There are many effigies of the same general character of the age of the fourth Rameses. One of them, a captive, is figured in the margin. Wilkinson reads their name Tochari on the monuments; Rosellini translates it Fekkaro. To my view they have the lined and hardy features of the Celts or Gauls, of whom, however, we have little knowledge at that remote date, (B.C. 1400,) although even then they occupied a large part of southern Europe. They perhaps rather pertain to the Phenician branch of the Caucasian race.
There are other paintings, especially some at Abousimbel of the age of Rameses III., which correspond in every particular with the Scythian physiognomy as recorded in history;[[92]] and the name of Scheto, by which they are designated on the monuments, confirms the suggestion of the hieroglyphists that they represent a Scythian or Scytho-Bactrian people.[[93]]
The researches of Lord Lindsay seem to prove that the Assyrians were also among the Hykshos conquerors of Egypt; and the shepherds who invaded Egypt before the time of Abraham are called Cushim by the ancients, which means Ethiopians or Babylonians; for the country on both sides of the Persian Gulf was called Cush.[[94]]
Plutarch, quoting Manetho, asserts that Tiphonean or red-haired men were sacrificed in the temples of Eletheias, and their ashes scattered to the winds. Was this done in commemoration of the hatred which the Egyptians bore to the red-haired Hykshos?
6. THE COPTS.
From various antecedent remarks it will be perceived that I regard the Copts as a mixed community, derived in diverse proportions from the Caucasian and the Negro; and this diversity of origin may explain the dissimilar characteristics which travellers have ascribed to them.
Denon, for example, described them as having “flat foreheads, eyes half closed, and raised up at the angles, high cheek bones, a broad, flat, and short nose, a large, flattened mouth, placed at a considerable distance from the nose, thick lips, a little beard, a shapeless body, crooked legs, without expression in the contour, and long, flat toes.”[[95]] Denon even thinks that these features correspond, in a remarkable manner, with the human face and figure as represented in Egyptian painting and sculpture! And Sonnini, after describing them in nearly analogous terms, adds the moral reproach, that while “they are the ugliest of men, they are the filthiest and most disgusting.”[[96]]
If we compare these seemingly exaggerated descriptions with those of Brown, Lane, and some other travellers, the discrepancy is so great as, at first thought, to baffle all explanation. Brown, for example, “was not struck with any resemblance to the Negro features or form;” and he saw nothing remarkable in the texture of the hair.[[97]] “The eyes of the Copts,” says Mr. Lane, “are generally large and elongated, slightly inclining from the nose upwards, and always black. The nose is straight, excepting at the end, where it is rounded and wide; and the lips are rather thick, and the hair is black and curly.”[[98]] Madden adds that they are characterized by a remarkable distance between the eyes. Belzoni observed among them some as fair as Europeans; Rosellini assures us that they are largely mixed with Jewish and Roman blood;[[99]] and D’Avezac, like Depauw, discovers in them a partial Chinese ancestry. These, and numberless other opinions which might be cited, prove that the Copts differ greatly among themselves; and that they are, physically and morally, a mixture of all the nations which have successively held dominion in Egypt, or swelled its varied population—Egyptians of various castes, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Hebrews, Negroes, and some others Such was, at least in part, the opinion of Pugnet, (whose memoir I have not seen,) for he separates them “into two divisions; those whose ancestry has been intermixed, and partly of Greek and Latin descent, and a class of purely Egyptian origin.”[[100]] But, after all, perhaps the traces which are most invariable in the Copt are derived from the Negro; and they are manifest in the very bones of the head and face.