We should note, however, that an acute contradiction in races is nowhere on earth perceptible. Everywhere may be found members to bridge over the gap, and the classification which we so much need does not ever start with the intermediate stages, but with the extremes in which the racial type finds its purest illustration.
Moreover, the type of the modern Egyptian cannot straightway determine the question as to the origin of the ancient Egyptian population, even if we do not take into account the difficult problem of how far climate and soil exercise a moderating influence upon a race. The inhabitants of the Lower Nile Valley at the time of the New Kingdom, and from that time forward in the whole course of history, have mingled so extensively with pure African blood, that it would have been a miracle if no assimilation had taken place. It is an undoubted fact that the Turks belong to the peoples resembling the Mongolians; but who will put the modern Osman in the same line with the Chinaman, or fail to recognise the assimilation to the Armenian, Persian, Semitic, Greek type? The same is true, for example, of the Magyars. A strictly analogous state of things is found in Egypt. It has been proved that, in the skull-formation of the modern Egyptian, the influence of the African element is more clearly discernible than in the days of the ancients. Moreover, a careful comparison leads to the conclusion that in ancient, as in modern Egypt, there are two coexistent types: one resembling the Nubian more closely, who is naturally more strongly represented in Upper Egypt than in Memphis and Cairo; and one sharply distinguished from him whom we may define as the pure Egyptian. Midway between these two stands a hybrid form, represented in numerous examples and sufficiently accounted for by the intermixture of the two races.
While the Nubian type is closer akin to the pure negro type and is indigenous in Africa, we must regard the purely Egyptian type as foreign to this continent; this directs us toward the assumption that the most ancient home of the Egyptian is to be sought in Asia. The Egyptians have depicted themselves, times out of number, on monuments, and enable us clearly enough to recognise their type.
For the most part, they are powerful, close-knit figures, frequently with vigorous features. Not infrequently, as Erman has sagaciously suggested, the heads have a “clever, witty expression just like what we are accustomed to meet with in cunning old peasants.” We have a recurrence of the same trait in several early Roman portraits. Side by side with this we have finely cut features: for instance, we are reminded of the almost effeminate expression in the head of Ramses II. The Egyptian type is altogether different from the negro type; the structure of the nose, for instance, is delicate for the most part, and there is no trace of prognathismus, or the protrusion of the lower part of the face.
On the monuments the colour of the skin in male Egyptians, who in ancient days went totally naked but for a loin cloth, is a red-brown. On the other hand, the women, who were clad in a long robe and were not equally exposed to the effects of air and sun, are painted in a lighter brown or yellow. In quite similar fashion the Greeks of old represented men on their vases as red and women as white. We should not forget that the art of depicting the finer shades of colours in paint had not yet been learnt.
Just as the Egyptians are distinguished from the population of the interior of Africa, so they have their nearest kinsmen in the inhabitants of the northern zone of the continent. West of them, on the coast lands on the Mediterranean as well as in the oases of the desert, dwell races which are comprehended by Egyptians under the term Thuhen. Following the precedent of the Greeks, we have transferred to all of them the name of the Libyans, that race which was settled in the territory of Cyrene, where the Greeks first learned of their existence. In Egyptian memorials we find them again under the name of Rebu (we should observe here, once for all, that neither Egyptian speech nor Egyptian writing has an L, and so in foreign words every R may be read as an L). The name Rebu, as the Greek form of the name tells us, was pronounced Lebu [Libu]. To the east of these Libyans proper, in the desert plateau of the country of Marmarica, dwell the Tuhennu, who spread as far as the borders of Egypt, and even also settled in the western portion of the Delta. Further westward, presumably in the neighbourhood of the Syrtes, we find the Mashauasha. The Greeks, especially Herodotus, have preserved for us a great number of other names. All these tribes, to which the dwellers in the oases also belong, are most closely related to one another, and form, together with the inhabitants of western North Africa, the Numidians and the Moors, a great group of nations, which we denote by the term Libyan or Moorish, or in modern terminology the group of Berber nations. The Libyans are light in colour; on the Egyptian monuments they are represented by a white-gray skin tint.
In the Moors the old type is to some extent still preserved. They are warlike, brave tribes, not without talent. But none of them, it is true, developed a high civilisation, although they adopted certain elements of civilisation from the Egyptians, and later on, in Mauretania, from the Carthaginians. According to the representations on the monuments, the custom of tattooing their arms and legs ruled amongst them; among the engraved signs we also meet with the symbol of Nit, the patron goddess of Saïs, whose population would appear to have consisted chiefly of Libyans.
As in the west, Libyans and Moors, to judge from their language, are connected with the Egyptians, so this is true in the south of a great number of tribes east of the Nile Valley. These are the ancestors of the modern Bedia tribes (i.e. of the Ababde, the Bischarin, and others, dwelling in the deserts and steppes east of the Upper Nile Valley), and of their relations the Falaschas, the Gallas, the Somali. Among them the country and people of Cush attained particular pre-eminence in antiquity; they were the southeastern neighbours of the Egyptians, who had their original settlements in the wastes and steppes of the mountain country east of the Nile. In the course of history they press forward against the negroes of the Nile Valley, the ancestors of the modern Nubians, and finally establish here a powerful empire.
The Hebrews and the Assyrians are accustomed to call this country Cush, and we too are in the habit of using this name Cushite instead of Egyptian. The Greeks call them Ethiopians. In the Christian era this name was adopted by a people living much farther south, the Semitic inhabitants of the great highlands of Habesh (Abyssinia), and this people and its language (Ge-ez) are therefore to-day called Ethiopian. But care must be taken not to transfer this term of modern usage in its modern significance to the circumstances of antiquity. The Ethiopia of antiquity is geographically about coterminous with modern Nubia.
A still more bewildering confusion has been engendered by the term Cushites. In the Old Testament, in the review of the races taking their departure from Noah, the name Cush has been transferred to Babylonia (Gen. x. 8; possibly also in the story of the Fall, ii. 13). This is to be explained by the fact that the robber mountain horde of the Kossæans, or, as they called themselves, the Kasshu, maintained supremacy for centuries in Babylonia; this name was identified by the Hebrew narrator with that denoting the African tribe. Recent experts have derived the most illusory consequences from this misunderstanding. In consequence of it the Cushites have become for them an Asiatic-African aboriginal people of wide extent, appearing everywhere and never at home; and wherever we encounter riddles in the matter handed down to us, or a bold combination has to be made possible, these Cushites are trotted out, only to sink again into nothingness as soon as they have done their work. Conceptions of this character have found their way into ethnographical, philological, and historical works of high merit.