What the wise men of Greece perceived through the thick veil of paganism, we behold clearly by the light of Christianity and the Holy Scriptures. It seems to us a simple thing to believe that the Egyptian nation, the first founded, not many centuries after the deluge, must have been organized according to the principles of the national law of which the descendants of Noah had not yet lost the tradition. "If we believe in the truth of the Scriptural accounts," says an illustrious promoter of social reforms in England,[186] "we must also believe that when the families descended from Ham and Japheth began their long migrations, they bore with them the religious traditions they possessed in common with the children of Shem.
"As to those who will not accept the testimony of the book which, to give it the most unpretending of its august titles, is the most ancient and most venerable document of human history, we could reply that the reasoning still remains the same. The progress of ethnological and philological researches furnishes us with evident proofs of a continued migration of the Touranian and Aryan races towards the north and west from places necessarily undefined, but certainly from the vicinity of the nomad patriarchs. On the other hand, nothing shows that their traditions have a different source from that given in the Book of Genesis—the three divisions of Noah's family. If, then, everything seems to demonstrate the intimate connection of these primitive races with the Semitic tribes, how could the descendants of Ham and Japheth have left behind the irreligious traditions when, for the first time, they left their brethren?"
The descendants of Ham, ancestors of the first Egyptians, doubtless preserved, with their religious traditions, the moral principles that guarantee the existence and perpetuity of domestic life, and the notions of the arts indispensable to its comfort. "With the human race," says Bossuet, "Noah preserved the arts; not only those necessary to life which man knew from the beginning, but those subsequently invented. The first arts which man learned, apparently from his Creator, were agriculture, the duties of pastoral life, the fabrication of clothing, and perhaps the construction of habitations. Therefore we do not see the rudiments of these arts in the East, in those regions whence the human race was dispersed. This is why everything springs from those lands, always inhabited, where the fundamental arts remained. The knowledge of God and memories of creation are there preserved."[187]
The ruins of the Tower of Babel still show to what a degree of advancement the art of building had arrived, and the details given us in the Bible about the construction of the ark display an amount of nautical knowledge which must have been transmitted to the skilful boatmen of the Nile and the bold navigators of ancient Phœnicia.
We will not extend these preliminary observations, which we think throw sufficient light on the origin of Egyptian civilization, the incontestable antiquity of which is as enigmatical as that of the Sphynx to the astonished eyes of the modern Œdipus. A truly learned man, who shows himself by his conférences in the Rue Bonaparte thoroughly conversant with the discoveries of contemporaneous Egyptology, and who is not ashamed to seek light from revelation as well as from science, has resolved the problem in the following terms: "There is not, in the first ages of the Egyptian monarchy, the least trace of the rude beginnings of a nation in its infancy. Indeed, we should not forget that this country never passed through the savage state, and that, if the truths revealed to the patriarchs were adulterated by the race of Ham, they still retained sufficient light not to remain satisfied with material enjoyments alone."[188]
Let us now endeavor to penetrate, by the light of these principles, as far as we can into the labyrinth of Egyptian antiquities.
BOOK FIRST.
THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.
I.
DOMESTIC REGULATIONS.
The institutions which are the safeguards of family life and of property are essential to society and the perpetuity of a nation, and these foundations of the social life seem to have been as firmly established among the ancient Egyptians as their own pyramids. The sacredness of the family tie was the result of unity of marriage and respect to parents, and its perpetuity was assured by the rights of primogeniture, which were universally admitted from the royal family down to that of the most humble laborer. This was the fundamental principle of family life and of society. Therefore we see Pharaoh in the Holy Scriptures resist all the plagues God sent upon Egypt for the deliverance of the Israelites; but when the first-born of the Egyptians were smitten in one night, the king yielded at once, for the whole nation felt that a blow had been given to the very source of its existence.
The Egyptian monuments of every age prove that the paternal authority was universally regarded with great respect. On a great number of stelæ collected by M. Mariette in the museum of Boulak are these words: