[453] The late Mr. Lane, who was greatly attached to Cairo and its population, insisted upon the Arab origin and kinship of the Egyptian. To those who know both races they appear as different as Englishmen and Greeks. Place an Arab, especially a Bedawi, by the side of a Fellah, and the contrast will strike the least experienced eye.
[454] The first instalment was sent in May 1881 to the Royal College of Surgeons for the benefit of Professor Flower and Dr. C. Carter Blake. I am aware of the difficulty in determining mummy-dates, but the fact of mummification shows a certain antiquity whose later limit is sharply defined. The mummy of King Mer en Rá (Sixth Dynasty), found near the Sakkarah pyramids, had been stripped of its bandages; but the marks impressed upon the skin showed that the system was that of later years. He can hardly be dated later than b.c. 3000; and, reckoning from that period to a.d. 700, when mummifying ceased, we have a population of embalmed bodies of some 730,000,000 in round numbers.
[455] The hair is of intermediate type between negro and Malay. The Nilotes are οὐλότριχοι and ἐριόκομοι, with woolly locks, slightly flat like ribbons, evenly distributed (not in peppercorns) over the scalp. It is also a mistake to make the Nubians λισσότριχοι: none of the Nile Valley races are lank-haired like Hindús, Chinese, and Australians.
[456] The full number of Herodotus is 52,000 years. Mr. Day (p. 59) is scandalised by these dates, which argue for the ‘high antiquity theory’; and appears astonished to find ‘anything placed centuries previous to the Noahitic Deluge.’ Of this more presently.
[457] Each generation contained a ‘Piromis, son of a Piromis.’ The word, made equivalent to Kalos k’ agathos (= galantuomo), Pe-Rome, the man, opposed to Pe-Neter, the god.
[458] Mela has been blamed for repeating Herodotus without understanding him. When he states that the sun twice set at the point where it now rises (‘solem bis jam occidisse unde oritur’), he probably means that the greater light left to the west the zodiacal sign which presided at its rising.
[459] The word at first applied probably to the commander-in-chief. Wilkinson’s day derived it from Phra (pa-Ra), the sun; now it is explained Per-áo, the Great House, in the sense of ‘Sublime Porte.’
[460] Antiquité des Races Humaines. Paris, 1862.
[461] The ‘black land,’ opposed to Tesher, the ‘red land’ (Edom, Idumæa, Erythræa), the wilds of North-Western Arabia. It is also called on the monuments A’in (Æan in Pliny) and Ta-mera (Mera, Tomera), the ‘inundation region.’ Another old name, Aeria, is from יאר, Yior, the Nile. Kemi must not be confounded with Khem, Chemmis, universal nature, the generative and reproductive principle—Pan. When Q. Curtius writes that Chemmis ‘umbraculo maxime similis est habitus,’ I would change the first word to ‘umbilico.’ The stepped cone in the Elephanta Caves exactly explains the latter.
[462] Hecatæus and Anaximander divided the globe into Europe (Ereb, Gharb, the West) and Asia (Asiyeh, the East). Their successors added Libya (Africa), a term derived from the Libu or Ribu tribes; and the Father of History a most insufficient fourth—the Nilotic Delta. The latter, however, is ethnologically correct: Egypt is neither Africa nor Asia, but a land per se.