THE EXPLANATION OF THE COVER-PLATE.

I have been given to understand that the [cover-plate] of this volume needs some explanation: if so, it can now only be inserted on an additional fly-leaf.

At the top is the familiar, winged, serpent-supported globe of the old Egyptians. This, as every body knows, is generally found over the main entrances of the temples, and on the heads of mummy cases. In speaking on such subjects we must not press words too far. But I believe it may be taken for what we may almost call a pantheistic emblem, compounded of symbols of three of the attributes of Deity, as then imagined. The central globe, the sun, represents the source of light and warmth, and, therefore, of life. The serpents represent maternity. The wings, beneath which the hen gathers her chickens, represent protection. This is one interpretation.

There might have been, and doubtless were, contained in the emblem other ideas, irrecoverable now by the aid of the ideas that exist in our minds. At all events, theological emblems, like theological terms, must vary in their import from time to time, in accordance with the varying knowledge of those who use them: for they can be read only by the light of what is in the mind of the reader. This emblem, therefore, may not always have stood to the minds of the old Egyptians for precisely the same conceptions. The above interpretation, however, probably contained for them, for some millenniums, its main and most obvious suggestions; suggestions which were for those early days a profound, though easily read, exposition of the relations of nature to man, and which are very far from being devoid of, at all events, historical interest to the modern traveller in Egypt.

For the lower division of the plate, the author of the volume is responsible. It is meant to illustrate the statement on [page 15], that the agricultural wealth of Egypt that is to say its history, results in a great measure from the fact of its having a winter as well as a summer harvest. The sun is represented on the right, at its winter altitude, maturing the wheat crop, which stands for the varied produce of the temperate zone; on the left, at its summer altitude, maturing the cotton crop, which stands for the varied produce of the tropical, or almost tropical, zone. Both have been grown beneath the same Palm tree, which symbolizes the region itself. The unusually erect Palm tree in the plate, was cut from a photographic portrait of one which we may trust is still yielding fruit, and casting on the rock-strewn ground the shade of its lofty tuft of wavy leaves, in the Wady Feiran, to the north-east of Mount Sinai. The black diagonal line gives the equator of the sky at the latitude of Cairo, which is taken, for the purposes of the illustration, as the mean latitude of Egypt. This is also indicated by the Pyramid.

The pathway of the sun is given as it is represented on one of the finest and most precious monuments of old Egypt in its proudest days—the wonderfully instructive monolithic alabaster sarcophagus of the great Sethos, Joseph’s Pharaoh, at all events the grandfather of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. It is now in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields ([page 138]). This firmamental road way of the great luminary (the contemporary explanation of the “firmament,” in our English version, of the first chapter of the Pentateuch, the “stereõma” of the Septuagint) is so sculptured on the sarcophagus, originally it was also so coloured, as to indicate granite. The granite—this I regret—cannot be brought out distinctly on the plate.

The beneficent action of the mysterious river, which made, and maintains Egypt, is suggested by the three wavy lines, the old hieroglyphic for water.

The star-sown azure, which suggests the supernal expanse, the most glorious, and the most instructive scene the eye and the mind of man are permitted to contemplate, is taken from the vaulted ceiling of the temple of Sethos and Rameses at primæval This ([page 100]).

How deep is the interest with which these facts and thoughts affect the mind!

EGYPT OF THE PHARAOHS
AND OF
THE KHEDIVÉ

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Duty and Discipline of Extemporary Preaching.

Second Edition.

C. Scribner & Co., New York.

A Winter in the United States:

Being Table-talk collected during a Tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.

John Murray, London.

A Month in Switzerland.

Smith, Elder, & Co., London.

EGYPT OF THE PHARAOHS
AND OF
THE KHEDIVÉ

BY
F. BARHAM ZINCKE
VICAR OF WHERSTEAD AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN

HUMANI NIHIL ALIENUM

SECOND EDITION, MUCH ENLARGED,
WITH A MAP

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1873

All rights reserved

DEDICATION

To my Stepson, Francis Seymour Stevenson

I Dedicate this Book

IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL MAY SOME DAY
CONTRIBUTE TOWARDS DISPOSING HIM TO
THE STUDY OF NATURE AND OF MAN
SINGLY FOR TRUTH’S SAKE

PREFACE
TO
THE SECOND EDITION

The best return in my power for the favourable reception the reading public, and many writers in the periodical press, have accorded to this book, is to take care that the Edition I am now about to issue shall be as little unworthy as I can make it of the continuance of their favour; though, indeed, this, which they have a right to expect, is no more than I ought to be glad to do for my own sake.

I have, therefore, carefully revised the whole volume. In this revision I have, without omitting, or modifying, a single statement of fact, or of opinion, introduced as much new matter as nearly equals in bulk a fourth of the old. These additions include a few reminiscences of my Egyptian tour, which had not recurred to me while engaged on the original work; but, in the main, they consist of fuller developments of some of its more important investigations and views.

As I find that several copies of the first edition were taken off in the autumn, and early winter, by persons who were about to proceed to Egypt, I have, for the convenience of any, who, for the future, may be disposed to use the work as a travelling companion in the land of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé, added a map of the country and an index: the former, I trust, will be found a good example of the accuracy of Messrs. Johnston’s cartography.

Wherstead Vicarage: January 16, 1873.

INTRODUCTION

Those particulars of the History of Egypt, and of its present condition, in which it differs from other countries, are factors of the idea this famous name stands for, which must be brought prominently into view in any honest and useful construction of the idea. Something of this kind is what the author of the following work has been desirous of attempting, and so was unable, as he was also unwilling, to pass by any point, or question, which fell within the requirements of his design. His aim, throughout, has been to aid those who have not studied the subject much, or perhaps at all, in understanding what it is in the past, and in the present, that gives to Egypt a claim on their attention. The pictures of things, and the thoughts about them, which he offers to his readers, are the materials with which the idea of Egypt has been built up in his own mind: they will judge how far with, or without, reason.

The work had its origin in a tour the author made through the country in the early months of this year. It consists, indeed, of the thoughts that actually occurred to him at the time, and while the objects that called them forth were still before him; with, of course, some pruning, and, here and there, some expansion or addition. They are presented to the reader with somewhat more of methodical arrangement than would have been possible had the hap-hazard sequence, in which the objects and places that suggested them were visited, been adhered to.

As he started for Egypt at a few hours’ notice, it did not occur to him to take any books with him. This temporary absence of the means of reference, and verification, will, in some measure, account for the disposition manifested throughout to follow up the trains of thought Egyptian objects quicken in the beholder’s mind. These excursus, however, as they will appear to those who take little interest in the internal, and ask only for the external, incidents of travel, have been retained, not merely because they were necessary for what came to be the design of the work, but also because, had they been excluded, the work would have ceased to be something real; for then it would not have been what it professes to be, that is, a transcript of the thoughts which the sights of Egypt actually gave rise to in the authors mind.

Wherstead Vicarage: May 13, 1871.

CONTENTS

Transcriber’s Note: The map is clickable for a larger version.

EGYPT

EGYPT OF THE PHARAOHS,
AND OF
THE KHEDIVÉ.

CHAPTER I.
EGYPT AND THE NILE.

Quodque fuit campus, vallem decursus aquarum

Fecit.—Ovid.

The history of the land of Egypt takes precedence, at all events chronologically, of that of its people.

The Nile, unlike any other river on our globe, for more than the last thousand miles of its course, the whole of which is through sandy wastes—the valley of Egypt being, in fact, only the river channel—is not joined by a single affluent. Nor, in this long reach through the desert, does it receive any considerable accessions from storm-water. From the beginning of its history—that is to say, for more than five thousand years, for so far back extend the contemporary records of its monuments—Egypt has been wondering, and, from the dawn of intelligent inquiry in Europe, all who heard of Egypt and of the Nile have been desiring to know what, and where, were the hidden sources of the strange and mighty river, which alone had made Egypt a country, and rendered it habitable.

Nowhere, in modern times, has so much interest been felt about this earliest, and latest, problem of physical geography as in England; and no people have contributed so much to its solution as Englishmen. At this moment the whole of the civilised world is concerned at the uncertainty which involves the fate of one of our countrymen, the greatest on the long roll of our African explorers, who has, now for some years, been lost to sight in the perplexing interior of this fantastic continent, while engaged in the investigation of its great and well-kept secret; but who, we are all hoping, may soon be restored to us, bringing with him, as the fruit of his long and difficult enterprise, its final and complete solution.[1] Thoughts of this kind do not stand only at the threshold of a tour in Egypt, as it were, inviting one to undertake it, but accompany one throughout it, deepening the varied interest there is so much everywhere in Egyptian objects to awaken.

One of the first questions to force itself on the attention of the traveller in Egypt is—How was the valley he is passing through formed?

This is a question that cannot be avoided. It was put to Herodotus, more than two thousand years ago, by the peculiarities of the scene. He answered it after his fashion, which was that of his time. It was, he said, originally an arm of the sea, corresponding to the Arabian Gulf, the Red Sea; and had been filled up with the mud of the Nile. Those were days when, as was done for many a day afterwards, the answers to physical questions were sought in metaphysical ideas. The one to which the simple-minded, incomparable, old Chronicler had recourse on this occasion was that of a supposed symmetrical fitness in nature. There is the Red Sea, a long narrow gulf, a very marked figure in the geography of the world, trending in from the south, on the east side of the Arabian Hills. There ought therefore to be on the west side of this range a corresponding gulf trending in from the north: otherwise the Arabian Gulf would be unbalanced. That compensatory gulf had been where Egypt now is. The demonstration was complete. Egypt must have been an arm of the sea, which had been gradually expelled by the deposit from the river. This argument, however, is not unassailable, even from the fitness-of-things point of view. Had the fitness-of-things been in this matter, and in this fashion, a real agent in nature, it should have made the valley of Egypt somewhat more like the Red Sea in width; and it should also have interdicted its being filled up with mud. It should have had the same reasons and power for maintaining it, which it had originally for making it. In this way, however, did men when they first began to look upon the marvels of Nature with inquiring interest, suppose that metaphysical conceptions, creatures of the brain, were entities in Nature, and would supply the keys that were to unlock her secrets.

‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile.’ But I believe that it is the gift of the Nile in a much larger sense than Herodotus had in his mind when he wrote these words. It is the gift of the Nile in a double sense. The Nile both cut out the valley, and also filled it up with alluvium. The valley filled with alluvium is Egypt. The excavation of the valley was the greater part of the work. That it was formed in this way was suggested to me by its resemblance to the valley of the Platte above Julesburg, as it may be seen even from a car of the Pacific Railway. You there have a wide valley, like Egypt, perfectly flat, bounded on either side by limestone bluffs, sometimes inclined at so precipitous an angle that nothing can grow upon them, excepting, here and there, a conifer or two; and sometimes at so obtuse an angle that the slopes are covered with grass. These varying inclinations reproduce themselves in the bounding ranges of the valley of Egypt. The Platte writhes, like a snake, from side to side of its flat valley, cutting away in one place the alluvium, all of which it had itself deposited, and transporting it to another. It is continually silting up its channel, first in one place, and then in another, with bars and banks, which oblige the stream to find itself a new channel to the right or left. The bluffs, though now generally at a considerable distance from the river, must have been formed by it, when it was working sometimes against one, and sometimes against the other side of the valley; and sometimes also for long periods leaving both, and running in a midway channel. Why should not the Nile have done the same?

This supposition is supported by the fact that when you have a soft cretaceous limestone, and rocks that may be easily worn away, the valley of Egypt is wide. When, as you ascend the stream, you pass at Silsiléh into the region of compact siliceous sandstone, the valley immediately narrows. And when you enter the granite region at Assouan, there ceases to be any valley at all. The river has not been able, in all the ages of its existence, to do more than cut itself an insufficient channel in this intractable rock. All this is just what you would expect on the supposition that it was the river that had cut out the valley.

We are sure, at all events, of one step in this process. For there is incontrovertible evidence that, in the historical period, the river flowed at a level twenty-seven feet higher than it does at present, as far down as Silsiléh. In several places, down to that point, may be found the Nile alluvium, deposited on the contiguous high ground at that height above the highest level the river now reaches in its annual inundations. There is, besides, the old deserted channel from a little below Philæ to Assouan, into which the river cannot now rise. Here, then, is the evidence of Nature.

We have also the testimony of man to the same fact, contemporary testimony inscribed on the granite. Herodotus tells us, that from the time of Mœris, the Egyptians had preserved an uninterrupted register of the annual risings of the Nile. This Mœris of the Greeks was Amenemha III., one of the last kings of the primæval monarchy, before the invasion of the Hyksos. This register was preserved both in a written record, in which the height of the inundation was given in figures for each year, (this is what Herodotus mentions,) and also in engraved markings on suitable river-side rocks. Of these markings, we, fortunately, have a series at Semnéh, in Nubia. Sesortesen II., the father of Amenemha III., had conquered Nubia. This event took place between two and three thousand years before our era. To secure his conquest, he built at Semnéh a strong castle on one of the perpendicular granite cliffs, between which the Nile had cut its channel. His son, not content with instituting the written register Herodotus mentions, ordered that the height of the inundation should, each year, be inscribed on the granite cliffs of Semnéh, which had been fortified by his father, and where an Egyptian garrison was kept. This castle, little injured by time, is still standing. Here was the most appropriate place for such a register. It was the actual bank of the river; it was perpendicular; it was indestructible; it measured all the water that came into Egypt. Amenemha must have been familiar with the place, for it was the custom of the princes to accompany the king in war. Now, there are thirteen of Amenemha’s inscriptions at this day on this cliff. Each gives a deeply-incised line for the height of the rising, and under it is an hieroglyphic inscription, informing us that that line indicates the height to which the river rose in such and such a year of Amenemha’s reign. In every instance the date is given. In the reign of Amenemha’s successor, the invasion of the Hyksos took place, terminated the old monarchy, and for four hundred years threw everything into confusion. But, what we are concerned with, is the fact that in the reign of this king and his successor, the Nile rose, on an average, twenty-four feet above the level to which it rises now.

Here, then, are two witnesses, Nature and Man. The coincidence of their testimony is as clear and complete as it is undesigned. It may, therefore, be accepted as an undoubted fact, that the Nile is now flowing from Semnéh to Silsiléh at a level lower by at least twenty-four feet than it did at the date of the inscriptions. Nature says there was a time when it rose at least twenty-seven feet higher than at present, for at that height it deposited alluvium. There is no discrepancy in these three additional feet, though there would have been something like a discrepancy had Nature indicated three feet less than the markings.

The only question for us to consider is, how this was brought about. It could have been brought about only in one way, and that was by the river deepening its channel. As far down as Silsiléh it had been flowing at a higher level. Here there must have been a cataract, or an actual cascade. Whatever the form of the obstruction, the stream carried it away. And so, again and again, working backwards, it ate out for itself a deeper channel all the way up to Semnéh. This is just how the Niagara river is dealing with its channel. It has undertaken the big job of deepening it, from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, down to the level of Ontario. The stone it has to work in is very hard and compact. It has now done about half the work, and every one sees that it will eventually complete it. All that is required is time. The River Colorado, we are told, runs for six hundred miles of its course in a canon, a mile in perpendicular depth, all cut through rock, and some of it granitic.

This is what the Nile did in the historic period for at least two hundred miles of its course. It planed down this part of its channel to a lower level, to what may be called the level of Egypt. Why should it not have done precisely the same work in the prehistoric period for, in round numbers, the four hundred miles from Silsiléh to Cairo, that is to say, for the whole valley of Egypt? That is just what I believe it did. Of course, there were aboriginal facilities which decided it upon taking that course. There may also have been greater depressions in some places than in others. There was harder work here, and lighter work there. The planing was carried on rapidly in one district, and slowly in another. But I believe that, after making whatever deductions may be thought proper for aboriginal depressions, it is safe to conclude that the valley of Egypt was, in the main, cut out by the Nile. It did not begin to obtain its abrading power after the reign of Amenemha III.

There may have been a cataract once at Cairo. When this was carried away, another must have been developed somewhere above its site, and so on backwards all the way to Silsiléh, where we are sure that there was once something of the kind. In a still remoter past the river may not have come as far north as Cairo, but may have passed through the Faioum, or by the Natron Lakes, into the desert. This is a question which, to some degree, admits of investigation.

The river would not always be bearing on the same side of the valley. A little change in any part of the channel, and which might result from any one of a variety of causes, would deflect its course. It is so with all rivers. These causes are always everywhere at work. The river would thus be always shifting from one side of the valley to the other; and, impinging in turn on the opposite bounding hills, would always be widening the valley.

The number of side canals, especially the Bahr Jusuf, which, throughout almost the whole length of the valley, is a second Nile, running parallel to the original river, must, during the historical period, by lessening the volume of water in the main channel, have very much lessened its power of shifting its course. But every one who voyages on the Nile will become aware that this power is still very great. He will often hear, and see, large portions of the incoherent bank falling into the water. In many places he will observe the fresh face of recent landslips. On the summit of these slips he will occasionally have presented to him interior sections of some of the houses of a village which is being carried away by the stream.

On the fresh faces of recent slips I often observed that the stratification was unconformable, and irregular. This indicated that the sand and mud out of which the alluvium had been formed, had not been deposited at the bottom of a quiet lake-like inundation, but must have been formed at the bottom of a running stream, precisely in the same way as the sand-banks and mud-banks of the existing channel are always at the present time being formed. This irregular stratification is just what we might expect to find in the alluvium of a valley through which runs a mighty river, always restlessly shifting its channel to the right, or to the left.

To experts in geology there will be but little, or nothing, new in the above given account of the process, by which the Nile formed Egypt. All river valleys have been formed, more or less, by the action of running water. It is, however, interesting both to those who are familiar, and to those who are not, with such investigations, to trace out the steps of the process, in such a manner as to be able to construct a connected view of as many of its details as can be recovered. In any case this would be interesting; but here it has an exceptional, and quite peculiar, interest, for it enables us to picture to the mind’s eye how the whole of the most historical country in the world was formed by the most historical river in the world—a physical operation, on which much that man has achieved, and, indeed, on which what man is himself at this day, very largely depended. Pictures of this kind are only one among the many helpful contributions, which science can now make to history.

I was not in Egypt during the time of the inundation; I can, therefore, only repeat on the authority of others, that for the first few days it has a green tint. This is supposed to be caused by the first rush of the descending torrents sweeping off a great deal of stagnant water from the distant interior of Darfour. This green Nile is held to be unwholesome, and the natives prepare themselves for it by storing up, in anticipation, what water they will require for these few days. The green is succeeded by a red tint. This is caused by the surface washing of districts where the soil is red. The red water, though heavily charged with soil, is not unwholesome. With respect to the amount of red in the colour of the water of the inundation, I found it stated in a work which is sometimes quoted as an authority on Egyptian subjects, that it is so great that the water might be mistaken for blood. This I do not understand, as the soil this water leaves behind has in its colour no trace of red. By the time the water of the inundation reaches the Delta, it has got rid of the greater part of its impurities. This causes the rise of the land in the Delta to be far slower than in Upper Egypt. In winter, when the inundation has completely subsided, the water, though still charged with mud, in which, however, there is no trace of red, is pleasant to drink, and quite innocuous. The old Egyptians represented in their wall-paintings these three conditions of the river by green, red, and blue water.

For myriads of years this mighty river has been bringing down from the highlands of Abyssinia and Central Africa its freight of fertile soil, the sole means of life, and of all that embellished life, to those who invented letters, and built Karnak. It is still as bountiful as ever it was of old to the people who now dwell upon its banks; but to what poor account do they turn its bounty! How great is the contrast between the wretchedness this bounty now maintains, and the splendour, the wealth, the arts, the intellectual and moral life it maintained four and five thousand years ago!

The Egyptians have a saying, with which, I think, most of those who have travelled in Egypt will agree, that he who has once drunk the water of the Nile will wish to drink it again.

CHAPTER II.
HOW IN EGYPT NATURE AFFECTED MAN.

Continuo has leges, æternaque fœdera certis

Imposuit natura locis, quo tempore primum

Deucalion vacuum lapides jactavit in orbem.—Virgil.

The physical features, and peculiarities of a country are one of the starting-points in the history of its people. If we do not provide ourselves with a knowledge of these matters before we commence our investigation of what the people were, and did, the character of the people, and of the events is sure very soon to make us feel the want of it. It is so in a higher degree with the history of the Egyptians, than with that of any other people. They were, emphatically, a people that stood alone; and the peculiarities of the people were the direct result of the peculiarities of the country.

Its environment by the desert gave it that security, which alone in early days could have enabled nascent civilization to germinate and grow. It possessed also a soil and climate which allowed its inhabitants to devote themselves to some variety of employments and pursuits, and so prevented their being all tied down to the single task of producing food. The absence of these two great natural advantages elsewhere placed insurmountable difficulties in the way of advancement in other parts of the world, so long as the arts by which man battles with nature were few, and feeble; and the organization of society in consequence only rudimentary. So was it, for instance, in Europe, at the time when Egypt was at the zenith of its greatness; where, too, for long centuries afterwards, nothing could have been done without the aid of slavery, which alone made mental culture possible for the few at the cost of the degradation and misery of the many. Egypt was differently circumstanced. There one man might produce food sufficient for many. The rest, therefore, could devote themselves to other employments, which might tend, in different ways, to relieve man’s estate, and embellish life. In this matter the river and the climate were their helpers. The river manured with an annual warp, irrigated, cleaned, and softened the land; and the climate, working harmoniously with the river, made the operations of agriculture easy, speedy, certain, and very productive. What in other countries, and in later times, the slow advances in arts, and knowledge, and in social organization, as the successive steps became possible, brought about for their respective inhabitants, Nature did, in a great measure at once, and from the first, for the Egyptians.

Another of the early hindrances to advancement arose out of the difficulties of communication, which prevented either a military force from maintaining itself away from home, or a single governing mind from acting at a distance. Of course in matters of this kind the effects of the want of sufficient means of communication are greatly aggravated by the want of foresight, and the distrust men have in each other, which belong to such times and circumstances. Nothing but the organization of tribes and cities can be accomplished then. Egypt, however, had advantages in the great and varied gifts of nature to which our attention is now directed, which enabled her, in some remote prehistoric period, to emerge from this politically embryonic condition, and to form a well-ordered and homogeneous state, embracing a population of several millions, who were in possession of many of the elements of wealth and power, and had attained to a condition that would suggest, and encourage culture. Of these advantages, that which came next in order to the soil and climate, was that its good fortune had conferred upon it a ready-made means of communication, absolutely complete and perfect; no part of the country, either in the valley of Egypt, or in the Delta, being more than a few miles distant from one of the most easily navigable rivers in the world.

And that nothing might be wanting, this advantage was equalised to all by a provision of nature that, at a certain season of the year, the descending current of the river should, for the purposes of navigation, be overbalanced by a long prevalence of northerly winds; thus giving every facility, by self-acting agencies, to both the up and the down traffic.

I may also observe that the river ran precisely in that direction in which it could serve most effectually as a bond of union, by serving most largely as a channel of commerce. If its course had been along the same parallel of latitude, that is, from East to West, or reversely, then throughout its whole length the productions of its banks would have been the same. It would, therefore, have been of little use as a means of commercial interchange. Where there was no variety of productions there would have been no commodities to exchange. But as its course was in the direction of a parallel of longitude, its stream offered a highway for the exchange of the varying products of the different degrees of latitude it passed through. This difference in the direction of their courses already constitutes a vast difference in the comparative utility of the streams of the Amazon and of the Mississippi; and must ensure to them very dissimilar futures.

Another of the provisions that had been made for the early progress of the country was something quite unique: there was not by nature, and there could not be constructed by man, a single strong place in the whole of Egypt, such as would enable powerful and ambitious individuals, or malcontent factions of the people, to maintain themselves in independence of the rest of the community, or to defy the government. Nature had supplied no such places, and the conditions of the country were such that they could not be formed. This is a point which involves so much that I will return to it presently.

It ought not to be unnoticed here, for it is one of the important peculiarities of the country, that Egypt yields both a winter and a summer harvest. The overflow of the river, and the warmth of the winter sun suffice for the former, which consists of the produce of temperate regions; and artificial irrigation for the latter, which consists of the produce of the tropics. This gives it the advantage of the climates of two zones; the one temperate and the other tropical; for, though it lies to the north of the tropic, its winter, by reason of its environment by the heat-accumulating desert, resembles our summer, and its summer, for the same reason, that of the tropics. Egypt is thus enabled to exceed all other countries in the variety of its produce. Both its wheat and its cotton are grown beneath its palms. This variety of produce ought to contribute largely to the wealth, and well-being of a country; and it was, we know, a very considerable ingredient in the greatness of the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

The characteristics of surrounding nature had corresponding effects on the ideas, too, and sentiments of the ancient Egyptians. We may, for instance, be absolutely certain that had they lived in an Alpine country, although they might have had the power of commanding the requisite materials on easier terms, they never would have built the Pyramids, for then an Egyptian Pyramid would have been but a pigmy monument by the side of nature’s Pyramids. But as these structures stood in Egypt, when seen from the neighbourhood of Memphis and Heliopolis, and throughout that level district of country, they went beyond nature. There they were veritable mountains; and that is what the word means. There were no other such mountains to be seen. In that was their motive. Man had entered into rivalry with nature, and had outdone nature.

So was it with one instance. And so was it on the whole, generally. The guise in which nature presented herself to the eye of the Egyptian was grand and simple. Nature to him meant the broad beneficent river; the green plain; the naked bounding ridge on the right hand, and on the left; upon, and beyond these the lifeless, colourless desert; above, the azure depth traversed by the unveiled sun by day, and illumined with the gleaming host of heaven by night. Here were just five grand natural objects, and there were no more. We rehabilitating to our mind’s eye the scene, must add a sixth, the orderly, busy, thronging community itself. But to them these five objects were all nature. No dark forests of ancient oak, and pine; no jutting headlands; no island-sown seas; no hills watered from above, nor springs running among the hills; no cattle upon a thousand hills; no shady valleys; no smoking mountains. Just five grand objects; everywhere just the same, and nothing else. Their thoughts and sentiments could only have been a reflection of nature (their mind as a glass reflected nature), and of the instincts which the form of society nature had imposed upon them gave rise to. And their acts could only have been the embodiment of their thoughts and sentiments, which must needs have been in harmony with surrounding nature. And hence the character of the people, which was grand and simple; but withal sensibly hard, somewhat rigid and formal, without much tenderness, and with little geniality; solid, grave, and serious.

Under such circumstances the individual was nothing. There could be no Homeric Chieftains; no Tribunes of the people; no eccentricities of genius. The community was an organism, of which every member had his special functions and purpose; a well-ordered machine which did much work, and did it smoothly.

This complete organization of society—it was what the gifts and arrangements of nature had enabled them to attain to—had brought them face to face with the ideas of law and justice. But under their form of society—and it has not been different under other forms the world has since seen—it was understood that some laws, which were necessary, were not good, and that justice did not rule absolutely. We see—it shows itself in all that they did—that their minds were too thorough, and logical, to rest satisfied under these contradictions; they therefore worked out for themselves to its legitimate, and complete development the old Aryan thought of a life beyond this present existence: this was that western world of theirs, in which no law would be bad, and in which there would be no miscarriage of justice. And thus it came to be that their doctrine of a future life was the apotheosis of their social ideas of law, and justice, and right.

And nature encouraged them in this belief. Every day they saw the sun expire in the western boundary of the solid world; and the next morning rise again to life. They saw also the mighty river always moving on to annihilation in the great sea, just as the sun sank every evening into the desert: but still it was not annihilated. Its being was lost, and was recovered, at every moment. It was ever dying, but equally it was ever living. These two great phenomena of nature (through our increased knowledge they teach other lessons now) aided the idea which the working of society was making distinct in their apprehension, and confirmed them in the belief of their own immortality. With the Egyptian also death would not be the end: the renewal he beheld in the sun, and in the river, would not fail himself.

The complete organization of the whole population had been rendered possible by the peculiar advantages of the country. The enterprising among the Pharaohs availing themselves of this complete organization, and of these peculiar advantages, were thereby enabled to command the whole resources of Egypt, and to wield the whole community at their will, as if it had been but one man.

I reserved for separate and fuller consideration the point that nature had nowhere provided Egypt with a single spot where the ambitious, the discontented, or the oppressed could maintain themselves; or to which, we may add, they could even secede. In this respect also, Egypt is quite unique. The configuration of the country, combined with the absence of rain, brought about this peculiarity. The valley of Egypt, speaking roundly, is five hundred miles long, and five miles wide, with a broad navigable river flowing through the midst of it. The Government will always be in possession of the river. It follows then that before the disaffected can be drawn together in formidable numbers at any rendezvous—for the distances they would have to traverse would not admit of this—the Government will be able to send troops by the river in sufficient force to disperse them; or, at all events, to prevent their receiving reinforcements.

A second reason is, that these handfuls of isolated insurgents must always remain within reach of the Government troops sent against them. They would not be able to withdraw themselves from the flat, open banks of the river; for there is nowhere vantage ground they could occupy, except in the desert; and there in twenty-four hours, that is before they could be starved, they would by thirst be reduced to submission. For, from the absence of rain, there are no springs on the high ground; and from the same cause the nitre accumulates in the soil to such a degree, as to render the well-water brackish, and unfit for drinking.

A third reason is the dependence of the agriculture of Egypt on irrigation. The people, therefore, in any neighbourhood cannot intermit their attention to their shadoofs and canals for the purpose of insurrection, or for any other purpose whatsoever. Were they to do so starvation would ensue. The Government also, being in possession of the river, could at any moment stop the irrigation, by destroying the shadoofs and canals, of a malcontent district.

Here, then, are three reasons, any one of which would, singly, be sufficient to make the Government in Egypt omnipotent. What conceivable chance, then, can the people have, when all the three are, at all times, combined against them? This explains much in the past and present history of the country. Nature had decided that in it there should be no strongholds for petty potentates, no castles for freebooters, no mountain fastnesses for untameable tribes, no difficult districts to harbour insurgent bands; no possibility of getting away from the bank of the river; no possibility of withdrawing attention, for a time, from the most artificial of all forms of agriculture. For long ages the wandering Arab of the desert was the only possible disturber of the peace of this exceptional country. Nature first gave to it, in its singular endowments, the means of union; and then eliminated those physical obstacles to its realization which, elsewhere, for long ages proved insurmountable. The point to be particularly noted here is, that these circumstances have ever given to the Government for the time being every natural facility for uniting the whole country into a single State, and ruling it despotically.

The Delta is no exception, for the branches of the river, and the canals by which this whole district is permeated, and the absence of defensible positions, reduce it, in respect to the points I have been speaking of, to the same condition as that of the long narrow valley above it.

A time may come when the moral force of public opinion will outweigh, and overmatch these natural facilities for establishing, and working a despotism; but there is no indication in the existing condition of the country of such a time being at hand. And that this is the only force that can be of any effect in such a country is demonstrated by its history. In the remote days of its greatness there was in some sort a substitute for it in the priestly municipal aristocracy, or oligarchy, of each city. The priests were the governing class, and supplied the magistracy. They were an united and powerful body. Wealth, religion, knowledge, the habitual deference of the people, made them strong. They thus became, to some considerable extent, a bulwark, behind which, in each separate city, some of the rights of person and of property could find protection from the arbitrary caprices of despotism. In this way something that was in the mind of man was at that time counterworking the consequences of physical arrangements: and this only is the way in which a country so circumstanced can be helped in the future.

Nothing, however, of this kind is now at work in modern Egypt. It has, therefore, but one ground for the hope of escaping from the despotism which so heavily oppresses it, and that is in the chance of external aid, which means the chance that some European power should assume the protectorate of the country. It must, however, be a power in which public opinion is in favour of liberty and political justice, and in which the economical value of security for person and property is understood. The Egyptians themselves desire such a consummation. They know how blessed to them would be the day which should relieve them from the grinding and senseless exactions of an oriental taskmaster, and place them under the sway of good and equal laws. Their wish is that this beneficent protector should be England. They almost expect that it will be. I was asked, why do you not come and take possession of the country? In Egypt this appears the natural conclusion of existing conditions. But a protectorate carried out thoroughly, and unflinchingly, and entirely for Egyptian objects, would be far better for both parties than simple English possession. If we were to make a gain by ruling the country, we should always be tempted to go a little further. We should find it very difficult to stop at any particular point, or to be clean-handed at all, when everything was in our power.

The motives for interference are strong. How saddening is it to the traveller to see the poor good-natured Fellah, his naked limbs scorched by the blazing sun, baling up the water from the river, during the livelong day, for his little plot of ground; and to think that all that will be left to him of its produce will be barely enough to keep himself, and his little ones, in millet-bread and onions; all the rest having been cruelly swept away to support at Cairo unused, and unuseable, palaces and regiments, and to make a Suez Canal for the furtherance of the policy of France, but for the naval and commercial benefit of England, and to build sugar-factories for a trading Khedivé. Of what benefit to the wretched cultivator are all the bounties of Egyptian nature, and all his own heavy moil and toil? This is one of the remorseless, and purposeless oppressions done under the sun, which it would be well that some modern Hercules should arise in his might, and in his hatred of such heartless and stupid injustice, to beat down, and make a full end of. An Egypt, in which every man might reap securely the fruit of his labour, would be a new thing in the world, and a very pleasant thing to look upon. At present, the riches of Egypt mean wealth without measure for one man, and poverty without measure for all the rest of the world.

The case of the poor Fellah is very hard: so also is that of his palm-tree. It came into existence, and grew up to maturity under great difficulties. It was hardly worth while to give it space and water, and to fence it round in its early days; for so soon as it could bear a bunch of fruit, it was to be taxed. Why, then, should the oppressed villager go to the cost of rearing it? He would be only toiling for a domestic despot, or foreign bond-holder. How many a palm-tree that might now be helping to shade a village, and beneath which the children might be playing, and the elders sitting, has by this hard and irrational impost, been prevented from coming into being. And of all the gifts of nature to Egypt, this palm-tree is one of the most characteristic, and of the most useful: its trunk supplies the people with beams; its sap is made into a spirit; its fruit is in some districts a most useful article of food, and everywhere a humble luxury; baskets are made of the flag of its leaf, and from the stem of the leaf beds, chairs, and boxes; its fibres supply materials for ropes and cordage, nets and mats; it has, too, its history in Egypt, for its shaft and crown, first suggested to the dwellers on the banks of the Nile, in some remote age, the pillar and its capital. A wise ruler, whether his wisdom was that of the head, or of the heart, would do everything in his power to induce his people to multiply, throughout the land, what is so highly useful, and in so many ways. But the plan despotic wisdom adopts is to kill the bird that lays the golden egg, and by a process which shall at the same time cause as few as possible of the precious kind to be reared for the future.

Every traveller in the valley of the Nile, who can think and feel, finds his pleasure, at the sight of the graceful form of this beneficent tree, clouded by the unwelcome recollection of the barbarous and death-dealing tax that is laid upon it.

If, when the Turkish empire falls to pieces, England should shrink from undertaking, on her own sole responsibility, the protectorate of Egypt, the great powers of Europe, together with the United States of America, might, as far as Egypt is concerned, assume the lapsed suzerainty of the Porte, and become the protectors of Egypt conjointly.

CHAPTER III.
WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS?

Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius.

What were the origin and affinities of the ancient Egyptians? To what race, or races, of mankind did they belong? At what time, whence, and by what route did they enter Egypt? The answer to these questions, if attainable, would not be barren.

We have just been looking at the physical characteristics of the country, and noting some of the effects they must have had on the character and history of the people. The inquiry now indicated, if carried to a successful issue, will enable us, furthermore, to understand, to some extent, what were the aboriginal aptitudes the people themselves brought with them. These were the moral and intellectual elements on which the influences of nature had to act. The result was the old Egyptian. He was afterwards modified by events and circumstances, by increasing knowledge, and by the laws and customs all these led to; but the two conditions we are now speaking of were the starting-points, and which never ceased to have much influence in making this people feel as they felt, and enabling them to do what they did. To have acquired, therefore, some knowledge about them will be to have got possession of some of the materials that are indispensable for reconstructing the idea of old Egypt. We feel with respect to these old historical peoples as we do about a machine: we are not satisfied at being told that it has done such or such a piece of work; we also want to know what it is within it, which enabled it to do the work—what is its construction, and what its motive power.

Six thousand years before our own time may be taken as the starting-point of the monumental and traditional history of the old monarchy. This inquiry, however, will carry us back to a far more remote past.

There is but one way of treating this question: that is, to apply to it the method we apply to any question of science—to that, for instance, of gravitation, or to any other: precisely the same method applied in precisely the same way. We must collect the phenomena; and the hypothesis which explains and accounts for them all is the true one. This will act exclusively: in establishing itself it will render all others impossible.

Other hypotheses, however, which have been, or may be, entertained must not be passed by unnoticed, in order that it may be understood that they do not account for the phenomena; or, to put it reversely, that the phenomena contradict them.

When history begins to dawn, the first object the light strikes upon, and which for a long time alone rears its form above the general gloom, is the civilization of Egypt. It stands in isolation, like a solitary palm by the side of a desert spring. It is also like that palm in being a complete organism, and in producing abundance of good fruit. All around is absolute desert, or the desert sparsely marked with the useless forms of desert life. On inquiry we find that this thoroughly-organized civilization, fully supplied with all the necessaries, and many of the embellishments of life, and which is alone visible in the dawning light, must have existed through ages long prior to the dawn. It recedes into unfathomable depths of time far beyond the monuments and traditions.

Some salient particulars at once arrest our attention. The people, though African by situation, do not, at first sight, strike us as possessing, preponderantly, African affinities. If there be any, they are not so much moral, or intellectual, as physical. They appear to be more akin to the inhabitants of the neighbouring Arabian peninsula, from which there is a road into Egypt. But here also the resemblances are not great: even that of language is far from conclusive. Their complexion, too, is fairer. On neither side is there any suspicion, or tradition of kindred. There is even deep antipathy between the two. Their religion, again, and religion is the summa philosophia—the outcome of all the knowledge, physical and moral, of a people, is unlike that of their neighbours. The Greeks, however, and this is worthy of remark, thought it only another form of their own. They were laborious, skilful, and successful agriculturists; and there was no record of a time when it had been otherwise with them. They were great builders. They had always practised the ordinary arts of life, spinning and weaving, metallurgy, pottery, tanning, and carpentering. They had always had tools and music. They had a learned and powerful priesthood. Their form of government was that of a monarchy supported by privileged classes, or of an aristocracy headed by a king, and resting on a broad basis of slavery, and a kind of serfdom. Their social order was that of castes.

We cannot ascertain precisely at what point in the valley this civilization first showed, or established itself. Of two points, however, which are of importance, we are sure. It did not descend the Nile from Ethiopia, and it did not ascend it from the coast of the Delta. It is true that Memphis was the first great centre of Egyptian life of which we have full and accurate knowledge. The founder, however, of the first historical dynasty, and who appears to have made Memphis his capital, came from This, or Abydos, in Upper Egypt. We may almost infer from this that Abydos was an earlier centre of Egyptian power than Memphis.

The idea, then, of an unmixed African origin may, I think, be at once and summarily dismissed.

Something may be alleged in support of a Semitic origin. Where, however, we may ask, is the theory on behalf of which nothing can be alleged? If it were so it would never have come into existence. What we have to consider in this, as in every doubtful or disputed matter, is not what can be said in favour of certain views, or what can be said against them, but which way the balance inclines when the arguments on each side have been fairly put into their respective scales.

To begin, then, with the language, which is the most obvious ground for forming an opinion in a matter of this kind. It happens that in this case nothing conclusive can be inferred from the language. First, because in it no very decisive Semitic affinities have been made out; and, secondly, because, had they been found to be much more important than some have supposed them to be, this would not of itself prove a preponderance of Semitic blood.

Colour is rather adverse to the Semitic theory. The Egyptian was not so swarthy as the Arab; whereas, if he had been a Semite, he ought to have been, at the least, as dark. In the wall-paintings a clear red represents the complexion of the men, and a clear pale yellow that of the women. In this clearness of tint we miss the swartness of the Arab.

It is true he was darker than the Jew. Little, however, can be inferred from this, for the Jews were an extremely mixed people. Abraham came from Haran, in Mesopotamia, and is called in Deuteronomy a Syrian. He must, in fact, have been a Chaldean. The wife of Joseph was a high-caste Egyptian. The wife of Moses was a Cushite. And when the Israelites went up out of Egypt ‘a mixed multitude’ went out with them. This can only mean that in the multitude of those who threw in their lot with them there was a great deal of Semitic blood, through the remnant of the Hyksos, which had been left behind when the great mass of that people had been expelled from Egypt, and also a great deal of Egyptian blood. From these sources, then, were derived no inconsiderable ingredients for the formation of what was afterwards the Jewish nation. The great-grandmother of David was a Moabitish woman. Solomon’s mother was a Hittite, and one of his wives an Egyptian. And we know that a very considerable proportion of conquered Canaanites were eventually absorbed by their conquerors. No argument, therefore, can be founded upon the complexion of so mixed a people as the Jews.

In features, taking the sculptures and paintings for our authority, the Egyptian was not a Semite. His nostrils and lips were not so thin, and his nose was not so prominent. In this particular, which is important, he presents indications of a cross between the Caucasian and the Ethiopian, or modern Nubian.

Their social and political organization—that of castes, and of a well-ordered, far-extended state—was completely opposed to Semitic freedom and equality, in which the ideas of the tribe, and of the individual, preponderated over those of the state, and of classes.

Religion is the interpretation of the ensemble. It takes cognizance of the powers that are behind, or within, visible external nature, and of the reciprocal relations between these powers and man. The mind of man is the interpreter. As is the interpreter so will be the interpretation.

Now, from the hard simplicity of nature in the Semitic region, or from the simplicity of life and thought resulting from it, or from the early apprehension by that part of the human family of the idea of a Creator, or from other causes not yet made out (though, indeed, it is the fact, and not the cause, that we are now concerned with), there has always been a disposition in the Semitic mind to think of God as one. In the earliest indications we possess of their religious thought each tribe, each city, almost each family, appears to have had its own God. They never could have created, or accepted, a Pantheon. The idea of Polytheism was unnatural, illogical, repulsive to them. The inference, therefore, is that in the large hierarchy of heaven, which approved itself to the Egyptian mind, there could be nothing Semitic. The religion, the religious thought of Egypt, which so stirred the whole heart, and swayed the whole being of the people as to impel them to raise to the glory of their gods the grandest temples the world has ever seen, was, in its whole cast and character, an abomination to the Semite.

Next after Religion, the most important effort of the human mind is Law. Law is distinguishable from Religion. It is not an effort to embrace and interpret the whole, but a general and enforced application of some of the conclusions of that interpretation to the regulation of the conduct of men towards each other. Its principles are those of justice and expediency, but with very considerable limitations—not absolute justice, but justice as then and there understood; and not in every point and particular, but in those matters only in which evidence is possible, and the observance also of which can be enforced by penalties; nor absolute expediency, but again, as it is then and there understood, and limited to such matters as admit of being carried out, and enforced, by public authority.

This, it is plain, may be regarded—and as a matter of observation and history is still, and has in all times been, regarded—either as something distinct from, or as a department of, religion.

If treated as a part of religion, then either the very letter itself of the law, or else the principles on which it is founded, and of which it is an application, must be accepted as from God. In the former case God is regarded as the actual legislator, and sometimes going a step further, as the actual executor of His own law. In the latter case He is regarded, because He is the primary source, at all events, of its principles, as ultimately their guardian, and the avenger of their violation.

The Semitic sentiment, looked upon law in the former of these two lights. It formed this conception of it, because the people held in their minds the two ideas, that God was One, and that He was the Creator. A people who have come to regard God as one will necessarily concentrate on the idea of God all moral and intellectual attributes. Out of this will arise a tendency to exclude all merely animal attributes, and, to a great extent, such phenomena as present themselves to the thought as merely human—such, for instance, as were the attributes of Mars, Venus, and Mercury. God then, being the perfection of wisdom, justice, and goodness, is the only source of law. He is, also, the actual Lawgiver in right of His being the Creator. The world, and all that it contains, is His. His will is the law of His creation. The gods of Egypt, however, like those of Greece, were not anterior to Nature, were not the creators of Nature, but came in subsequently to it, and were in some sort emanations from it; the highest conception of them, in this relation, was that they were the powers of Nature.

Now, in this important and governing matter of law, the Egyptian mind did not take the Semitic view. God appeared to the Egyptian, not so much in the character of the direct originator, as in that of the ultimate guardian of the law, in our sense of these words. They had had kings who had been wise legislators, and the complete punishment for violations of the law would be in the life to come.

A review, then, of the whole field makes it appear highly improbable that the Egyptians were Semites.

But if they were neither African nor Semitic, what were they? There are not many alternatives to choose from. The process soon arrives at a complete exhaustion. They must have been—there is no other possible race left—mainly Aryan: that is, of the same race as ourselves.

There is no antecedent improbability in this. That an Aryan wave should have reached the Nile was, indeed, less improbable than that others, as was the case, should have reached the Ganges and the Thames. That one had not, would almost have needed explanation.

That the Egyptians themselves had not the faintest trace, either of a tradition, or of a suspicion, that it had been so, is only what we might have been sure of. No other branch of the race, from the Ganges to the Thames, had preserved any record of their ancestors’ migrations, or any tradition of their old home, or of their parentage. This only shows—which will explain much—that the migration took place at so remote a period, so long before the invention of letters, that we feel as if it might have resulted from some displacement, or variation, of the axis of our earth in the glacial epoch.

That the complexion of the Egyptians is not so fair as that of Europeans, is a remark of no weight. Europeans may have become fairer by the operation of causes analogous to those which made the Egyptians darker. Among the Hindoos, the Brahman, who is indubitably Aryan, is generally as dark as the Egyptian was. The colour of the Egyptian may have been heightened in precisely the same way as that of the Brahman; first, by intermixture with the previous possessors of the soil, and afterwards by exposure through a long series of generations, with but little clothing, to the floods of light and heat of a perennially cloudless and all but tropical sun.

They might, on their arrival, have found an Ethiopic race in possession of the valley of the Nile, and having come from a distance with but few women, may have largely intermarried with the conquered, and displaced aborigines.

That there had been some intermixture may be inferred from the complexion of the Egyptians, and from the thickening of their features.

There is also a moral argument in favour of this supposition in the fact that the Egyptians never, even in their best days, showed repugnance to intermarriage with the Ethiopians, or even to being ruled by Ethiopian sovereigns. They followed Tirhakah and Sabaco into Syria just as readily as they had followed Sethos and Rameses. We see on the sculptures the Ethiopian Queen of Amenophis.

Had the language been manifestly Aryan in its roots and structure, this, under the circumstances, would have been conclusively in favour of our supposition. Its not being so is, however, not conclusive against it. The Northmen, who invaded, and settled in Normandy, abandoned their own language, and adopted that of France. Again, the Norman invasion led to a great modification of the language of England, but the new tongue was not that of the invaders. Indeed, it seems only in accordance with what might have been expected—that the non-Aryan element in the people having been so potent as, to a great extent, to cloud the Aryan complexion, and coarsen the Aryan features, the language which was ultimately formed, should not have been, to any great extent, Aryan.

We find caste existing in Egypt from the earliest times. This becomes intelligible on the supposition of an Aryan origin. It is a parallelism to what took place on the ground occupied in India by another, but later, offset of this race. Caste could not develop itself spontaneously in the bosom of an indigenous, and homogeneous people. It is impossible to conceive such a phenomenon under such circumstances. It must be the result of two causes: foreign conquest, and pride of blood. As to the former, we are sure that there could have been no other means by which the Egyptians could have been introduced into the valley of the Nile, as they were not indigenous Africans; and as to pride of blood, we know that this feeling exists so strongly among Aryan peoples, that it may almost be regarded as one of the characteristics of the race. It was natural, therefore, that, wherever they came to dwell on the same ground with a conquered and subject population of a colour different from their own, they should introduce this, or some equivalent, organization of society. If they had found a dark race in Europe we should have had caste in Europe; but here the hardness of the struggle for existence in old times, aided by the absence of difference in colour between the conquerors and the conquered, made it impossible. In all European aristocracies, whatever may have been their origin, we can detect traces of this old Aryan disposition towards exclusiveness founded on pride of blood.

In religion, which is for those times one of the surest criteria of race, there was so close an approximation of the gods, and of the whole system of Egypt, to those of Greece, that, as has been observed already, the Greeks supposed that the two were identical. They were in the habit of speaking of the deities of Egypt as the same as their own, only that in Egypt they had Egyptian names. Of course, it is impossible for any people to suppose that the religion of another people is identical with its own, unless the fundamental ideas of the two systems are the same. This similarity, then, indicates that they were both offsets from the same stock, and that they parted from the old home after the fundamental and governing ideas of the mythology they carried with them had been elaborated there.

But in this matter we may go much further than Greece. If we view all the Aryan religions collectively, we shall find that the one idea that was the life-giving principle in every one of the whole family was the belief in a future life. The Hindoo and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the Teuton, all alike, as if by a common instinct, agreed in this. This, therefore, is distinctly Aryan, and no religion from which it is absent could belong to that race. How, then, and this is almost a crucial test, does the religion of old Egypt stand in this matter? Exactly as it ought to do, on the supposition that it had an Aryan origin. This was its central, its formative, its vital idea. It was this that built the thousand mighty temples in which the living might learn those virtues, and practise that piety, which would be their passport to the better world to come. It was this that embalmed the bodies of the dead, whose souls were still alive. Without it the religion of old Egypt could never have been a living force, nor anything but the merest mummy of a religion. At all events, without it, it could have had no origin in Aryan thought.

Another point to be considered is that of artistic tastes and aptitudes. These are shown most conspicuously in the architecture of a people, and the subsidiary architectonic arts of sculpture and painting; they may be followed also into the arts which minister to the conveniences and embellishments of everyday life, and which are chiefly exhibited in the style of the dress of a people, and of the furniture of their houses. Here, again, I think the working of the Aryan mind is seen in old Egypt. Their ideas and tastes in these matters were singularly in harmony with the ideas and tastes that have in all ages developed themselves in the bosom of Aryan communities wherever settled. On the whole, our taste approves of what they did in these applications of man’s creative power, the necessary deductions having been made for the trammels which the fixity of their religious ideas imposed upon them; and for the fact that all that they did were but first unaided essays, uncorrected by comparisons with the arts of other people. When we consider what great disadvantages in this respect they worked under, we must come to the conclusion that no nation ever showed so much invention, or more native capacity for art. We cannot suppose that they borrowed from any other people the idea of the pillar with its ornamented capital; the arch; the ornamentation of buildings with the sculptured and painted forms of man, of animals, and of plants; the use of metallic colours; the art of making glass; the forms of their furniture; the art of embalming the dead; the art of writing; and a multitude of other arts which were in common practice among them in very remote times.

The same may be said of their aptitude for science, which has ever been a distinct characteristic of Aryans, and never of Semites. Science is a natural growth among the former, and has appeared among the latter only occasionally, and then evidently as an exotic. The mechanics, the hydraulics, the geometry, the astronomy, of the old Egyptians were all their own.

We also find among them evidences of a genius for organization in a high degree, and of a singular power of realizing to their thoughts, and of working for the attainment of, very distant objects, both of which are valuable peculiarities of the Aryan mind, and in both of which the Semitic mind is markedly deficient.

One point more. Herodotus observes that the Egyptians resembled the Greeks in being content each of them with a single wife. On our supposition, this is just what might have been expected. There are no practices among mankind so inveterate as those connected with marriage; and the ancient Egyptians, having been an offset from the race of mankind which had originally been monogamic, could not, although they had long been settled in the polygamic region, bring themselves to adopt polygamy. The primæval custom of the race could not be unlearnt. We see, too, from the sculptures that the affectionate relation between husband and wife was rather of the European than of the Asiatic pattern. The wife places her hand on the shoulder, or round the arm of the husband, to symbolize unitedness, attachment, and dependence. This is done in a manner one feels is not quite in harmony with oriental sentiment.

The last questions are—Where did they come from? and, How did they get into Egypt? I have at times thought that they came from the mouth of the Indus, or from the Persian Gulf, and entered Egypt by the way of the Red Sea. If Abydos was the first centre of Egyptian power, and the balance of historical argument inclines towards it, there seems to be no other way of accounting for its having been so than by supposing a landing at Myos Hormos, or Berenice, as they were afterwards called. In one of those harbours I can imagine the May Flowers of that old, old world, hauled up upon the beach, and the stout hearts, that had crossed in them the Indian Ocean, preparing for their inland march across the desert hills to the wondrous river. The distance is not great. On the third day they will drink its water. The natives they are to encounter are gentle, and industrious. They will dispossess them of their land, and enslave them. They will take their daughters for wives. They will increase rapidly in their happy valley. The language they brought with them will be lost, and a new language formed by their descendants, which will be mainly that of the people they subdued, and with whom they intermarried. The religion, however, and the arts they brought with them, they will never forget; and as the centuries roll on, and they have increased greatly in numbers, and come to have many goodly cities, and much wealth, they will add largely both to their religion, and to their arts. But by the time they have added to their other arts that one which will enable them to perpetuate the memory of events, so long a time will have passed, that they will have lost all tradition of how their first fathers came into the valley, and how they possessed themselves of it. For them, therefore, the history of Egypt will commence with the discovery of letters; but for us, who are able to recover something of the history of words, of races, and of mythologies, it will reach back into far more distant tracts of time.

There is no reason which should lead us peremptorily to decide against their having come by sea. There is no antecedent improbability. The distant voyages and settlements both of the Phœnicians, and of the Normans, show what can be achieved in very small vessels. Evidence to the same point was again supplied by the insignificant capacity of many of the vessels employed by some of our early trans-Atlantic explorers, and circumnavigators. And in the spirit-stirring and invigorating era of the Aryan migrations we may believe that some enterprises of this kind were undertaken. At all events, there is nothing to preclude our believing that, in the prehistoric period, Indian and Arabian vessels were wafted by the reciprocating monsoons, to and fro, across the Indian Ocean. Nor, indeed, are we at all obliged to suppose that those vessels were of insignificant capacity.

But this entrance into Egypt must have taken place at so remote a date that the physical features of that part of the world might then have been somewhat different from what they are now. The Dead Sea might not then have been thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and the isthmus we have just seen canalized might then have been navigable water.

But it will make the point in question more distinct if I endeavour to speak more precisely about it. The immigration into Egypt could not possibly have been an offset of the Aryan immigration into India, which resulted in the formation of the Hindoo, or of its westward outflow, which resulted in the formation of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. These dispersions must, we know, speaking broadly, have been contemporaneous. Their date, however, as has been already observed, was so remote that no one branch of the race retained the slightest trace of a tradition of its original seat, or of the way in which they themselves came to their new home, or of any particulars of the occurrence. We will suppose, then, that the event to which they all belong, and of which each is a part, occurred 10,000 years ago. I merely use these figures to make myself intelligible. But the Aryan immigration into Egypt belongs to a still more remote epoch, and to another order of events. In the stratifications of history its place is far lower down. It is a part of what forms a distinct and more primitive stratum. Again, for the purpose of making my meaning distinct, I will say that it belonged to a series of events which took place 15,000 years ago. The peoples and civilization of Europe, as they now exist, are to be traced back to the first-mentioned of these two world-movements. To that which preceded it may possibly be referred some fragments of a previous condition of things in Europe which have been enigmas to historians and ethnologists, as the Etruscans, the Finns, the Laps, and the Basques. The Egyptians may have been a part of that first original wave coming down freely of their own accord into Egypt. Or they may have been driven out of Persia, or from the banks of the Indus, at the epoch of the rise and outflow of the second wave. At all events, this is clear, that they were no part of the second wave itself; because their language was older than the Aryan tongue of that epoch. And if, as appears probable, it was also older than that of the Semitic peoples, they, too, must have come into being after the Egyptians.[2]

CHAPTER IV.
EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD.

Nec vero terræ ferre omnes omnia possunt.—Virgil.

Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While nature had separated it from other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on the hint. Their general policy was to seclude themselves, to which, however, their history contains some conspicuous exceptions; and to exclude foreigners; which policy, however, they, ultimately, completely reversed in the reign of Psammetichus, as the Japanese have done in our own day; and from the same motives. They carried the mechanical arts, and all that ministers to material well-being, to a high degree of perfection. Like the Japanese, they did this with what they could win from nature within the boundaries of their own country, and under what we are disposed to regard as very crippling disadvantages. Though, indeed, in respect of absolute independence in the origination of characteristic trains of thought, and of inventions, Japan, on account of the connexion of its early civilization with that of China, is estopped from entering the lists against Egypt. The moral sentiments of the Egyptians, and their social and domestic life, were entirely their own: the results of the working of their own ideas. It is this originality that makes them so interesting and instructive a study of human development. All their customs, and all that they did, were devised by themselves to meet their own especial wants. They were self-contained, and confident in themselves that they would always be able to find out both what would be best for them to do, and what would be the best way of doing it.

Their success justified this self-reliance. All the ordinary, and many of the more refined wants of man, were supplied so abundantly, and in so regular and well-ordered a fashion among them, that a modern traveller would find no discomfort, and much to wonder at and admire, in a year or two spent in such a country as was the Egypt of Rameses the Great. He would, indeed, be a very great gainer if he could find the Egypt of to-day just what Egypt was three thousand years ago.

There are no other moderately-sized countries in the world so well prepared by nature for a system of isolation, and self-dependence, as Japan and Egypt. On a large scale China and the United States possess the same advantage.

The action of free trade is to place all countries—even those that may be able to produce but one commodity the world wants, be it wool or labour, gold or iron, or even the power of becoming carriers for others—on the same footing of abundance as the most bountifully supplied, but at the cost of self-dependence, which, in its highest degree, means complete isolation. Free trade equalizes advantages, making the advantage of each the advantage of all. It does for the world on a large scale what the free interchange of no inconsiderable variety of domestic products did on a small scale for old Japan of the modern, and for old Egypt of the ancient, world.

With respect to the common arts of everyday life, I think general opinion is somewhat in error, in the direction of being unduly disparaging, as to the state in which they were throughout the East, and on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, at the period which precedes the first glimmerings of history. I believe that the knowledge of these arts was throughout that large area spread very generally. Man has no real tradition of the discovery of these arts any more than he has of the acquisition of the domestic animals, and of the most useful of the kinds of grain[3] and of fruits he cultivates. What is to the credit of the Egyptians is, that they carried the practice of them to a high degree of perfection, and rendered them singularly fruitful, and that they added to them much which circumstances made it impossible they could have borrowed from any other people. Everything done in Egypt was invested with an Egyptian, just as everything done in Japan has been with a Japanese, character.

CHAPTER V.
BACKSHEESH.—THE GIRL OF BETHANY.

And who will say ’tis wrong?—J. Baillie.

One meets few travellers in Egypt who do not speak of the incessant demands for backsheesh as an annoyance, and a nuisance. The word has become as irritating to their temper as a mosquito-bite is to their skin; and it is quite as inevitable. You engage a boat, a porter, a donkey: in each case you pay two, or three times as much as you ought; and in each case the hand that has received your overpayment is again instantly held out for backsheesh. While on the Nile I gave one morning a cigar to the reis of the boat. On walking away I heard his step behind me. I turned back, and found that he was following me to ask for backsheesh. I suppose what passed in his mind was, either that I had discovered in him some merit that entitled him to backsheesh, or that one who was rich enough, and weak enough, to give a cigar, without any provocation, would give even money to one who asked for it. A friend of mine rode over a little boy. The urchin, as he lay upon the ground writhing with pain, and incapable of rising, held up his hand, crying out, “I die now, give backsheesh!” An English surgeon sees a man fall, and break his arm. He goes to his assistance, and sets the broken limb. The man asks for backsheesh. If the wayfarer who, as he was journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho, had fallen among thieves, had been an Egyptian, he would, while the good Samaritan was taking leave of him, have addressed to him the same request. An Arab helps you up to the top of the Pyramid. You pay him handsomely, and he is satisfied. You enter into conversation with him, and he tells you that he is the Hakem of his village; that he possesses so many sheep, so many goats, so many asses, so many camels; that the wife he married last, now two years ago, is thirteen years old. You look upon him as a rich man, but, while the thought is forming itself in your mind, he holds out his hand, and asks for backsheesh.

There is, however, nothing in such requests that need cause annoyance, or irritation. These children—whether, or not, grown up, for they never arrive at mental manhood—have nothing in their minds corresponding to our ideas of pride, whether aristocratic, or republican, of a kind that might dispose them to regard such petitions as humiliating. What pride they have is that of race and of religion, which suggests to them the thought that to get money in this way is only a justifiable spoiling of the unbelieving stranger. They look, too, upon you as quite inexhaustibly rich, while they are themselves, generally, very poor. And if you are satisfied with their services—and they certainly always endeavour to do their best; or if you have any good-will towards them, with which they credit you; how is this satisfaction, or good-will, to be shown? It is ridiculous to suppose that words will suffice. There is but one thing to do, that is to give a little backsheesh. This rational way of settling the matter is the way of the East. And of old, too, we know that “the little present” figured largely in the manners and customs of that part of the world.

In Egypt, then, to blaze up with indignation at the sight of a hand held out towards you, is to misunderstand the people you are among. Moreover, indignation, whatever may be the prompting cause, is very un-Egyptian. I never met with one who had seen a native lose his temper, under any circumstances, or under any amount of provocation. You may abuse him; you may even beat him; but he still smiles, and is still ready to serve you. In this way he soon makes you feel that you are in the wrong. One cannot be angry with such people.

This ever-present idea of backsheesh may be turned to some account. I found that the only way in which I could extract a smile, or a word, from the native women was to hold out my hand to them, and ask for backsheesh. That the Howaji, as he rode by, should turn the tables on them in this way, and invert the natural order of things, by constituting himself the petitioner, and elevating them to the position of the dispensers of fortune, was enough to upset their gravity, and loosen their tongues.

I had gone from Jerusalem to Bethany with a young friend late from Harrow, great in athletics, and full of fun and good spirits. We were on foot—for who would care to go to, or return from, Bethany otherwise? and, having arrived at the village, were inquiring for what is shown as the tomb of Lazarus. The women of the place soon collected round us. One of them, in the first bloom of youth, looked like a visitant to Earth, come to enable hapless mortals to dream of the perfectness of Paradise. Her figure would have given Praxiteles new ideas. Her face was slightly oval; her features fine and regular; and her complexion such as must be rare in an Arab girl, for her lips were of a rich, if of a dusky, coral, and the rose envermeiled her nut-brown cheeks. Her eyes thought. Her beauty was about her as a halo of light. To look upon her was fascination. My admiration was speechless. Not so, however, my young friend’s; for, turning to our dragoman, he said, ‘Ask that young lady if she is married?’ My breath went from me at the sudden indignation with which she fired up.

As she walked away, giving utterance, as she went, to some angry Arabic, I looked into the faces of the women about us. It was evident that they were impressed with, and approved of, the propriety of her conduct. It will, I thought, be long remembered, and quoted, in the village as an example of the promptitude, and decision, with which an Arab girl should guard her reputation.

And now, I said to myself, we are in for it. She will go and fetch her father, or a brother, or some relative assumed for the occasion, and there will be a row. I suggested, therefore, to my young friend, ‘that the tomb was a transparent imposture; that it could only be an excavation in the rock, made by some mediæval monk; and that we should do better to go on, and look at something else.’ And so we got away.

As we left the party of women, I gave them a little more backsheesh than usual; and then told the dragoman that we would leave the place at once, but not by the road by which we had come.

We had just cleared the village, and I was congratulating myself on our having got off so speedily, when we encountered a flight of locusts. I soon became absorbed in observing their ‘numbers numberless.’ They gave me, I thought, a new idea of multitude. They blurred the sunlight almost like a cloud. I began to capture some of them, which I now have preserved in spirits.

While thus occupied, and with a feeling of wonder, at the infinitude of living things around us, growing upon me, the apprehensions I had lately felt, dropped entirely out of my mind. In this way we went on. When we had got about three-quarters of a mile from the village we came to a turn in the mountain path, far removed from any dwelling, and where all was solitude and quiet. As we approached the corner, a young woman stepped forward from behind a projecting rock, and with a gracious look, and most engaging smile, presented my young friend with a carefully-arranged and beautiful bouquet.

Could my eyes be deceiving me? No. It was no other than the exemplary young creature, who, only half-an-hour back, had shown so much and such becoming indignation.

My apprehensions, then, and precautions had been unnecessary. But, in American phrase, ‘How dreffle smart’ to combine, in so prompt and graceful a manner, the credit of being good with the pleasure of being good-natured. Could anything have been better imagined in London, or Paris?

So it seemed. But honi soit qui mal y pense. True, few can be as beautiful, few as keen-witted as the girl of Bethany. But also true that none could have been more free from thought of evil. ’Twas all for backsheesh.

And where two rupees are a marriage portion—so much to them, and so little to us—whose heart would condemn the bare-footed young tactician?

That day, as she returned to the village, her step, I can think, was lighter than usual. Perhaps she did not observe the mischief the locusts were doing to her father’s little plot of wheat.

A few days afterwards, we were riding across the hills from Bethlehem to Solomon’s Pools. Our path lay by the side of the rude old aqueduct. This is merely a trough of undressed stone, sunk to the level of the surface of the ground, on the sides of the hills it winds its way among, for about five miles, from the Pools to the town. The sinking of the aqueduct just to the level of the surface, was a way of saving it from the risks of being knocked over, or of falling to pieces, that was as wise as it was simple. If it had been raised above the ground, or buried in it, whenever it got out of order, the repair of damages would have been difficult and costly. Originally it was carried on, five miles further, to Jerusalem. We had, in our ride, reached the spot where the large-hearted king (who, like Aristotle, Bacon, and Humboldt, had seen that all knowledge was connected) had, probably, his Botanical Gardens, in which he cultivated some of the plants he wrote about; and the genius loci had just brought into my mind, his request, suggested to him, perhaps, by the interest he took in the fruit he was growing up here, ‘To be comforted with apples, for that he was sick of love,’ when we came suddenly on a party of women washing clothes. If the daughters of Bethlehem were as good-looking in Solomon’s time as they are in ours, it, we can imagine, must have strengthened his favourable disposition towards the place; and may go some way towards accounting for the aqueduct. Though, indeed, this seems a little inconsistent with his preference for apples. That, however, may have been only a temporary feeling, or, it may have been the expression of his latest and more matured experience.

But, as to those daughters of Bethlehem now in the flesh, whom we had come upon, while so usefully and creditably employed. They were much amused, as it appeared, at having been caught in such an occupation, and were laughing merrily. My young friend, as might have been expected of him, endeavoured to increase the merriment; this he did by leaning over his saddle, and saying, ‘Ateeni bosa.’ Had he spoken in English—though, of course, nothing of the kind could ever have been said by him in our downright tongue—the words would have been ‘Give me a kiss.’ The one, to whom he appeared more particularly to address himself, blazed up with instantaneous indignation, just like the girl of Bethany. With angry glance, and fierce tone, she exclaimed, ‘May your lips be withered first.’ But now I felt no apprehensions. My only thought was, that if we came back the same way, and should, by accident, find her alone, she would then, perhaps, hold out her hand, and say, ‘Your lips are a garden of roses: give backsheesh.’

CHAPTER VI.
ANTIQUITY AND CHARACTER OF THE PYRAMID CIVILIZATION.

The riddle of the world.—Pope.

That the three great Pyramids of Gizeh were erected by Chufu, Schafra, and Menkeres, the Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus of Herodotus, we now know with as much certainty as that we owe the Pantheon to Agrippa, and the Coliseum to the Flavian Emperors. We also know with equal certainty that they were built between five and six thousand years ago. From these Pyramids to the Faioum extends along the edge of the desert a region of Pyramids, and of circumjacent Necropoleis. Not far from an hundred Pyramids have been already noted. These were the tombs of royalty. The uncrowned members of the royal family, the ministers of state, the priests, and the other great men of the dynasties of the Old Monarchy, lie buried around. Their tombs, excavated and built in the rock, are innumerable. Some of them reaching seventy feet, or more, back into the mountain (the tombs of the New Monarchy at Thebes were several times as large), are constructed of enormous pieces of polished granite, most exquisitely fitted together. Some are covered with sculptures and paintings, traced with much freedom, and a grand and pleasing simplicity. They describe the offices, occupations, and possessions, and the religious ideas and practices of those for whom they were constructed.

Great was the antiquity of Thebes before European history begins to dawn. It was declining before the foundations of Rome were laid. Its palmy days ante-dated that event by as long a period as separates us from the first Crusade. But the building of the great Pyramids of Gizeh preceded the earliest traditions of Thebes by a thousand years.

In this Pyramid region, and its Necropoleis, we have a chapter in the history of our race, the importance of which every one can comprehend. It is a history which, while in the main it omits events, gives us fuller, and more genuine and authentic materials than any written history could give, for a complete understanding of the everyday life, and arts of the people. And the time for which it gives us this information is so remote, that there is no contemporary history of any other people, which we can compare with it, or with which we can in any way bring it into connexion. It has nowhere any points of contact. It is a rich stream of history that runs through a barren waste of early time, like the Nile itself through the Libyan Desert, with a complete absence of affluents.

Having, then, made out the position of this epoch with respect to general history, the next point is to ascertain as distinctly as we can what were the arts, the knowledge, the manners, the customs of the period, that is of those who were buried in these Pyramids and Necropoleis. When they lived, and what they were, give to them their historic interest and importance.

The mere naked fact that the Great Pyramid was built implies that at that, time, agriculture was so advanced, and, in consequence, so productive, and that society was so thoroughly organized, as to enable the country to maintain for thirty years 100,000 men while occupied in the unproductive labour of cutting and moving the stones employed in its construction. To which we must add the 100,000 men engaged for the ten previous years upon the great causeway which crossed the western plain, from the river to the site of the Pyramid, and over which all the materials for the Pyramid were brought. Modern Egypt could not do this. We should find it an enormous tax even upon our resources.

There is also implied in the cutting and dressing of this vast amount of stone, the supply of a corresponding amount of tools; and as granite was at that time used largely in the construction of some of the tombs and Pyramids, it implies that those tools were of the best temper.

It must also be remembered that some of these Pyramids had crossed the Nile. The unwieldy and ponderous stones of which they were constructed had been quarried in the Arabian range, and brought across the river to the African range on which the Pyramids stand. What granite had been required had been brought, the whole length of the valley, from Syené. How much mechanical contrivance does this imply! All these great blocks had to be lifted out of the quarry, to be brought down to the river, carried across, some even between five and six hundred miles down the river, and then again across the cultivated western plain to the first stage of the Libyan hills. They had to be lowered into the boats and lifted out of them. The inclined causeway was made of dressed and polished blocks of black basalt, a kind of stone extremely difficult to work. It was a mile in length. And when the blocks for the Pyramid had at last reached the further end of the causeway, they had to be lifted into their place in a building that was carried to a height of 480 feet. Herodotus mentions the succession of machines by which they were elevated from the bottom to the top. The mechanical arrangements, then, must have been well planned and executed.

In these great works we see that nothing was overlooked, or neglected. Everything that could happen was anticipated, and calculated with the utmost nicety, and completely and successfully provided for. This would, in itself alone, imply much accumulated knowledge, and habits of mind which nothing but long ages of civilization can give. No rude people can make nice calculations, can summon before themselves for consideration all the conditions of a problem, or take precautions against what may happen thousands of years after their time.

If, then, we look at these structures, such as we have them now before our eyes, and work out in our minds the conditions, both contemporary and precedent, involved in the single fact of their having been built, we see distinctly that we are not contemplating one of the earlier stages, but a very advanced stage, of civilization. All traces of the inception of the useful arts, and of social organization, are utterly wanting. We have before us a great community which, when seen for the first time, appears, Minerva-like, full-grown and completely equipped.

This is seen with equal distinctness in the representations of the common arts, and of the ordinary occurrences and practices of life, as we find them on the tombs. They are such as belong to a civilized people. Among the former we may instance the manufacture of glass, and the enamelling of earthenware with coloured glazes; and among the latter the making of inventories of the property of deceased persons.

The religion, too, we see, had already attained its full development. Its doctrines were matured, all its symbols had been decided upon, and an order of men had been set apart for the maintenance of the knowledge of it, and for the celebration of its services.

The hierarchy also of society was now completely established, and had been long unhesitatingly acquiesced in. There are no indications here either of growth, or of decay, or of any disposition to unsettle anything. The order of society is received as the order of Nature, is administered by a regular form of government, and crowned by a splendid court.

But—and this is as surprising as anything we meet with belonging to those times—they were already in possession of their hieroglyphical method of writing, and were using it regularly and largely in their monumental records; and, which is still more significant, had discovered how to form papyrus-rolls, that is to say paper, for its reception. Nor is there any indication of a time when their ancestors have been without it. In this, as in the other matters I have mentioned, there is no substantial difference between the primæval monarchy, before the invasion of the Hyksos, and the revived monarchy, which flourished after the expulsion of the Hyksos.

From whence, then, did this remote civilization come? Was it indigenous, or was it from abroad? or, if derived from these two sources, in what degree did each contribute? Is there any possibility of recovering any of the early dates, or of at all measuring roughly any of the periods of the early history? I have already said something on these questions, and shall return to them, whenever we shall have reached any point, from which there may appear to be emitted some ray of light which falls upon them.

CHAPTER VII.
LABOUR WAS SQUANDERED ON PYRAMIDS, BECAUSE IT COULD NOT BE BOTTLED UP.

Faute de mieux.

It is essential to the right understanding of any age that we have a general knowledge of its monetary and economical condition. This, which in ordinary histories is passed over with little or no notice, does, in truth, largely affect the character of men’s works and deeds, their manners and customs, and even their thoughts and feelings. It had much influence on the history of the old world: we see it distinctly at work in that of the Roman Empire. And we are now beginning to understand how largely it is influencing the course of events amongst ourselves at the present moment. With respect to the Pyramids, who was to build them, the means by which they were to be built, and that they were to be built at all, depended on the monetary and economical condition of the Egypt of that day. To elucidate this is to advance a step in the reconstruction and revivifying of the period.

Herodotus tells us that he saw inscribed on the Great Pyramid how many talents of silver (1,600 was the number) had been expended in supplying the hands employed on the work with radishes, onions, and garlic. He says he had a distinct recollection of what the interpreter told him on the subject. We believe this, because he was no inventor of fables, but an accurate and veracious recorder of what he saw and heard. The idea of history—that is, of what is properly called history, which is exclusive of intentional deception and misrepresentation—was the uppermost idea in his mind. The internal evidence of his great, varied, and precious work demonstrates this.

There is, however, another reason for our believing this particular piece of information he gives us about the Great Pyramid, which is, that it is in strict accord with what we know of the period to which his statement belongs. Silver was at that time not coined but weighed, and therefore, necessarily, the inscription would speak of such a weight of silver, and not of so many coins of a certain denomination. At that time there were not in existence any coins of any denomination. In the history of Joseph we have frequent mention of money without any qualifying terms; but on the one occasion in the narrative, where it becomes necessary to speak precisely on the subject, Joseph’s brethren do so by saying that their money was in full weight. Money then, we may suppose, as late as the time of the Pentateuch, was silver that was weighed, and not coined. This is in accordance with another statement of Herodotus, that the Lydians, the most mercantile neighbours of the Greeks, were the people who first coined money.

Now that the Egyptians had at this time no coined money, proves that their taxes—as is very much the case at this day with their chief tax, that on land—were paid in kind. In an age when silver was so scarce that the idea of coining it, for the purpose of giving to it easy and general circulation, had not occurred, and it was passing from hand to hand of the few who possessed it by weight, the actual tillers of the soil, always in the East, and not less so in Egypt than elsewhere, a poor and oppressed class, could not have had silver to pay their rents and taxes. The wealth, therefore, of Pharaoh must have consisted mainly of produce.

The next point is, that no profitable investments for what silver, or precious things, a few might have possessed, were known, or possible then. It was not only that there were no Government stocks, and no shares paying dividends, but that there was nothing at all that could be resorted to for such purposes. If a man had invested money in anything he would have stood out before the world as a rich man, and so as a man to be squeezed. Doubtless there was less of this in Egypt than elsewhere in the East, but in those early and arbitrary days there must have been, at times, even in Egypt, somewhat of it. People, therefore, would not, as a general rule, have invested had it been possible. But it was utterly impossible, for the double reason that there was nothing to invest, and nothing to invest in.

What people invest is capital. Capital is bottled-up labour, convertible again, at pleasure, into labour, or the produce of labour. But in those days labour could not be bottled up, except by a very few in the form of silver ingots. In these days every kitchen-maid can bottle up labour in the shape of coin, which is barren bottling-up, and invest it in a saving’s bank account, or in some other way, which is fruitful bottling-up. I ask permission to use these incongruous metaphors, one on the top of the other. Every grown-up person in the kingdom can bottle up labour, and invest it; and, as a matter of fact, there are few who, at one time or other of their lives, do not. Some have succeeded in doing it to such an enormous amount that they might with the accumulated store build a Pyramid greater than that of Cheops. It is, indeed, with the labour that has been bottled up by private individuals that we have constructed all our railways, docks, and gas works, and with which we carry out all our undertakings, great and small, in this country. There is no limit to our capacity for bottling up labour. It is one of our greatest exports; we send it all over the world, to Russia, to America, to India, and to Egypt itself. It is estimated that we store up somewhere about 150,000,000 pounds worth every year.

But in the time of Cheops nothing of this kind was done, nor could it have been. It is true that the nation could then produce a great deal more food than it needed for consumption, but, at the end of the year, it was none the richer. Its surplus labour had not been fixed and preserved in a reconvertible form for future needs. Its surplus production had not been thus stored up for future uses. To repeat ourselves there were, speaking generally, no ways open to them for bottling up this surplusage either in the temporarily barren, or in the continuously fruitful fashion. But there were ways open to them by which they might squander, or consume, their imperfect chances. They might, for instance, throw away their surplus food, and capacity for surplus labour, by doing no productive work for a portion of the year. They were engaged in this way in the long and numerous festivals of their gods, in their funeral processions, and other matters of this kind. The effect was the same when they made military raids on their neighbours. To this method also of using up their surplus labour and food they had frequent recourse. To these matters they were disposed more than ourselves, because, unlike ourselves, they could not save what they were thus squandering. Or they might spend much of it in excavating, sculpturing, and painting acres of tombs; or in piling up Pyramids; or in building incredible numbers of magnificent temples. This explains the magnitude and costliness of many of the works, and undertakings, of the old world elsewhere, as well as in Egypt. The point which it is essential to see is, that they could not bottle up their surplus labour of any kind in the time of Cheops; while with us every form of surplus labour, even every odd half-hour of every form of it, may be bottled up, and the interest on what has been secured in this way may itself also be secured in like manner. The only approach to this among them was made by the king when he built a treasury, which we know was sometimes done by the Pharaohs, and locked up in it his ingots of silver, and what gold, precious stones, and costly stuffs he had acquired.

But this form of bottling up labour, and which only one man in the kingdom could practise, had two objections. It was of the utterly barren sort: it paid no dividends. He had no enjoyment of any kind from it. This was the first objection; and the other was, that if it was continued too long—and this might be the result at any moment—the man who was thus hoarding up his treasures would prove to have been hoarding them up for others, and not for himself; and so he would get no particle of advantage from them.

What, then, was he to do? How was what he had to be spent in such a manner as that he might himself get something from it? How was he to have himself the spending of it? A Pyramid is utterly unproductive, and all but utterly useless. It is a building that does not give shelter to any living thing, in which nothing can be stored up, excepting a corpse, and that cannot even be entered. Still it was of as much benefit to the man who built it as leaving the surplus labour, and food he had at his disposal, and the valuables he had in his treasury, unused would be. And those who built Pyramids had at their absolute command any amount of labour, and any amount of food. Here, then, was a great temptation to raise monuments of this kind to themselves. What treasure they had might as well be sunk in stones, as remain bottled up barrenly. They would, at all events, spend it themselves, and get for it an eternal monument. They would have the pleasure of raising themselves their own monuments. They would have the satisfaction of providing a safe and magnificent abode for their own mummies.

If they had had at home Egyptian Three per Cent. Government Consols, or could have bought Chinese, Hindoo, or Assyrian Five per Cent. Stocks; or if the thought had occurred to them, which not long afterwards did occur to their successors, of reclaiming from the Desert, by irrigation, the district of the Faioum; or if they had foreseen that in times to come the Hyksos and the Persians might invade Egypt, and that possibly a rampart from Pelusium to the metropolis, such as was afterwards constructed, might assist in keeping them in check in the Desert, where there would be a chance of their perishing from thirst; or if Egypt had been, like Ceylon, a country in which mountain streams could be dammed up in the wet season for irrigating the land in the dry; or, like Yucatan, where enormous tanks for the storage of the rainfall are indispensable; then it is evident that the surplus labour and food, and the silver ingots in the King’s treasury, would have been spent in some one or other of these ways. But some of these things were not possible in Egypt, and the time for thinking of the others had not yet come. There was, therefore, no alternative. It must be something as unproductive as a Pyramid, or a temple. The intense selfishness of man, such as he was in those early days, prevented his having any repugnance to the idea of a Pyramid all for himself: it rather, on the contrary, commended the idea to his mind. And so it came about that the Pyramids were built. The whole process is as clear to us as it would be, had we ourselves, in some well-remembered stage of a previous existence, been the builders, and not Cheops and Chephren. We see the conditions under which they acted, and the mental process by which they were brought to the only conclusion possible to them.

The question may be propounded—Why was there given to these structures that particular form which from them has been called the pyramidal? Mathematics and astronomy have been summoned to answer the question; and lately the Astronomer Royal for Scotland has, in a large and learned work, endeavoured to prove that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was intended to perpetuate for ever a knowledge of scientifically-ascertained natural standards of weight, measure, and capacity. If this was the purpose of the Great Pyramid, will he allow an old friend to ask him—what, then, was the purpose of each one of those scores of other Pyramids that were constructed before and after it? No two, probably, of the whole series were precisely of the same dimensions, except, perhaps, accidentally. All suppositions of this kind have their origin in the unhistorical, or rather anti-historical practice of attributing to early ages the ideas of our own times. The first requirement for enabling one to answer this question rightly is the power of, in some degree, thinking with the thoughts of the men who themselves built the Pyramids. Though, of course, there is no more reason for doubting that every Pyramid in Egypt was intended for a tomb and sepulchral monument, just for that and for nothing else, than there is for doubting that the Coliseum was built for the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and London Bridge for enabling people to cross the Thames.

Sir John Mandeville, the greatest English traveller of the Middle Ages, and who, during his thirty-three years of wandering in the East, had served in the armies both of the Sultan of Egypt and of the Emperor of China, writing between 1360-70, of what he had seen about twenty-five years previously, tells us the Pyramids were the granaries Joseph built for the storage of the corn of the years of plenty. This is instructive: it shows how readily in ages of ignorance—the same cause still has, where it remains, the same effect—men connect old traditions, particularly if there be anything of religion about them, with existing objects: being prompted to do this by a craving to give distinctness, and a local habitation, to such traditions.

He anticipates and bars the objection that neither he, nor anyone else, had inspected the interior of the Pyramids, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they were adapted for granaries, by telling us that they were full of serpents. This is set down apparently without any other design than that of recording a curious fact, which it would be as well to mention. And, doubtless, as far as the knight knew himself, he had no other object. But in matters of this kind, experience teaches us that such people do not know themselves.

Here, then, we have an instance of the way in which extremes meet. The old knight accepts his theory without one jot or tittle of evidence in its favour, and directly in the teeth of all that had ever been recorded of the Pyramids. It is a theory which allows at most seven years for their construction; and which supposes them to have been designed for a purpose which is flatly contradicted by their form, and by all that is seen of their exterior, and known of their interior; and, too, by the history itself. One grain of science of any kind in the old knight would have lost us the lesson to be drawn from his theory.

What he did was to yield to what was to him a temptation. And this, and I say it with all due deference, is precisely what the Astronomer Royal for Scotland appears to have done. He, too, has yielded to a temptation. The old knight, five centuries and an half back, was tempted to find in these mighty monuments the Biblical narrative; and he found it. The modern Astronomer is tempted to find in them most unexpected and surprising indications, facts, and conclusions of profoundest science; and he finds them. Each was tempted after his kind.

History, which had only an embryonic and potential existence in the time of the old knight, and which even now is only beginning to assume its proper form and lineaments, and to become a living thing with power to teach, to guide, and to save from error—formerly what was taken for history often only misled—would readily have enabled each of them to have escaped the temptation that was besetting him.

It is worth noticing, by the way, that Mandeville was one of the last who saw the original inscriptions on the Great Pyramid. The construction of Sultan Hassan’s Mosk, the materials for which were supplied by the outer flakes of this Pyramid, was completed about the middle of the fourteenth century. Mandeville was in Egypt immediately before its commencement, and mentions the inscriptions. Notices of them are also to be found in several Arabian and other writers of earlier date. These were what Herodotus saw, and refers to. Some others, both in Greek and Latin, had been added during the period of Ptolemaic and Cæsarian domination. When the Father of History saw, and had them interpreted to him, they were more than 2,000 years old. The knight of St. Albans, 1,700 years later, looked upon them in blank ignorance. Here we have brought together, as it were, in a single canvas, the primæval Egyptian, the inquisitive Greek, and the adventurous Englishman. What would not one now give to behold such inscriptions, on such a building, and with such a history? They had stood for nearly 4,000 years; and were capable, probably, of standing 4,000 years more: at all events, at this day, we might, certainly, be reading what Cheops had inscribed, and Herodotus and Mandeville had seen, if (we need not say anything about Sultan Hassan) Mohamed had been less of an ignorant barbarian. What destroyed these inscriptions, just as it had overthrown a civilization it was incapable of reconstructing, was the grand and luminous formula that ‘God is God, and Mohamed his Prophet.’ This, which the true believer takes for a summary of all knowledge, is, in fact, nothing but the profession and apotheosis of all ignorance. It does excellently well for Mecca, and still better for Timbuctoo. But, however, as it is the summary of all knowledge, those who utter it have attained (how easy then is the achievement) the highest point man can reach. They can have on intellectual sympathy, or moral connexion with the ages that preceded its announcement. So also the ages that are to come (why there should be such ages does not appear) can never be, in anything, one step in advance of them. God can never be anything but God, and he never can have any prophet but Mohamed: that is to say, men must never conceive the idea of God otherwise than as Mohamed conceived it. This was what destroyed the inscriptions Cheops had placed on the Great Pyramid, and turned it into a quarry for Mosks and palaces at Cairo.

Religion, however, sooner or later, has its revenge on the theology which endeavours to confine it within narrow and inexpansive limits of this kind. The day comes when ‘the engineer is hoist with his own petard,’ that is, when the theology is strangled with its own formularies. History, too, which theologies generally ignore, has its revenge in pointing, as a warning, to the indications, scattered throughout all lands, of their former existence, and of the causes of their decay and extinction. Religion is a living thing that, from time to time, advances into a higher form. Theologies are often only fossils of forms of religion that have passed away.

But to return to our question: why was this particular form given to these tombs and sepulchral monuments? Of course, it was because this was the form which presented itself to the minds of the men of those times as the natural and proper form. But why did a thought, which does not appear obvious and appropriate to us, appear to them natural and proper? It was because in the ages that had preceded the times of the Pyramid builders, and which had left some of the ideas that had belonged to them still impressed on men’s minds, tools for quarrying and squaring stones had been scarce; and it had resulted from this scarcity of tools (sometimes it was an entire absence of them) and from the corresponding embryonic condition of the primitive ideas of art, that the tombs and sepulchral monuments of those ages had consisted merely of a shallow grave covered over with a pile of inartificially heaped-up stones, or earth. That was all that the natural desire in the survivors to perpetuate the memory of the dead had found possible. Such was, with the Aryan race, the primæval idea of a tomb and sepulchral monument, throughout the whole Aryan world. Cheops and Chephren, and their predecessors for many generations on the throne of Egypt, had acquired tools, and an unlimited supply of labour; but they had not acquired new ideas about tombs and sepulchral monuments. So when, with the vigour of thought, and boldness of conception, that belonged to a young world, conscious of its strength, they resolved to construct such tombs and sepulchral monuments as should endure while the world endured, no other form occurred to them, excepting that of the simple antique Aryan cairn. They wanted a tomb, and a sepulchral monument, and nothing but a cairn could be that. And so they built the cairns of Gizeh.

Solomon’s Temple indicated that it had been preceded by a time during which the House of God had been a tent; the marble Parthenon that it had been preceded by a time during which the ancestors of its architects had built with wood.

Suppose that it were discovered that in the language of old Egypt the word for a sepulchral monument meant literally a heap of stones, should we not be justified by the known history of the power words have over thought, in feeling certain that in those early times there could not have been a man in Egypt capable of forming any other conception of a sepulchral monument? We have some little ground for presuming that something of the kind was at work in the minds of the builders of the Pyramids. The force, that is to say, of words, as well as the force of tradition, may have constrained them to adopt the pyramidal form. At all events, we know that the word pyramid may mean the mountain, perhaps the mound, perhaps really the cairn, the heap of stones.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE GREAT PYRAMID LOOKS DOWN ON THE CATARACT OF PHILÆ.

Now I gain the mountain’s brow,

What a landscape lies below!—Dyer.

There is some interest in the comparison contained in the following figures. The Great Pyramid was originally 480 feet high. In consequence of the sacrilegious removal of its outer courses by the Caliphs to provide materials for the construction of the Mosk of Hassan, and other buildings at Cairo, its height has been reduced twenty feet, that is to 460 feet. It stands at the northern extremity of the valley of Egypt. The First Cataract is at the other, or southern extremity. These two extreme points of the valley are separated by a distance, following the windings of the river, of 580 miles. Throughout this distance the river falls on an average five inches a mile. This gives an uniformly rapid stream. To ascend this distance in a steamboat, such as are used on the Nile, requires seven days of continuous work; no time having been allowed for stoppages, except of course during the night. I need hardly say that the voyage is never accomplished in so short a time. But supposing a week has been spent in the ascent of the river, when, at the end of it, you land at the Cataract, you are at very little more than half the height you had reached when you were standing, at the beginning of the week, on the top of the Pyramid. So it would be supposing the Pyramid stood on the level of the river-bank, instead of standing, as it does, on a spur of the limestone ridge that overlooks the valley. To think, when you are entering Nubia, that a building in the neighbourhood of Cairo, so many hundred miles away, is still towering nearly 240 feet above your head, and that it has been there from an antiquity so remote that, in comparison with it, the most ancient monuments of Europe are affairs of yesterday, an antiquity that is separated from our own day by more than 5,000 years, makes one feel that those old Egyptians understood very well what they were about, when they undertook to set for themselves a mark upon the world, which should stand as long as the world endured. Judging from what we still see of the casing at the top of the Second Pyramid, we feel certain that, if the destroying hand of man had not stripped off its polished outer casing from the Great Pyramid, the modern traveller would behold it precisely as it was seen fifty centuries ago, when the architect reported to Cheops the completion of the work.

I have been speaking of the relation, in respect of height, of the Great Pyramid to the Cataract of Philæ only; it may, however, be noticed, for the sake of enabling the fireside traveller to picture more readily to his mind the peculiarity of the hypsometrical features of this unique country, that this Pyramid looks down, and always from a relatively greater height, on every part of the cultivated soil of the whole land of Egypt.

CHAPTER IX.
THE WOODEN STATUE IN THE BOULAK MUSEUM.

Vivi vultus.—Virgil.

In the museum of Egyptian antiquities at Boulak, the harbour of Cairo, is a wooden statue of an old Egyptian. It was found in a tomb at Sakkara, and belongs to one of the early dynasties of the old primæval monarchy. It is absolutely untarnished by the thousands of years it had been reposing in that tomb. There is no stain of time upon it. To say that it is worth its weight in gold is saying nothing: for its value is not commensurable with gold. It is history itself to those who care to interpret such history. The face is neither of the oval, nor of the round type, but as it were, of an intermediate form; the features and their expression are just such as might be seen in Pall Mall, or in a modern drawing-room, with the difference that there is over them the composed cast of thought of the wisdom of old Egypt. As you look at the statue intently—you cannot do otherwise—the soul returns to it. The man is reflected from the wood as he might have been from a mirror.

He is not a genius. His mind is not full of that light which gives insight. He cannot communicate to others unusual powers of seeing and feeling. He cannot send an electric shock through the minds and hearts of a generation. He is no prophet whose lips have been touched with fire, no poet whose words are creations, no master of philosophical construction, no natural leader of men.

And this piece of wood tells you distinctly not only what manner of man he was not, but also exactly what manner of man he was. How this Egyptian of very early days thought, and felt, and lived, are all there. He was accustomed to command. He was a man of great culture. His culture had refined him. He was conscious of, and valued his refinement. He was benevolent on conviction and principle. It would have been unrefined to have been otherwise. He was somewhat scornful. He was very accurate in his knowledge, his ideas, and statements. Very precise in his way of thinking, and in all that he did. He shrunk from doing a wrong, or from using an ill-placed word, as he would have from a soiled hand. He was as clean and neat in his thoughts as in his habits. He was as obstinate as all the mules in Spain. Had there been any other party in those days, he would have belonged to the party of order; and, if things had gone so far, he would not have shrunk from standing by his principles; but he would not unnecessarily have paraded them. If he had been called upon to die for his principles, he would have died with dignity, and with no sign of the thoughts within. In his philosophy nothing so became firmness of mind as composure of manner.

His servants respected him. They had never known him do a wrong thing; and they had known him do considerate things. But they did not like him. They could not tell why, but it was because they could not understand him. He was an aristocrat. He cultivated and valued the advantages his position had given him; and was dissatisfied with those whom circumstances had forbidden should ever be like himself. He saw that this feeling was inconsequential, but he saw no escape from it, and this vexed his preciseness and accuracy; and he combated the disturbing thought with greater benevolence and greater accuracy, and became more precise where preciseness was possible. He was fond of art, of his books, and of his garden. He was not unsocial, still, in a sense, nature attracted him more than man; and he preferred the wisdom of the ancients to that of the moderns.

Such was this Egyptian of between five and six thousand years ago. He was the creation of a high civilization. He could have been understood only by men as civilized as himself. That he was understood is plain, from this piece of wood having been endowed with such a soul.

In the Boulak Museum is also a statue in diorite, one of the hardest kinds of stone, carefully executed and beautifully polished, of Chephren, the builder of the second Pyramid, with his name inscribed upon it. The features are uninjured, and are seen by us at this day just as they were seen by Chephren and his Court 5,000 years ago. It was discovered by M. Mariette at the bottom of the well, which supplied the water used for sacred purposes in the sepulchral temple attached to Chephren’s Pyramid. This statue must have been, originally, erected in the temple; and we can imagine that it was thrown into the well by the barbarous Hyksos, or iconoclastic Persians, where it lay undisturbed till brought again to light by M. Mariette. Probably the well had been filled up with the rubbish of demolitions contemporary with the overthrow of the statue, and, having been thus forthwith obliterated, had been lost to sight and memory to our day.

CHAPTER X.
DATE OF BUILDING WITH STONE.

When time is old and hath forgot itself,

And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,

And mighty states characterless are grated

To dusty nothing.—Shakspeare.

Manetho tells us that in the reign of Sesortosis, a king of the third dynasty, the method of building with hewn stone was introduced. He reigned about 3,600 B.C. It will be observed that this date is about thirteen centuries earlier than that assigned to the flood on Archbishop Ushers authority, and which is placed on the margin of our Bibles; and only between three and four centuries subsequent to the date assigned, on the same authority, to the creation of the world. To examine, however, this date of Manetho’s for the hewing and dressing of building stone, is now our immediate object. A little investigation of the subject will, I am disposed to think, show that it is inadmissible, and that it must be thrown back to a very much more remote antiquity.

Manetho made this statement in the time of the Ptolemies. We are therefore, under the circumstances, justified in supposing that the author of the date, whether Manetho himself, or some earlier chronographer to whom he was indebted for it, meant by it little more than an acknowledgment, that he was not acquainted with any stone buildings earlier than the reign of Sesortosis. A question of this kind was then very much what it is now, one of antiquarian research; it being necessary then, as now, to collect the evidence for its decision from the monuments. But if our acquaintance with the monuments of the primæval period is as extensive and profound as Manetho’s was, or even more so; and if in addition, we have advanced far beyond what was possible in his day in the direction of universal history, we may be able to show that there is some error in his date; or at all events may be able to explain it in such a way, that it may be brought into closer conformity with what is now known, than it would seem to admit of, if taken literally.

It is, then, evident, that he was unacquainted with any buildings of hewn stone earlier than the time of Sesortosis. No surprise need be felt at this. Sesortosis reigned more than 3,000 years before the time of Manetho. Let us recall what is the effect of 3,000 years upon ordinary stone buildings in a country that has, during that period, been growing and prospering.

Our Saxon forefathers used stone largely in building. One thousand years only have passed: and now there is not a building in the country we can point to, and say with certainty, that it was raised by their hands. There are a few doubtful exceptions in the form of church towers. But these, if authentic, are exceptions of the kind which prove the rule: for when everything else disappeared, they could have been preserved only by a combination of chances so rare that it did not occur in one out of ten thousand cases. It was much the same after five hundred years had passed.

The Roman world was covered, in the time of Constantine, with magnificent cities and villas. But how many of the houses that were then inhabited are now standing?

The reasons of this are evident. First, there is the ever-acting disintegration of natural causes. Whatever man erects upon the surface of the earth, nature is ever afterwards busy in reducing to the common level. Then comes fire, the best of servants, but the worst of masters, which no dwelling-house can be expected to escape for a thousand years. Earthquakes, too, and war have, in any long series of years, to be credited with much destructive work. These are all in the end complete undoers of man’s handiwork. But I am disposed to assign the greatest amount of obliteration to the ever-changing fashions and wants of man himself. The houses of one generation are not suited to the tastes and requirements of the generations that succeed. They must therefore be pulled down to make way for what men wish to have. Perhaps, they become quarries to supply the materials needed for the new buildings. Those who act in this way are only doing what their predecessors did, and what their successors will do. Palaces, and the chief public buildings, in a city are, from a variety of causes, transferred to new sites; and the cities, of which they must be the centres, must correlate themselves to the sites of the new buildings. Or the capital, or city, itself, may, from, again, a variety of causes, be transferred to an entirely new site. In either case more or less of the old city is no longer inhabited. Sometimes the old materials are wanted, sometimes the ground upon which the deserted buildings are standing is needed for cultivation.

If we sum up the effects of these causes, we cannot expect that the contemporaries of the Ptolemies should have found in Egypt any buildings dating from the first period of the Old Monarchy, that is nearly four thousand years old. They had before them the Pyramids, which were then certainly more than three thousand years old, and which, it is evident, had defied all the destructive causes we have enumerated, simply on account of their exceptional form and mass, and because the enormous stones of which they were constructed had been so nicely fitted together as to exclude moisture and air; and so, because they found no earlier buildings, and because the stones of these had been so carefully and truly wrought, they assigned, as the commencement of the practice of building with wrought-stone, the reign of Sesortosis, that is, they carried it back two hundred years beyond the date of the commencement of the Great Pyramid.

This is altogether inadmissible. Men could not pass in two hundred years from the first essays in cutting stone to the grandest stone structure, and, in nicety of workmanship, one of the most perfect instances of stone joinery that has ever been erected. There were great builders long anterior to this date of two hundred years before the commencement of the Great Pyramid. Some of the Pyramids themselves, and many of the tombs, are older than the Pyramids of Gizeh, and even than the time of Sesortosis. A Pyramid had been built in the Faioum as far back as the first dynasty of all, that of Menes himself. Their system of religion, and their system of writing, had both arrived at their perfected condition in the time of Menes; and each of these two facts imply considerable advance in the art of building, of course building with stone, of which there were such ample materials everywhere throughout the valley of Egypt. They could not have had a perfected religion, such as was theirs, without temples. Nor is it possible that they could have advanced to the art of writing without having advanced previously as far as the art of cutting and dressing stone. And this is more obvious when we consider that the very peculiarity of Egyptian writing grew partly out of the idea that its characters were to be sculptured and incised on stone: this is what is implied in its very name of hieroglyphics.

I do not imagine that the date we are considering was a mere fiction. To invent history was not an Egyptian custom. What might have been rightfully assigned to the time of Sesortosis might not have been rightly understood, and so came to be wrongly described. They had hewn and built with stone centuries before his time. But there was an architectural improvement which must have commenced somewhere about his reign, which we see perfected in the Pyramids, and which the Egyptians ever afterwards retained, and that was the practice of building with enormous blocks of stone, cut and fitted together with the utmost care and precision. We can accept Manetho’s statement, when interpreted to mean this.

The Egyptians had already had a long national existence. They were a very observant and thoughtful people. Of all people of whom we know anything, they had the strongest craving to leave behind them grand, and, if possible, everlasting historical monuments. But they observed that all buildings constructed with small stones, sooner or later, but at all events, in a few centuries, passed away without leaving a record. They fell to the ground, or they were taken down to supply materials for new buildings, or the stone they were built of was burnt for lime. The consumption of lime has always been great in Egypt; and although the limestone mountains are not far from the river, and throughout the greater part of the country seldom more than two or three miles from it, old buildings have always been made to supply much material for this purpose. Mehemet Ali, notwithstanding that the limestone ridges of Thebes were close by, threw down one of the magnificent propylæa of Karnak to get lime for some paltry nitre-works he was setting up in the neighbourhood. To secure, then, as far as possible, their great monuments and tombs against these causes of decay and overthrow, they, at about the time of the date we are discussing, changed their method of building, and began to use such large stones, that it would generally be less troublesome and costly to get new stone at the quarries for building and for lime, than to overthrow an enormous structure, which could not be done without some machinery, and much tackle and labour. But their ideas, and the knowledge and the skill shown in these great buildings agree with other considerations in obliging us to carry back the art of building with hewn stone to a very remote epoch, far beyond any contemporary monuments, and far beyond Menes, whose name is the first to appear in the annals of Egypt, and who must have reigned not far from six thousand years ago. At this period, we cannot now entertain any doubts on the subject, civilization in Egypt was in a very advanced state; not very different, indeed, from what we find it at the date of the oldest of the still existing monuments. Upon the earliest of these we see the public and private life of the Egyptians sculptured and painted by their own hands. This, of course, must have required long antecedent periods of slow advance, for in this matter it is the first, and not the later, steps which require most time.

No inference, in respect of the point before us, can be drawn from the preservation of buildings standing on such sites as those of Pæstum and Palmyra. As soon as those cities began to decay, all temptation to use the stones of old structures in the erection of new ones, or to burn them for lime, completely ceased. They became useless and valueless, and this it was that saved them. During the four thousand years that had elapsed between Menes and Manetho, Egypt had been a populous country, generally in a state of prosperity, and, during the whole of the time, building, which often implies pulling down, had been actively going on: every stone, therefore, in every old disused building of the early dynasties was likely, in one way or another, to have been reused. No one can suppose that in such a country as ancient Egypt the pressure of this temptation would be long resisted.

The object of these pages is to present to the reader the thoughts on Egypt, as it was and as it is, which arose in the author’s mind during a tour he made last winter through the country. Among these thoughts, as I intimated at the beginning of this chapter, a prominent place is occupied by chronological questions, for the dates of early Egyptian history do not accord with those of the popularly-received system. It therefore becomes necessary to revert to the grounds of that system, as well as to examine and ascertain the particulars of the chronology of Egypt.

In this indispensable department of primæval history it is possible that we may have been misled by a very natural misapprehension as to the character of the earlier portions of the Hebrew Scriptures. We read them as if they were addressed to ourselves, and as if their object was historical. These are, both of them, erroneous and misleading ideas. It is evident, on the face of the documents, that their writers had in view no readers excepting those for whose immediate behoof they were composed, and no objects excepting religion and patriotism. Their aim was to form the Israelites into a people by the instrumentality of a Code, sanctioned and enforced by religion. The writings, therefore, necessarily lay a foundation for the religion, give an exposition of it, and set forth the motives for its observance. The Code is the point of view from which the religion, and the formation of the people that from which the Code, is to be regarded. History is no more their object than science. They do, of course, contain a part, and that a most important part, of the history of mankind; for, in carrying out their aim, they give much of the history of a people that was destined to have a great, and permanent, and ever-growing effect on the world. But it is important to observe that even this they contain only incidentally. To us both their religious aims, and their incidental history, give them a value which cannot be over-estimated. We shall, however, only fall into mistakes if we lose sight of their primary, limited, Hebrew, religious purpose, and regard them as universal history.

This is a question of broad as well as of minute criticism—of the interpretation of the whole as well as of particulars. Are these Scriptures to be regarded as containing the religion and the history, limited to the point of view of the religion, of one of the smallest of all people, or as containing the whole primæval history of man, in such a sense that nothing but what appears to be in harmony with what has come to be their popular interpretation, can be taken into consideration? It was for many ages an unavoidable mistake to entertain respecting them the latter assumption. (That some of the elements of Hebrew religious thought were subsequently taken up into the religious thought of a very considerable portion of mankind does not affect the question immediately before us.) It maybe, precisely, the attempt to maintain this misconception of their nature which is now causing so much confusion of thought and ill-feeling. If regarded in their true light, no documents of the old world are more precious to us historically (I am not speaking of them in any other sense now); for, to refer to that which is the chief concern of man, if the great lesson of history is to teach us that it has itself no meaning, purpose, or value, excepting so far as it is the story of the intellectual and moral growth of the race, and that this double growth is the paramount object of national and of individual life, then how precious and how luminous a portion of history do these documents become!

But this value is very much lessened, and this light obscured, by the determination to find in them, not a part, but the whole of primæval history. The civilization of Egypt, which reaches back into so remote a past that the Pyramids were monuments of hoar antiquity when Abraham saw them, and the civilization—perhaps contemporary with the date of the Pyramids—which existed on the banks of the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Yankse Kiang, must be made harmoniously to find a place by the side of what is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. So must the mythology, and the moral and intellectual aptitudes of the Aryan race of man. So must also the knowledge to which we have attained of the history of our globe itself, and of the succession of life upon it. This process has already been passed through with respect to the discoveries of astronomy. Against them there was a long and fierce struggle. At last everybody admitted both that what astronomers taught might be believed, and that the Hebrew Scriptures did not teach astronomy. There is no reason for confining to astronomy the rule that was established in its favour. It must be extended so as to include our knowledge of the greatness and the remoteness of Egyptian civilization, and every other kind of knowledge. We need not, and we must not, so interpret the Hebrew Scriptures as to reject on their authority, or even to feel repugnance to accept, any clearly-established facts. To make this use of them is to wrest them to a purpose for which it is clear they were never intended.

Their historical value to ourselves is only an incident and accident of their designed purpose: that was to teach to the Israelites their code, and to give them motives for observing it (which has come to be to us a part of history), and not to teach history to us. The idea of history, taking the word in the meaning it has for us, did not exist then. It could not, indeed, have existed then, for everything has its own place and time, and the time for history had not come then. First, the seed is deposited in the ground, then comes the tender shoot, next the stem and blades, after that the plant flowers; last of all comes the full corn in the ripe ear. Those early days were the time when the materials were in many places being collected, out of which we have to construct human history. It is fortunate for us that in those first times men did not forestall the idea of history: that would have prevented their attending singly to what they were themselves doing, and to the thoughts that were at work in their own minds.

CHAPTER XI.
GOING UP TO THE TOP OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.

How fearful

And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low:

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles.—Shakspeare.

Of course you listen to anything people have to say on a subject about which you are at the moment interested. Here are some specimens of what I heard about the Pyramids, when I was on the point of visiting them. A gentleman, who had that day returned from making the ascent, was, as he sat at the table d’hôte, overflowing with his impressions. His complexion and voice were somewhat womanly. As might have been expected, he strongly advised that everyone should attempt what he had himself just accomplished. There was, however, some novelty in the advantage, he thought, would result from the ascent, as well as in the logical process by which it was to be attained. ‘Go up,’ his words were, ‘go up by all means. The religious effects are very good. Elevated to so enormous a height above the earth, on so vast and imperishable a structure, you feel deeply and profitably the littleness, the feebleness of man.’

I asked the owner of a New York dry-goods store, who was rushing over the world for the purpose of adding to the stock of his ideas—a very creditable effort in a man of his antecedents and occupation, and who was now half-gray—what he thought of the Pyramids? ‘Well,’ was his reply, ‘they are a matter biggish. But I don’t think them much, for we can have just as good Pyramids in Central Park, New York, if we choose to spend the money to have them. A Pyramid is nothing but dollars. How many dollars do you say one would cost? Well, we have got all these, and many more, to spare. We have got the Pyramids in our pockets, and can set them up any day we please.’

These are specimens (and additional instances might be given) of the ideas of people who are eminently estimable, and perfectly contented with themselves and with the world. Indeed, in holding and expressing them, they must think that their eyes are not quite as other men’s; that they can penetrate a little further beyond the surface of things. Yet one meets with many a man quite as estimable, though perhaps not quite so contented with himself and with the world, who would be disposed to ask what good would his life do him, if told that he must swop ideas with them. The prospect would be as little attractive to him as that of the exchange of his religion for the creed of an ancient Briton, or Cherokee Indian. But variety is pleasant; and the world is a big place with plenty of room for honest folk of all sorts.

An acquaintance (I trust he will allow me to quote him here), in whose mind at the moment artistic must have preponderated over historical associations, standing unawed, and even unmoved, in front of the Great Pyramid, relieved his mind to me, by giving utterance to the following piece of honest profanity:—

‘I can’t bring myself to take the slightest interest in these Pyramids. They don’t possess one principle, one element, one feature of architecture. They are nothing at all but heaps of stones.’

On my first visit to the Pyramids of Gizeh it was too windy for anyone but an Arab to think of making the ascent. On my second visit the day was all one could wish, and so four of our party went up to the top of the Great Pyramid. It was my fifty-fourth birthday. This seemed to myself rather a reason for not making the effort. My climbing-days were done. But my young friend, late from Harrow, and great in athletics, thought differently. ‘You mustn’t give in yet,’ he urged. ‘You must go up. It is what everyone ought to do. What is the use of having come all this way if you don’t go up? You will be sorry afterwards if you don’t. One would come a long way to have a chance of doing it.’ As this was very much like what one used to think oneself some thirty, or so, years since, the exhortation seemed reasonable and good. We ought to endeavour to keep ourselves young in body as well as in mind. We ought not to give in by anticipation. It will be time enough when we can’t help ourselves. And so I went to the top.

By the way a party for travel in Egypt, if pleasure, not work, is the first object, may be a large one, and need not be composed entirely of historians and philosophers. All liberal pursuits and reasonable ways of looking at things may be represented advantageously. A naturalist and a geologist are almost indispensable. A member of the Ethnological Society might, at times, turn up worth his salt. A Liverpool, or Manchester, man whose ideas are of commerce, manufactures, and machinery; of the value of things, and how to do things, would often serviceably recall speculation to the standard of present utility. But by all means have a young fellow late from Harrow, and still great in athletics. He is always to the front, like a cork to the surface of the water. He is never afraid of work, or of roughing it. He is always good-tempered and merry. Always glad to hear what has anything in it; is impatient of twaddle, and can’t stand assumption. Some day he will himself be an Egyptologer, or geologist, or something of the kind. At present he is tolerant, and allows these things to those who like them. What he likes is a rousing gallop on the Sheik’s horse, a girl that has no nonsense in her, a champagne luncheon, a good cigar. Some things, and some chaps he thinks slow, but the general rule is ‘all right.’ A Nile party is the better for this ingredient. We mediævalists must not be over-reasonable. He will help us a little to keep this tendency in check. Besides, we were once young ourselves, while our friend was never, though we all hope he may live to be, an old fogie.

Four of us went to the top together. But place aux dames, and no young lady, from the days of Cheops, better deserved the first place than she who, on an early day in January, 1871, ascended his Pyramid with eye as bright, and foot as sure, as a gazelle’s. If he still haunts the mighty monument in which he was laid, after having bent his people to its erection for fifty years, he must have thought, as the Lily of the North stood on its summit, that he was well repaid.

For ne’er did Grecian chisel trace

A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace

Of finer form, or lovelier face.

A foot more light, a step more true,

Ne’er from the heath-flower dashed the dew;

E’en the light hare-bell raised its head

Elastic from her airy tread.

My young friend, late from Harrow, and great in athletics, was, of course, one of the four.

And so was an older friend of mine, with whom and another lad, in the year 1836, each of the three being then seventeen years old, I had gone, I believe, the first open-boat cruise on our home rivers. We started from Bedford and went to York and Hull, and back again, 700 miles in an open boat, pulling it all the way ourselves, and lying down in it at night to sleep, accoutred as we were in Jersey frock and canvas. During the whole expedition we cooked our meals ourselves. From that boat we had looked forward into the unknown world before us: I can still recall the anticipations, visions, and resolves of that time. Now, from the top of the Pyramid of Cheops, we looked back on our course, so far, through the world. Well, just like other people, we had had each of us to make some discoveries for himself, and to pay for his experience. But the fight had not been always against either of us. On the whole we had not found it a bad world. We were glad, after thirty years of the chanceful life-battle, to meet again, on the summit of the Great Pyramid, if not quite unscathed, yet not crippled. I suppose we each thought that the time to come could not be as pleasant as the interval had been that separated our two excursions.

The Great Pyramid is built of extremely hard and compact nummulitic limestone. The third was cased, at all events, to half its height, perhaps completely, with enormous blocks of granite. A few are still in their places, but most of them have been thrown to the ground. A small portion of the external casing at the top of the Second Pyramid is still uninjured. It is of so pale and fine a limestone that it looks as if it were of polished white marble.

I found the best way of getting an impressive idea of the enormous magnitude of these Pyramids was to place myself in the centre of one side, and to look up. The eye then travels over all the courses of stone from the very bottom to the apex, which appears to pierce and penetrate the blue arch above. This way of looking at the Great Pyramid—perhaps it is a way which exaggerates to the eye its magnitude unfairly—makes it look Alpine in height, while it produces the strange effect just noticed.