The world’s great mistress in the Egyptian vale.
The modern Egyptologist is reforming the false and one-sided theories based upon the meagre studies of anthropological literature in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Yet in the Nile Valley we are only upon the threshold of exploration—topographical, linguistic, and scientific. Of its proto-Egyptians and its primæval workmanship as yet we know little; and it is truly preposterous to suppose that man began his artistic life by building pyramids, cutting obelisks, and engraving hieroglyphs. The ‘Cushite School,’ based upon the Asiatic Ethiopians of Eusebius the Bishop,[451] and unfortunately represented by Bunsen, Maspero, Wilkinson, Mariette, Brugsch, and a host of minor names, has determined that the old Nilotes ‘undoubtedly came from Asia.’ The theory utterly lacks proof; and the same may be said of the popular assertion, based upon Biblical grounds—‘The early colonists of Egypt came thither from Mesopotamia.’ We seem to be reading fable when told (by William Osburn[452]), ‘The skill of these primitive artists of Egypt was a portion of that civilisation which its first settlers brought with them when they located themselves in the Valley of the Nile.’
My conviction is that the ancient Egyptians were Africans, and pure Africans; that the Nile-dwellers are still negroids whitened by a large infusion of Syrian, Arabian, and other Asiatic blood; and that Ethiopia is its old racial home. Æschylus had already robed their black limbs in white raiment when Herodotus (ii. 104) made them dark-skinned compared with the Arabs[453] and North Africans. Every traveller finds his description hold good to the present day. Blumenbach declared the old Egyptians to be of Berber origin, the race of Psametik, or the Son of the Sun. Hartmann opined that they were not Asiatics but Africans, and Dr. Morton modified his first opinion, finding the cranium to be negroid. I hope to prove their correctness by making a large collection of mummy skulls.[454] It is certain that the modern Egyptian’s hair—that great characteristic of race, according to Pruner Bey—is not silky, as Professor Huxley says, but wiry like that of his forefathers.[455] Moreover, his type, as distinctly shown by the Sphinx, is melanochroic-negroid. Lastly, there are other signs, which need not here be noticed, distinguishing the African—horse as well as human—from the Arabian.
ANTIQUITY OF EGYPT.
There is a history of ancient Egypt, into which we have not yet penetrated. Herodotus (ii. 142) glances at it when he makes the Ptah-priest at Memphis pretend to an antiquity of 11,340 years,[456] during which reigned 341 generations of kings and pontiffs.[457] Plato does the same when he speaks of hymns 10,000 years old, and Mela[458] when he numbers 330 kings before Amasis, who ruled more than 30,000 years. Mena (Menes), the first man-monarch who founded Memphis (b.c. 4560?) some centuries before the Hebrew Creation, was preceded for 13,000 years by the ‘Dynasty of the Gods’ (god-kings), suggesting a governmental hierarchy of the fetisheer caste: and this lasted for ages, till the Soldier upset the Priest and raised himself to the rank of Pharaoh[459] and king. Traces of the proto-Egyptian dynasties in which the men of the Pen controlled the men of the Sword long survived; and in later times the ecclesiastical order again ruled the military. We know nothing of the hierarchical supremacy but its baldest outline. When our modest chronologists allow 6000 years to its incept, they run into the contrary extreme of those who assign to it myriads of centuries. Rodier[460] is more reasonable; he opines that the cycle of 1,460 years dates in Egypt from b.c. 14,611.
Fig. 151.—1. Bronze Dagger; 2. Sword
(14 inches long).
Again, it will probably be found that ancient Egypt was not ‘the narrowest strip of land in the world running between a double desert.’ The extent of ‘Kemi’[461] has been arbitrarily confined to the Riverine Valley as far as the First Cataract, or seven hundred by seven miles widening out in the Delta-netherland to a base of eighty-one miles. We may fairly suspect that modern Masr is only a slice from the eastern half of the antique Mizraim. The Greeks made the frontier of Asia extend beyond the Suez isthmus and the Nile to the lands of Libya.[462] This Greater Egypt is still suggested by the system of Bahr bilá má, large Fiumare now bone-dry, and by the alignment of the oases in the wilderness west of the River Valley with their giant ruins of a proto-historic Past. These may date from the days when the basin of the Bahr el-Ghazal—a lake like the Tanganyika and the Victoria Nyanza—discharged its annual flood to the North in channels parallel with the ‘River Ægyptus.’[463] The lacustrine bed would silt up by the natural process of warping, and the surplus water, no longer able to discharge northwards, would force itself eastwards to the Nile. The easier drainage would presently convert the lake into a river-basin and system, and the lands no longer irrigated would become a waste dotted like a leopard skin with oases or watered valleys.
An abundance of popular literature has familiarised the public with the outer aspect of ancient Egypt, but the world is still far from recognising the message she sent to mankind. We must go back to ‘the Wonderland on the banks of the mighty Nile’ for the origin of all things which most interest us. It is the very cradle-land of language. Her tongue contains all the elements of the so-called ‘Aryan,’[464] Semitic, and Allophyllian or Turanian families, and dates long before the days of the present distribution. Bunsen’s ‘Egypt’ first noticed this fact at some length, without, however, dwelling upon its importance. ‘All Semitic pronouns and suffixes,’ says M. C. Bertin, ‘can be traced back to Egyptian, especially the Egyptian of the earliest dynasties’; he might have added much about other mechanical forms. Brugsch tells us (i. 3) that the primitive roots and the essential elements of the Egyptian grammar point to an intimate connection of the Indo-Germanic (!) and Semitic languages.[465] The Allophyllian or Agglutinative Turanian,[466] a tertium quid which is neither ‘Aryan’ nor ‘Semitic,’ is also traceable in old Coptic.
ORIGINS IN EGYPT.