And thus again Herodotus reports that the same letter which the Dorians called San, the Ionians called Sigma. Is not this more than a dialectic difference, and does it not indicate a deeper distinction of race?[229]
The connection of the Pelasgians with ancient Attica will receive further illustration from our inquiry hereafter into the general evidence of the later tradition respecting that race.
Egypt.
Egypt and the Pelasgians.
If we are to venture yet one step further back, and ask to what extraneous race and country do the Pelasgic ages of Greece appear particularly to refer us as their type, the answer, as it would seem, though it can only be given with reserve, must be, that Egypt and its people appear most nearly to supply the pattern. A variety of notes, indicative of affinity, are traceable at a variety of points where we find reason to suspect a Pelasgian character: particularly in Troy, and in the early Roman history, more or less in Hesiod and his school, and in certain parts of Greece. Many of these notes, and likewise the general character that they indicate, appear to belong to Egypt also.
The direct signs of connection between Egypt and Greece are far less palpable in Homer, than between Greece and Phœnicia. We have no account from him of Egyptians settled among the Greeks, or of Greeks among the Egyptians. The evidence of a trading intercourse between the two countries is confined to the case of the pseudo-Ulysses, who ventures thither from Crete under circumstances[230] which seem to show that it was hardly within the ordinary circle of Greek communications. He arrives indeed in five days, by the aid of a steady north-west wind: but a voyage of five days[231] across the open sea, which might be indefinitely prolonged by variation or want of wind, was highly formidable to a people whose only safety during their maritime enterprises lay in the power of hauling up their vessels whenever needful upon a beach. It was near twice the length of the voyage to Troy[232]. Hence we find that Menelaus was carried to Egypt not voluntarily, but by stress of weather: and Nestor speaks with horror of his crossing such an expanse, a passage that even the birds make but once a year[233]. If this be deemed inconsistent with the five days’ passage, yet even inconsistency on this point in Homer would be a proof that the voyage to Egypt was in his time rare, strange, and mysterious to his countrymen, and so was dealt with freely by him as lying beyond experience and measurement.
There is nothing in Homer absolutely to contradict the opinion that Danaus was Egyptian; but neither is there anything which suffices conclusively to establish it. And if he considered the Egyptians to approach to the Pelasgian type, this may cast some slight doubt on the Egyptian origin of Danaus. The Poet certainly would not choose a Pelasgian name, unless fully naturalized, for one of the characteristic national designations of the Achæans. But he is too good a Greek to give us particular information about any foreign eminence within his fatherland. It seems, however, possible that in the name ἀπίη, given to Peloponnesus, there may lie a relation to the Egyptian Apis. Apis was the first of the four divine bulls of Egypt[234]; and the ox was the symbol of agriculture which, according to the tradition conveyed by Æschylus[235], Danaus introduced into the Peloponnesus.
The paucity of intercourse however between Greece and Egypt in the time of Homer does not put a negative on the supposition that there may have been early migration from the latter country to the former.
It has been questioned how far the ancient Egyptians were conversant with the art of navigation. The affirmative is fully argued by Mr. M’Culloch[236] in his commentaries on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But it is plain that the Egyptians were not known to Homer as a nautical people. Not only do we never on any occasion hear of them in connection with the use of ships, but we hear of the plunder of their coast by pirates, when they confined themselves to resistance by land. This want of nautical genius agrees with all that we learn of them in Holy Scripture. And it places them in marked resemblance to the Pelasgian races generally: to the Arcadians[237]; to the Trojans; to the early Romans, who paid no serious attention to the creation of a fleet until the second Samnite War B.C. 311, or, as Niebuhr thinks, then only first had a fleet at all[238]: and again, to the landsmanlike spirit of Hesiod, who calls himself
οὔτε τι ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος, οὔτε τι νηῶν,