FROM THE CORRESPONDANT.
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS ON THE ANTIQUITY OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.
The most striking fact respecting the Egyptian monarchy is its antiquity. "Forty centuries look down upon you from these pyramids," were the sublime words of Bonaparte; but they do not express enough. The progress of archæological science shows that the reign of the Pharaohs began more than three thousand years before Christ. M. Bunsen gives the date as 4245 B.C., and M. Mariette 5004, but with some qualifications that should be mentioned. "Egyptian chronology," says he, "presents difficulties which no one, as yet, has surmounted.... To all dates before the time of Psammetichus I. (665 B.C.), it is impossible to give anything but approximations, which become more and more uncertain as we recede.... This uncertainty increases in proportion as we go back from the present age; so that, according to the methods of computation, there may be two thousand years' difference in assigning the date of the Egyptian monarchy."[181]
While fully admitting the reasonable qualifications of the learned director of the Egyptian antiquities, it is no less certain, from the discoveries already made, that the reign of the Pharaohs extends back about thirty centuries before the Christian era.
Another characteristic of this ancient nation, which is no less remarkable, is that it manifests all the signs of civilization from the beginning. "It is a phenomenon worthy of the most serious attention," says Champollion-Figeac, "that Egypt possessed in those remote ages all the civil, religious, and military institutions indispensable to the prosperity of a great nation, and all the enjoyments resulting from the perfection of the arts, the advantages assured by the authority of the civil and religious laws, the culture of the sciences, and a profound sentiment of the dignity and destination of man."[182]
"Egyptian civilization manifests itself to us fully developed from the earliest ages, and succeeding ones, however numerous, taught it little more,"[183] says M. Mariette.
"What is most extraordinary about this mysterious civilization is that it had no infancy.... Egypt, in this respect as in so many others, is an exception to the laws to which the Indo-European and Semitic races have accustomed us. It does not begin with myths, heroic exploits, and barbarism."[184] The author we have just quoted sought in vain, with all his mind and learning, for the cause of this strange phenomenon. "Egypt," says he, "is another China, mature and almost decrepit from its birth, and in its monuments and history there is something at once childlike and old."
This ingenious explanation excites a smile, but not conviction. Rather than admit revelation—that is to say, the intervention of the divine agency in the creation of man and the formation of primitive nations—many learned men of our day prefer to take refuge in the most singular and inadmissible theories. According to them, human society must "commence with myths and barbarism," and man himself with the savage nature of the brutes. But they are forced to acknowledge that Egypt is a decided exception to this theory.
"The gigantic labors of the Suez Canal in removing the immense accumulations of sand, so often amassed as if to preserve the past history of the world, have not revealed a single vestige of uncivilized men who, before the deluge, were scattered over the rest of the earth."[185]
To resolve the problem of ancient Egyptian civilization, we propose an explanation more conformable to the traditions and the dignity of the human race. It is true, this explanation is not new, for it was evident to the sages of pagan times a long time before it was fully unfolded by Christian philosophers. Socrates taught that "the ancients, better than we and nearer the gods, had transmitted by tradition the sublime knowledge they had received from them." Plato adds that "the earliest of mankind, issuing from the hands of the gods, must have known them as well as we know our own fathers, and that it is truly impossible not to believe the testimony of the children of the gods."