their sacred music, domestic and military. The lyre, harp, and flute were used for the sacred concerts; for festive occasions they had the guitar, the single and double pipes, and castanets; for troops, and during military service, they had trumpets, tambourines, drums, and cymbals. Various kinds of harps were invented by them, such as the lyre, sambuc, ashur; some of these had upward of twenty strings. The superiority of the Egyptian lyre over the Grecian is an admitted fact. The material out of which were made such instruments was often of very costly and rare wood, and they were beautifully carved; they imported it sometimes from very distant countries; some were painted, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and ornamented with colored leather. They used catgut for strings as we do. Pythagoras learned music in Egypt and made a regular science of it in Italy. But the Egyptians were generally considered in antiquity as the best music-teachers in Greece. They understood thoroughly well how to extract harmonious sounds out of an instrument by adding strings to it, as well as the multiplication of notes by shortening the strings upon its neck; which knowledge shows a great progress in the musical art. Speaking of harps, in a tomb at Thebes, Bruce remarks that, “they overturn all the accounts hitherto given of the earliest state of music and musical instruments in the East, and are altogether, in their form, ornaments and compass, an incontestable proof, stronger than a thousand Greek quotations, that geometry, drawing, mechanics, and music were at the greatest perfection when these instruments were made; and that the period from which we date the invention of these arts was only the beginning of the era of their restoration.”
On the walls of the palace of Amenoph II. at Thebes, the king is represented as playing chess with the queen. This monarch reigned long before the Trojan war. In India the game is known to have been played at least 5,000 years ago.
As to their knowledge in medicine, now that one of the lost Books of Hermes has been found and translated by Ebers, the Egyptians can speak for themselves. That they understood about the circulation of the blood, appears certain from the healing manipulations of the priests, who knew how to draw blood downward, stop its circulation for awhile, etc. A more careful study of their bas-reliefs representing scenes taking place in the healing hall of various temples will easily demonstrate it. They had their dentists and oculists, and no doctor was allowed to practice more than one specialty; which certainly warrants the belief that they lost fewer patients in those days than our physicians do now. It is also asserted by some authorities that the Egyptians were the first people in the world who introduced trial by jury; although we doubt this ourselves.
But the Egyptians were not the only people of remote epochs whose achievements place them in so commanding a position before the view of posterity. Besides others whose history is at present shut in behind the mists of antiquity—such as the prehistoric races of the two Americas, of Crete, of the Troäd, of the Lacustrians, of the submerged continent of the fabled Atlantis, now classed with myths—the deeds of the Phœnicians stamp them with almost the character of demi-gods.
The writer in the National Quarterly Review, previously quoted, says that the Phœnicians were the earliest navigators of the world, founded most of the colonies of the Mediterranean, and voyaged to whatever other regions were inhabited. They visited the Arctic regions, whence they brought accounts of eternal days without a night, which Homer has preserved for us in the Odyssey. From the British Isles they imported tin into Africa, and Spain was a favorite site for their colonies. The description of Charybdis so completely answers to the maëlstrom that, as this writer says: “It is difficult to imagine it to have had any other prototype.” Their explorations, it seems, extended in every direction, their sails whitening the Indian Ocean, as well as the Norwegian fiords. Different writers have accorded to them the settlement of remote localities; while the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean was occupied by their cities. A large portion of the African territory is asserted to have been peopled by the races expelled by Joshua and the children of Israel. At the time when Procopius wrote, columns stood in Mauritania Tingitana, which bore the inscription, in Phœnician characters, “We are those who fled before the brigand Joshua, the son of Nun or Navè.”
Some suppose these hardy navigators of Arctic and Antarctic waters have been the progenitors of the races which built the temples and palaces of Palenque and Uxmal, of Copan and Arica.[814] Brasseur de Bourbourg gives us much information about the manners and customs, architecture and arts, and especially of the magic and magicians of the ancient Mexicans. He tells us that Votan, their fabulous hero and the greatest of their magicians, returning from a long voyage, visited King Solomon at the time of the building of the temple. This Votan appears to be identical with the dreaded Quetzo-Cohuatl who appears in all the Mexican legends; and curiously enough these legends bear a striking resemblance, insomuch as they relate to the voyages and exploits of the Hittim, with the Hebrew Bible accounts of the Hivites, the descendants of Heth, son of Chanaan. The record tells us that Votan “furnished to Solomon the most valuable particulars as to the men, animals, and plants, the gold and precious woods of the Occident,” but refused point-blank to afford any clew to the route he sailed, or the manner of reaching the mysterious continent. Solomon himself gives an account of this interview in his History of the Wonders of the Universe, the chief Votan figuring under the allegory of the Navigating Serpent. Stephens, indulging in the anticipation “that a key surer than that of the Rosetta-stone will be discovered,” by which the American hieroglyphs may be read,[815] says that the descendants of the Caciques and the Aztec subjects are believed to survive still in the inaccessible fastnesses of the Cordilleras—“wildernesses, which have never yet been penetrated by a white man, ... living as their fathers did, erecting the same buildings ... with ornaments of sculpture and plastered; large courts, and lofty towers with high ranges of steps, and still carving on tablets of stone the same mysterious hieroglyphics.” He adds, “I turn to that vast and unknown region, untraversed by a single road, wherein fancy pictures that mysterious city seen from the topmost range of the Cordilleras of unconquered, unvisited, and unsought aboriginal inhabitants.”
Apart from the fact that this mysterious city has been seen from a great distance by daring travellers, there is no intrinsic improbability of its existence, for who can tell what became of the primitive people who fled before the rapacious brigands of Cortez and Pizarro? Dr. Tschuddi, in his work on Peru, tells us of an Indian legend that a train of 10,000 llamas, laden with gold to complete the unfortunate Inca’s ransom, was arrested in the Andes by the tidings of his death, and the enormous treasure was so effectually concealed that not a trace of it has ever been found. He, as well as Prescott and other writers, informs us that the Indians to this day preserve their ancient traditions and sacerdotal caste, and obey implicitly the orders of rulers chosen among themselves, while at the same time nominally Catholics and actually subject to the Peruvian authorities. Magical ceremonies practiced by their forefathers still prevail among them, and magical phenomena occur. So persistent are they in their loyalty to the past, that it seems impossible but that they should be in relations with some central source of authority which constantly supports and strengthens their faith, keeping it alive. May it not be that the sources of this undying faith lie in this mysterious city, with which they are in secret communication? Or must we think that all of the above is again but a “curious coincidence?”