HUMAN ORIGINS

HUMAN ORIGINS.

Published July 1892, 1500 copies.
Reprinted August 1892, 1500 copies.
Reprinted September 1892, 2000 copies.

HUMAN ORIGINS

BY
S. LAING

AUTHOR OF
"PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE," "MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT,"
"A MODERN ZOROASTRIAN," ETC.

With Illustrations

FIFTH THOUSAND

CHAPMAN AND HALL: Ld.
1892

[All rights reserved]

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS

HUMAN ORIGINS.

INTRODUCTION.

The reception which has been given to my former works leads me to believe that they have had a certain educational value for those who, without being specialists, wish to keep themselves abreast of the culture of the day, and to understand the leading results and pending problems of Modern Science. Of these results the most interesting are those which bear upon the origin and evolution of the human race. In my former works I have treated of these mainly from the point of view of geology and palæontology, and have hardly touched on the province which lies nearest to us, that of history and of prehistoric traditions. In this province, however, a revolution has been effected by the discoveries of the present century, which is no less important than that made by geological research and by the doctrine of Evolution.

Down to the middle of the nineteenth century, and to a considerable extent down to the present day, the Hebrew Bible was held to be the sole and sufficient authority as to the early history of the human race. It was believed, with a certainty which made doubt impious, that the first man Adam was created in or about the year 4004 b.c., or not quite 6000 years ago; and that all human and other life was destroyed by a universal Deluge, 1656 years later, with the exception of Noah and his wife, their sons and their wives, and pairs of all living creatures, by whom the earth was repeopled from the mountain-peak of Ararat as a centre.

The latest conclusions of modern science show that uninterrupted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments, carry history back at least 1000 years before the supposed Creation of Man, and 2500 years before the date of the Deluge, and show then no trace of a commencement; but populous cities, celebrated temples, great engineering works, and a high state of the arts and of civilization, already existing. This is of the highest interest, both as bearing on the dogma of the Divine inspiration of the historical and scientific, as distinguished from the moral and religious, portions of the Bible, and on the still more important question of the true theory of Man's origin and relations to the Universe. The so-called conflict between Religion and Science is at bottom one between two conflicting theories of the Universe—the first that it is the creation of a personal God who constantly interferes by miracles to correct His original work; the second, that whether the First Cause be a personal God or something inscrutable to human faculties, the work was originally so perfect that the whole succession of subsequent events has followed by Evolution acting by invariable laws. The former is the theory of orthodox believers, the latter that of men of science, and of liberal theologians who, like Bishop Temple, find that the theory of "original impress" is more in accordance with the idea of an Omnipotent and Omniscient Creator, to whom "a thousand years are as a day," than the traditional theory of a Creator constantly interfering to supplement and amend His original Creation by supernatural interferences.

It is evidently important for all who desire to arrive at truth, and to keep abreast of the culture of the day, to have some clear conception of what historical and geological records really teach, and what sort of a standard or measuring-rod they supply in attempting to carry back our researches into the depths of prehistoric and of geological time.

I have therefore in this work begun with the historic period, as giving us a solid foundation and standard of time, by which to gauge the vastly longer periods which lie behind, and ascended from this by successive steps through the Neolithic and Palæolithic ages, and the Quaternary and Tertiary periods, so far as the most recent discoveries throw any light on the mysterious question of "Human Origins."

If I have succeeded in stimulating some minds, especially those of my younger readers, and of the working-classes who are striving after culture, to feel an interest in these subjects, and to pursue them further, my object will have been attained. They have been to me the solace of a long life, the delight of many quiet days, and the soother of many troubled ones, and I should be glad to think that I had been the means, however humble, of introducing to others what I have found such a source of enjoyment, and enlisting, if it were only a few, in the service of that "divine Philosophy," in which I have ever found, as Wordsworth did in Nature,

"The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being."

[PART I.—HISTORY.]

[CHAPTER I.
EGYPT.]

Historical Standard of Time—Short Date inconsistent with Evolution—Laws of Historical Evidence—History begins with Authentic Records—Records of Egypt oldest—Manetho's Lists—Confirmed by Hieroglyphics—Origin of Writing—The Alphabet—Phonetic Writing—Clue to Hieroglyphics—The Rosetta Stone—Champollion—Principles of Hieroglyphic Writing—Language Coptic—Can be read with certainty—Confirmed by Monuments—Manetho's Date for Menes 5004 b.c.—Old, Middle, and New Empires—Old Empire, Menes, to end of Sixth Dynasty—Break between Old and Middle Empires—Works of Twelfth Dynasty—Fayoum—Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties—Hyksos Conquests—Duration of Hyksos Rule—Their Expulsion and Foundation of New Empire—Conquests in Asia of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties—Wars with Hittites and Assyrians—Persian and Greek Dynasties—Summary of Evidence for Date of Menes—Period prior to Menes—Horsheshu—Sphynx—Stone Age—Neolithic and Palæolithic Remains—Horner, Haynes, and Pitt-Rivers.

In measuring the dimensions of space we have to start from some fixed standard, such as the foot or yard, taken originally from the experience of our ordinary senses and capable of accurate verification. From this we arrive by successive inductions at the size of the earth, the distance of the sun, moon, and planets, and finally at the parallax of the fixed stars. So in speculations as to the origin and evolution of the human race, history affords the standard from which we start, through the successive stages of prehistoric, neolithic, and palæolithic man, until we pass into the wider ranges of geological time.

Any error in the original standard becomes magnified indefinitely, whether in space or time, as we extend our researches backwards into remoter regions.

Thus whether the authentic records of history extend only for some 4500 years backwards from the present time to the scriptural date of Noah's flood, as was universally assumed to be the case until quite recently; or whether Egyptian and Chaldæan records carry us back for 7000 years, and show us then a dense population, powerful empires, large cities, and generally a highly advanced civilization already existing, makes a wonderful difference in the standpoint from which we view the course of human evolution.

To begin with, a short date necessitates supernatural interferences. It is quite impossible that if man and all animal life were created only about 4000 years b.c., and were then all destroyed save the few pairs saved in Noah's ark, and made a fresh start from a single centre some 1500 years later, there can be any truth in Darwin's theory of evolution. We know for a certainty from the concurrent testimony of all history, and from Egyptian monuments, that the different races of men and animals were in existence 5000 years ago as they are at the present day; and that no fresh creations or marked changes of type have taken place during that period. If then all these types, and all the different races and nations of men, sprung up in the interval of less than 1000 years, which is the longest that can by any possibility be allowed between the Biblical date of the Deluge and the clash of the mighty monarchies of Assyria and Egypt in Palestine, the date of which is proved both by the Bible and by profane historians, it is obviously impossible that such a state of things could have been brought about by natural causes.

But if authentic historical records carry us back not for 3000 or 4000, but for 6000 or 7000 years, and then show no trace of a beginning, the case is altered, and we may assume an almost unlimited duration of time, through historical, prehistoric, neolithic, and palæolithic ages, during which evolution may have operated. It is of the first importance therefore to inquire what these records really teach in the light of modern research, and what is the evidence for the longer dates which are now generally accepted.

Furnished with such a measuring-rod it becomes easier to attempt to bring into some sort of co-ordination the vast mass of facts which have been accumulated in recent years as to prehistoric, neolithic, and palæolithic man; and the glimpses of light respecting the origin, antiquity, and early history of the human race, which have come in from other sciences such as astronomy, geology, zoology, and philology.

To do this exhaustively would be an encyclopædic task which I do not pretend to accomplish, but I am not without hope that the following chapters, connected as they are by the one leading idea of tracing human origins backward to their source, may assist inquiry, and create an interest in this most interesting of all questions, especially among the young who are striving after knowledge, and the millions who, not having the time and opportunity for reading technical works, feel a desire to keep themselves abreast of modern thought and of the advanced culture of the close of the nineteenth century.

Before examining these records in detail it is well to begin with the general laws upon which historical evidence is based. History begins with writings. All experience shows that what may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, consists mainly of hymns and portions of ritual, such as the Vedas of the Hindoos; and to a certain extent of heroic poems and ballads in which the historical element is so overlaid by mythology and poetry, that it is impossible to discriminate between fact and fancy. Thus the legend of Hercules is evidently in the main a solar myth, and his twelve labours are related to the signs of the zodiac, but it is possible that there may have been a real Hercules, the actual or eponymic ancestor of the tribe of Heraclides. So, at a later period, the descent of the Romans from the pious Æneas, and of the Britons from another Trojan hero Brute, are obviously fabulous; and at a still more recent date, our own Arthurian legends are evidently a mediæval romance, though it is possible that there may have been a chief of that name of the Christianized Romano-Britons, who opposed a gallant resistance to the flood of Saxon invasion.

But to make real history we require something very different; concurrent and uninterrupted testimony of known historians; absence of impossible and obviously fabulous dates and events; and, above all, contemporary records, written or engraved on tombs, temples, and monuments, or preserved in papyri or clay cylinders.

Another remark is, that these authentic records of early history only begin to appear when civilization is so far advanced as to have established powerful dynasties and priestly organizations. The history of a nation is at first the history of its kings, and its records are enumerations of their genealogies, successive reigns, foundation or repair of temples, great industrial works, and warlike exploits. These are made and preserved by special castes of priestly colleges and learned scribes, and they are to a great extent precise in date and accurate in fact. Before the establishment of such historical dynasties we have nothing but legends and traditions, which are vague and mythical, the mythological element rapidly predominating as we go backwards in time, until we soon arrive at reigns of gods, and lives of thousands of years. But as we approach the period of historical dynasties the mythological element diminishes, and we pass from gods reigning 10,000 years, and patriarchs living to 900, to later patriarchs living 150 or 200 years, and finally to mortal men, living, and kings reigning, to natural ages.

In fact, with the first appearance of authentic records the supernatural disappears, and the average duration of lives, reigns, and dynasties, and the general course of events, are much the same as at present, and fully confirm, the statement of the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, that during the long succession of ages of the 345 high priests of Heliopolis, whose statues they showed him in the great temple of the sun, there had been no change in the length of human life or in the course of nature, and each one of the 345 had been a piromis, or mortal man, the son of a piromis. The first question is how far back these authentic historical records can be traced, and Egypt affords the first answer.

The first step in the inquiry as to Egyptian antiquity is afforded by the history of Manetho. Ptolemy Philadelphus, whose reign began 284 b.c., was an enlightened king. He founded the great Alexandrian library, and was specially curious in collecting everything which bore on the early history of his own and other countries. With this view he had the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, made of the sacred books of the Hebrews, and he commissioned Manetho to compile a history of Egypt from the earliest times, from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information. Manetho was eminently qualified for such a task, being a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebennytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples.

The history of Manetho is unfortunately lost, being probably the greatest loss the world has sustained by the burning of the Alexandrian library, but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus and Syncellus, of whom Eusebius and Africanus profess to give Manetho's lists and dates of dynasties and kings from the first King Menes down to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 b.c. With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian fathers, these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies, and in several instances they have obviously been tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament. But enough remains to show that Manetho's lists comprised thirty-one dynasties, and about 370 kings, whose successive reigns extended over a period of about 5500 years, from the accession of Menes to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 b.c., making the date of the first historical king who united Upper and Lower Egypt, about 5800 b.c. There may be some doubt as to the precise dates, for the lists, of Manetho have obviously been tampered with to some extent by the Christian fathers who quoted them, but there can be no doubt that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 b.c.

The only other historical information as to the history of Ancient Egypt was gleaned from references to it in the extant works of Josephus and of Greek authors, especially Homer, Herodotus, and Diodorus Siculus. Josephus, in his Antiquity of the Jews, quotes passages from Manetho, but they only extend to the period of the Hyksos invasion, the Captivity of the Jews, and the Exodus, which are all comparatively recent events in Manetho's annals. Homer's account of hundred-gated Thebes does not carry us back beyond the echo which had reached Ionian Greece of the splendours of the nineteenth dynasty. Herodotus visited Egypt about 450 b.c., and wrote a description of it from what he saw and heard on the spot. It contains a good deal of valuable information, for he was a shrewd observer. But he was credulous, and not very critical in distinguishing between fact and fable, and it is evident that his sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides, and even the more authentic information is so disconnected and mixed with fable, that it can hardly be accepted as material for history. As far as it goes, however, it tends to confirm Manetho, as, for instance, in giving the names correctly of the kings who built the three great pyramids, and in saying that he saw the statues of 342 successive high priests of the great Temple of Heliopolis, which correspond very well with Manetho's lists of 370 kings.

Diodorus gives us very much the same narratives as those of Herodotus; and, on the whole, we had to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history.

Manetho's dates, however, were so inconsistent with preconceived ideas based on the chronology of the Bible, that they were universally thought to be fabulous. They were believed either to represent the exaggerations of Egyptian priests desirous of magnifying the antiquity of their country, or, if historical, to give in succession the names of a number of kings and dynasties who had really reigned simultaneously in different provinces. So stood the question until the discovery of reading hieroglyphics enabled us to test the accuracy of Manetho's lists by the light of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. This discovery is of such supreme importance that it may be well to begin at the beginning, and lay a solid foundation by showing how it was made, and the demonstration on which it rests.

Reading presupposes writing, as writing presupposes speech. Ideas are conveyed from one mind to another in speech through the ear, in writing through the eye. The origin of the latter method is doubtless to be found in picture-writing. The palæolithic savage who drew a mammoth with the point of a flint on a piece of ivory, was attempting to write, in his rude way, a record of some memorable chase. And the accounts of the old Empires of Mexico and Peru at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that a considerable amount of civilization can be attained and information conveyed by this primitive method. But for the purpose of historical record more is required. It is essential to have a system of signs and symbols which shall be generally understood, and by which knowledge shall be handed down unchanged to successive generations. All experience shows that before knowledge is thus fixed and recorded, anything that may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, fades off almost immediately into myth, and leaves no certain record of time, place, and circumstance. A few religious hymns and prayers like those of the Vedas, a few heroic ballads like those of Homer, a few genealogies like those of Agamemnon or Abraham, may be thus preserved, but nothing definite or accurate in the way of fact and date. History, therefore, begins with writing, and writing begins with the invention of fixed signs to represent words. A system of writing is possible, like the Chinese, in which each separate word has its own separate sign, but this is extremely cumbrous, and quite unintelligible to those who have not got a living key to explain the meaning of each symbol. It is calculated that an educated Chinese has to learn by heart the meaning of some 15,000 separate signs before he can read and write correctly. We have a trace of this ideographic system in our own language, as where arbitrary signs such as 1, 2, 3, represent not the sounds of one, two, and three, but the ideas conveyed by them. But for all practical purposes, intelligible writing has to be phonetic, that is, representing spoken words, not by the ideas they convey, but by the sounds of which they are composed. In other words there must be an Alphabet.

The alphabet is the first lesson of childhood, and it seems such a simple thing that we are apt to forget that it is one of the most important and original inventions of the human intellect. Some prehistoric genius, musing on the meaning of spoken words, has seen that they might all be analyzed into a few simple sounds. To make this more easily intelligible, I will suppose the illustrations to be taken from our own language. "Dog" and "dig" express very different ideas; but a little reflection will show that the primary sounds made by the tongue, teeth, and palate, viz. 'd' and 'g,' are the same in each, and that they differ only by a slight variation in the soft breathing or vowel, which connects them and renders them vocal. The next step would be to see that such words as "good" or "God," consisted of the same root-sounds, only transposed and connected with a slight vowel difference. Pursuing the analysis, it would finally be discovered that the many thousand words of spoken language could all be resolved into a very small number of radical sounds, each of which might be represented and suggested to the mind through the eye instead of the ear by some conventional sign or symbol. Here is the alphabet, and here the art of writing.

This great achievement of the human intellect appears to have been made in prehistoric times; and where not obviously imported from a foreign source, as in the Phœnician alphabet from the Egyptian and the Greek from the Phœnician, it is attributed to some god, that is, to an unknown antiquity.

Thus in Egypt, Thoth the Second, known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus, a fabulous demi-god of the period succeeding the reign of the great gods, is said to have invented the alphabet and the art of writing. The analysis of primary sounds varies a little in different times and countries in order to suit peculiarities in the pronunciation of different races and convenience in writing; but about sixteen primitive sounds, which is the number of the letters of the first alphabet brought by Cadmus to Greece, are always its basis. In our own alphabet it is easy to see that it is not formed on strictly scientific principles, some of the letters being redundant. Thus the soft sound of 'c' is expressed by 's,' and the hard sound by 'k'; and 'x' is an abbreviation of three other letters, 'eks.' Some letters also express sounds which run so closely into one another that in some alphabets they are not distinguished, as 'f' and 'v,' 'd' and 't', 'l' and 'r'; while some races have guttural and other sounds, such as 'kh' and 'sj,' which occur so frequently as to require separate signs, while they baffle the vocal organs of other races, and in some cases syllables which frequently occur, instead of being spelt out alphabetically, are represented by single signs. But these are mere details, the question substantially is this—if a collection of unknown signs is phonetic, and we can get any clue to its alphabet, it can be read; if not it must remain a sealed book.

To apply this to hieroglyphics; it had been long known that the monuments of ancient Egypt were carved with mysterious figures, representing commonly birds, animals, and other natural objects, but all clue to their meaning had been lost. It seemed more natural to suppose that they were ideographic; that a lion for instance represented a real lion, or some quality associated with him, such as fierceness, valour, and kingly aspect, rather than that his picture stood simply for our letter 'l.' The long-desired clue was afforded by the famous Rosetta stone. This is a mutilated block of black basalt, which was discovered in 1799 by an engineer officer of the French expedition, in digging the foundations of a fort near Rosetta. It was captured, with other trophies, by the British army, when the French were driven out of Egypt, and is now lodged at the British Museum. It bears on it three inscriptions, one in hieroglyphics, the second in the demotic Egyptian character employed for popular use, and the third in Greek. The Greek can of course be read, and it is an inscription commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy Epiphanes and his Queen Arsinoe, in the year 196 b.c. It was an obvious conjecture that the two Egyptian inscriptions were to the same effect, and that the Greek was a literal translation of this. To turn this conjecture, however, into a demonstration, a great deal of ingenuity and patient research were required. The principle upon which all interpretation of unknown signs rests may be most easily understood by taking an illustration from our own language. The first step in the problem is to know whether these unknown signs are ideographic or phonetic. Thus if we have two groups of signs, one of which we have reason to know stands for "Ptolemy" and the other for "Cleopatra," if they are phonetic, the first sign in Ptolemy will correspond with the fifth in Cleopatra; the second with the seventh, the third with the fourth, the fourth with the second, and the fifth with the third; and we shall have established five letters of the unknown alphabet, 'p, t, o, l,' and 'e.' Other names will give other letters, as if we know "Arsinoe," its comparison with "Cleopatra" will give 'a' and 'r,' and confirm the former induction as to 'o' and 'e.'

And it will be extremely probable that the two last signs in Ptolemy represent 'm' and 'y'; the first in Cleopatra 'c'; and the third, fourth, and fifth in Arsinoe, 's, i,' and 'n.' Suppose now that we find in an inscription on an ancient temple at Thebes, a name which begins with our known sign for 'r,' followed by our known 'a,' then by our conjectural 'm,' then by the sign which we find third in Arsinoe, or 's,' then by our known 'e,' and ending with a repetition of 's,' we have no difficulty in reading "Ramses," and identifying it with one of the kings of that name mentioned by Manetho as reigning at Thebes. The identification of letters was facilitated by the custom of inclosing the names of kings in what is called a cartouche or oval.

TABLET OF SNEFURA AT WADY MAGERAH.

(The oldest inscription in the world, probably 6000 years old. The king conquering an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.)

This name reads "Snefura," which is the name of the king of the third dynasty who reigned about 4000 b.c., or before the building of the Great Pyramids, which inscription is the earliest contemporary one of an Egyptian king as yet discovered. It was found at the copper mines of Wady Magerah, in the peninsula of Sinai, and represents the victory of the king over an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.

The first step towards the decipherment of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone was made in 1819 by Dr. Young, who was one of the most ingenious and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, and is also famous as the first discoverer of the undulatory theory of light. But in both cases he merely indicated the right path and laid down the correct principles. The development of his theories was reserved for two Frenchmen; Fresnel in the case of Light, and Champollion in that of Hieroglyphics. The task was one which required immense patience and ingenuity, for the hieroglyphic alphabet turned out to be one of great complexity. Not only were many of the signs not phonetic, but ideographic or determinative; and some of them standing for syllables and not letters; but the letters themselves were not represented, as in modern languages, each by a single sign or at most by two signs, as A and a, but by several different signs. The Egyptian alphabet was in fact constructed very much as young children often learn theirs, by—

• A was an apple-pie,
• B bit it,
• C cut it;

with this difference, that several objects, whose names begin with A and other letters, might be used to represent them. Thus some of the hieroglyphic letters had as many as twenty-five different signs or homophones. It is as if we could write for 'a,' the picture either of an apple, or of an ass, archer, arrow, anchor, or any word beginning with 'a.'

However, Champollion with infinite difficulty, and aided by the constant discovery of fresh inscriptions, solved the problem, and succeeded in producing a complete alphabet of hieroglyphics comprising all the various signs, thus enabling us to translate every hieroglyphic sign into its corresponding sound or spoken word.

The next question was, what did these words mean, and could they be recognized in any known language? The answer to this was easy; the Egyptians spoke Egyptic, or as it is abbreviated Coptic, a modern form of which is almost a living language, and is preserved in translations of the Bible still in use and studied by the aid of Coptic dictionaries and grammars. This enabled Champollion to construct a hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar, which have been so completed by the labours of subsequent Egyptologists, that it is not too much to say that any inscription or manuscript in hieroglyphics can be read with nearly as much certainty as if it had been written in Greek or in Hebrew.

SPECIMEN OF HIEROGLYPHIC ALPHABET. (From Champollion's Egypt.)

The above illustrations from English characters are only given as the simplest way of conveying to the minds of those who have had no previous acquaintance with the subject, an idea of the nature of the process and force of the evidence, upon which the decipherment of hieroglyphic inscriptions is based. In reality the process was far from being so simple. Though many of the hieroglyphics are phonetics, like our letters of the alphabet, they are not all so, and many of them are purely ideographic, as when we write 1, 2, 3, for one, two, and three. All writing has begun with picture-writing, and each character was originally a likeness of the object which it was wished to represent. The next stage was to use the character not only for the material object, but as a symbol for some abstract idea associated with it. Thus the picture of a lion might stand either for an actual lion, or for fierceness, courage, majesty, or other attribute of the king of animals. In this way it became possible to convey meanings to the mind through the eye, but it involved both an enormous number of characters, and the use of homophones, i.e. of single characters standing for a number of separate ideas. To obviate this, what are called "determinatives" were invented, i.e. special signs affixed to characters or groups of characters to determine the sense in which they were to be taken. For instance, the picture of a star (*) affixed to a group of hieroglyphics may be used to denote that they represent the name of a god, or some divine or heavenly attribute; and the picture of rippling water ~~~~~~~~ to show that the group means something connected with water, as a sea or river. Beyond this the Chinese have hardly gone, and it is reckoned that it requires some 1358 separate characters, or conventionalized pictures, taken in distinct groups, to be able to read and write correctly the 40,000 words in the Chinese language. Even for the ordinary purposes of life a Chinaman instead of committing to memory twenty-six letters of the alphabet, like an English child, has to learn by heart some 6000 or 7000 groups of characters often distinguished only by slight dots and dashes. Such a system is cumbrous in the extreme, and involves spending many of the best years of life in acquiring the first rudiments of knowledge. Indeed it is only possible when not only writing but speech has been arrested at the first stage of its development, and a nation speaks a language of monosyllables. In the case of Egypt and other ancient nations the standpoint of writing went further, and the symbolic pictures came to represent phonograms, i.e. sounds or spoken words instead of ideas or objects; and these again were further analyzed into syllabaries, or the component articulate sounds which make up words; and these finally into their ultimate elements of a few simple sounds, or letters of an alphabet, the various combinations of which will express all the complex sounds or words of a spoken language.

Now in the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, along with those pure phonetics or letters of an alphabet, are found numerous survivals of the older systems from which they sprung, and Champollion, who first attempted the task of forming a hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar, had to contend with all the difficulties of ideograms, polyphones, determinatives, and other obstacles.

Those who wish to pursue this interesting subject further will do well to read Dr. Isaac Taylor's book on the Alphabet, and Sayce on the Science of Writing; but for my present purpose it is sufficient to establish the scientific certainty of the process by which hieroglyphic texts are read. With this key a vast mass of constantly accumulating evidence has been brought to light, illustrating not only the chronology and history of ancient Egypt, but also its social and political condition, its literature and religion, science and art. The first question naturally was how far the monuments confirmed or disproved the lists of Manetho. Manetho was a learned priest of a celebrated temple, who must have had access to all the temple and royal records and other literature of Egypt, and who must have been also conversant with foreign literature, to have been selected as the best man to write a complete history of his native country for the royal library in Greek. Manetho's lists of the reigns of dynasties and kings when summed up show a date of 5867 b.c. for the foundation of the united Egyptian Empire by Menes, a date which is of course absolutely inconsistent with those given by Genesis, not only for the Deluge, but for the original Creation.

It is evident that the monuments alone could confirm or contradict these lists, and give a solid basis for Egyptian chronology and history. This has now been done to such an extent that it may fairly be said that Manetho has been confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that successively and not simultaneously, so that the margin of uncertainty as to the date of Menes is reduced to one of a few hundred years on one side or other of 5000 b.c.

Mariette, who is the best and latest authority, and who has done so much to discover monuments of the earlier dynasties, concludes, as the result of a careful revision of Manetho's lists, and of the authentic records from temples, tombs, and papyri, that 5004 b.c. is the most probable date for the accession of Menes, and this date is generally adopted by modern Egyptologists. Some make it rather longer, as Boeck 5702 b.c., and Unger 5613 b.c.; while others make it a little shorter, as Maspero 4500 b.c., and Brugsch[1] 4455; but it is to be observed that the date has always lengthened with the progress of discovery. Thus the earlier Egyptologists such as Wilkinson, Birch, and Poole assigned a date not exceeding 3000 b.c. for the accession of Menes; twenty years later Bunsen and Lepsius gave respectively 3623 and 3892 b.c.; and since the latest discoveries, no competent scholar assigns a lower date than 4500 b.c., while some go up to 5702 b.c., and that most generally accepted is 5004 b.c. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that about 5000 b.c., or very nearly 7000 years before the present time, may be taken provisionally as the date of the commencement of authentic Egyptian history, and that if this date be corrected by future discoveries it is more likely to be increased than diminished.

This immensely long period of Egyptian history is divided into three stages—the Old, the Middle, and the New Empires. The Old Empire began with Menes, and lasted without interruption for about 1500 years, under six dynasties of kings, who ruled over the whole of Egypt. It was a period of peace, prosperity, and progress, during which the pyramids, the greatest of all human works, were built, literature flourished, and the industrial and fine arts attained a high degree of perfection.

At the very commencement of this period we find the first King Menes carrying out a great work of hydraulic engineering, by which the course of the Nile was diverted, and a site obtained on its western banks for the new capital of Memphis. His immediate successor is said to have written a celebrated treatise on Medicine, and the extremely life-like portrait-statues and wooden statuettes, which were never equalled in any subsequent stage of Egyptian art, date back to the fourth dynasty.

PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH AND SPHYNX. (From Champollion's Egypt.)

It is singular that this extremely ancient period is the one of which, although the oldest, we know most, for the monuments, the papyri, and especially the tombs in the great cemeteries of Sakkarah and Ghizeh, give us the fullest details of the political and social life of Egypt during the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, with sufficient information as to the three first dynasties to check and confirm the lists of Manetho. We really know the life of Memphis 6000 years ago better than we do that of London under the Saxon kings, or of Paris under the descendants of Clovis.

The sixth dynasty was succeeded by a period which seems to have been one of civil war and anarchy, during which there was a complete cessation of monuments; or, if they existed, they have not yet been discovered. The probable duration of this eclipse of Egyptian records is somewhat uncertain, as we cannot be sure, in the absence of monuments, that the four dynasties of short reigns assigned to the interval between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties by Manetho, and the numerous names of unknown kings on the tablets, were successive sovereigns who reigned over united Egypt, or local chiefs who got possession of power in different parts of the Empire. All we can see is that the supremacy of Memphis declined, and that its last great dynasty was replaced, either in whole or in part, by a rebellion in Upper Egypt which introduced two dynasties whose seat was at Heracleopolis on the Middle Nile, In any case the duration of this period must have been very long, for the eclipse was very complete, and when we once more find ourselves in the presence of records in the eleventh dynasty, the seat of empire is established at Thebes, and the state of the arts, religion, and civilization are different and much ruder than they were at the close of the great Memphite Empire with the sixth dynasty. Mariette says, "When Egypt, with the eleventh dynasty, awoke from its long sleep, the ancient traditions were forgotten. The proper names of the kings and ancient nobility, the titles of the high functionaries, the style of the hieroglyphic writing, and even the religion, all seemed new. The monuments are rude, primitive, and sometimes even barbarous, and to see them one would be inclined to think that Egypt under the eleventh dynasty was beginning again the period of infancy which it had already passed through 1500 years earlier under the third." The tomb of one of these kings of the eleventh dynasty, Entef I., is remarkable as showing on a funeral pillar the sportsman-king surrounded by his four favourite dogs, whose names are given, and which are of different breeds, from a large greyhound to a small turnspit.

However, the chronology of this eleventh dynasty is well attested, its kings are known, and under them Upper and Lower Egypt were once more consolidated into a single state, forming what is known as the Middle Empire. Under the twelfth dynasty, which succeeded it, this Empire bloomed rapidly into one of the greatest and most glorious periods of Egyptian history. The dynasty only lasted for 213 years, under seven kings, whose names were all either Amenemes or Osirtasen; but during their reigns the frontiers of Egypt were extended far to the south, Nubia was incorporated with the Empire, and Egyptian influence extended over the whole Soudan, and perhaps nearly to the equator on the one hand, and over Southern Syria on the other. But the dynasty was still more famous for the arts of peace.

One of the greatest works of hydraulic engineering which the world has seen was carried out by Amenemes III., who took advantage of a depression in the desert limestone near the basin of Fayoum, to form a large artificial lake connected with the Nile by canals, tunnelled through rocky ridges and provided with sluices, so as to admit the water when the river rose too high, and let it out when it fell too low, and thus regulate the inundation of a great part of Middle and Lower Egypt, independently of the seasons. Connected with this Lake Mœris was the famous Labyrinth, which Herodotus pronounced to be a greater wonder than even the great Pyramid. It was a vast square building erected on a small plateau on the east side of the lake, constructed of blocks of granite which must have been brought from Syene, with a façade of white limestone; and containing in the interior a vast number of small square chambers and vaults—Herodotus says 3000—each roofed with a single large slab of stone, and connected by narrow passages, so intricate that a stranger entering without a clue would be infallibly lost. The object seems to have been to provide a safe repository for statues of gods and kings and other precious objects. In the centre was a court containing twelve hypostyle chapels, six facing the south and six the north, and at the north angle of the square was a pyramid of brick faced with stone forming the tomb of Amenemes III.

In addition to this colossal work, the kings of this dynasty built and restored many of the most famous temples and erected statues and obelisks, among the latter the one now standing at Heliopolis. It was also an age of great literary activity, and the biographies of many of the priests, nobles, and high officers, inscribed on their tombs and recorded in papyri, give us the most minute knowledge of the history and social life of this remote period.

The prosperity of Egypt during the Middle Empire was continued under the thirteenth dynasty of sixty Theban kings, to whom Manetho assigns the period of 453 years. Less is known of this period than of the great twelfth dynasty which preceded it, but a sufficient number of monuments have been preserved to confirm the general accuracy of Manetho's statements. A colossal statue of the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth king, Sevckhotef VI., found on the island of Argo near Dongola, shows that the frontier fixed by the conquests of Amenemes at Semneh, had not only been maintained, but extended nearly fifty leagues to the south into the heart of Ethiopia; and another statue found at Tanis shows that the rule of this dynasty was firmly established in Lower Egypt. But the scarcity of the monuments, and the inferior execution of the works of art, show that this long dynasty was one of gradual decline, and the rise of the next or fourteenth dynasty at Xois, transferring the seat of power from Thebes to the Delta, points to civil wars and revolutions.

FELLAH WOMAN AND HEAD OF SECOND HYKSOS STATUE. (From photograph by Naville in Harper's Magazine.)

HYKSOS SPHYNX. (From photograph by Naville in Harper's Magazine.)

Manetho assigns seventy-five kings and 484 years to the fourteenth dynasty, and it is to this period that a good deal of uncertainty attaches, for there are no monuments, and nothing to confirm Manetho's lists, except a number of unknown names of kings of the dynasty enumerated among the royal ancestors in the Papyrus of Turin. If Manetho's figures are correct, the period must have been one of anarchy and civil war, for the average duration of each reign is less than six and a half years, while that of the twelfth and other well-known historical dynasties exceeds thirty years. The same remark applies to the thirteenth dynasty, the reigns of whose sixty kings average only seven and a half years each, and it is probable that the end of this dynasty and the whole of the fourteenth was a period of anarchy, during which so-called kings rose and fell in rapid succession, as in the case of our own dynasties of Lancaster and York, and the annals are so confused that the dates are unreliable. What is certain is that the great Middle Empire sank rapidly into a state of anarchy and impotence, which prepared the way for a great catastrophe. This catastrophe came in the form of an invasion of foreigners, who, about the year 2000 b.c., broke through the eastern frontier of the Delta, and apparently without much resistance, conquered the whole of Lower Egypt up to Memphis, and reduced the princes of the Upper Provinces to a state of vassalage. the princes of the Upper Provinces to a state of vassalage. There is considerable doubt who these invaders were, who were known as Hyksos or Shepherd Kings. They consisted probably, mainly of nomad tribes of Canaanites, Arabians, and other Semitic races, but the Turanian Hittites seem to have been associated with them, and the leaders to have been Turanian, judging from the portrait-statues of two of the later kings of the Hyksos dynasty which have been recently discovered by Naville at Bubastis, and which are unmistakably Turanian and even Chinese in type. Our information as to this Hyksos conquest is derived mainly from fragments of Manetho quoted by Josephus, and from traditions repeated by Herodotus, and is very vague and imperfect. But this much seems certain, that at first the Hyksos acted as savage barbarians, burning cities, demolishing temples, and massacring part of the population and reducing the rest to slavery. But, as in the parallel case of the Tartar conquest of China, as time went on they adopted the superior civilization of their subjects, and the later kings were transformed into genuine Pharaohs, differing but little from those of the old national dynasties. This is conclusively proved by the discoveries recently made at Tanis and Bubastis, which have revealed important monuments of this dynasty. At Tanis an avenue of sphynxes was discovered, copied evidently from those at Thebes and from the Great Sphynx at Gizeh, with lion bodies and human heads, the latter with a different head-dress from the Egyptian, and a different type of feature. At Bubastis two colossal statues of Hyksos kings, with their heads broken off, but one of them nearly perfect, were unexpectedly discovered by Naville in 1887, and it was proved that they had stood on each side of the entrance to an addition made by those kings to the ancient and celebrated temple of the Egyptian goddess Bast, thus proving that the Hyksos had adopted not only the civilization but also the religion of the Egyptian nation. There are but few inscriptions known of the Hyksos dynasty, for their cartouches have generally been effaced, and those of later kings chiselled over them; but enough remains to show that they were in the hieroglyphic character, and the names of two or three of their kings can still be deciphered, among which are two Apepis, the second probably the last of the dynasty. It was probably under one of these Hyksos kings that Joseph came to Egypt, and the tribes of Israel settled on its eastern frontier. The duration of the Hyksos rule is thus left in some uncertainty. Manetho, if correctly quoted by Josephus, says they ruled over Egypt for 511 years, though his lists only show one dynasty of 259 years, and then the Theban dynasty, who reigned over Upper Egypt for 260 years contemporaneously with Hyksos kings in Lower Egypt. We regain, however, firm historical ground with the rise of the eighteenth Theban dynasty of native Egyptian kings, who finally expelled the Hyksos, after a long war, and founded what is known as the New Empire. The date of this event is fixed by the best authorities at about 1750 b.c., and from this time downwards we have an uninterrupted succession of undoubted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments and by the annals of other nations, down to the Christian era. The reaction which followed the expulsion of the Hyksos led to campaigns in Asia on a great scale, in which Egypt came into collision with powerful nations, and for a long time was the dominant power in Western Asia, extending its conquests from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and receiving tribute from Babylon and Nineveh. Then followed wars, waged on more equal terms, with the Hittites, who had founded a great empire in Asia Minor and Syria; and as their power declined and that of Assyria rose, with the long series of warlike Assyrian monarchs, who gradually obtained the ascendency, and not only stripped Egypt of its foreign conquests, but on more than one occasion invaded its territory and captured its principal cities. It is during this period that we find the first of the certain synchronisms between Egyptian history and the Old Testament, beginning with the capture of Jerusalem by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam, and ending with the captivity of the Jews and temporary conquest of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar. Then came the Persian conquest by Cambyses and alternate periods of national independence and of Persian rule, until the conquest of Alexander and the establishment of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, which lasted until the reign of Cleopatra, and ended finally by the annexation of Egypt as a province of the Roman Empire.

The history of this long period is extremely interesting, as showing what may be called the commencement of the modern era of great wars, and of the rise and fall of civilized empires; but for the present purpose I only refer to it as helping to establish the chronological standard which I am in search of as a measuring-rod to gauge the duration of historical time. We may sum up the conclusions derived from Manetho's lists and the monuments as follows:—

Manetho's lists, as they have come down to us, show a date of 5867 years b.c. for the accession of Menes. Of this period, we may say that we know 1750 years for the New Empire and the period of the Persians and the Ptolemies, from contemporary monuments and records, with such certainty that any possible error cannot exceed fifty or one hundred years. The Hyksos period is less certain, but there is no sufficient reason for doubting that it may have lasted for about 511 years. Manetho could have had no object in overstating the duration of the rule of hated foreigners, and a long time must have elapsed before the rude invaders could have so completely adopted the civilization of the subject race. The dates of the Middle Empire, to which Manetho assigns 1241 years, are more uncertain, and we can only check them by monuments for the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties. The length of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty seems to be exaggerated, and the later obscure Theban dynasties may have been contemporary with the rule of the Hyksos in Lower Egypt. Of the 2105 years assigned to the Ancient Empire, the first 1645 from Menes to the end of the sixth dynasty are well authenticated by monuments and inscriptions, and the 460 for the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth are obscure, though a considerable time must have elapsed for such a complete eclipse of the monuments and arts as appears to have occurred between the nourishing period of the sixth dynasty and the revival of the Middle Empire under the eleventh. We may say, therefore, that we have about 4000 years of undoubted history between the accession of Menes and the Christian era, and 1600 more years for which we have only the authority of Manetho's lists, and the names of unknown kings in genealogical records, with a few scattered monuments, and to which it is difficult to assign specific dates. This may enable us to appreciate the nature of the evidence upon which Mariette and so many of the best and oldest authorities base their estimates in assigning a date of about 5000 b.c. for the accession of Menes.

The glimpses of light into the prehistoric stages of Egyptian civilization prior to Menes are few and far between. We are told that before the consolidation of the Empire by Menes, Egypt was divided into a number of separate nomes or provinces, each gathered about its own independent city and temple, and ruled by the Horsheshu or servants of Horus, who were apparently the chief priests of the respective temples, combining with the character of priest that of king, or local ruler. Parts of the Todtenbuch or Sacred Book of the Dead certainly date from this period, and the great Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis had been founded, for we are told that certain prehistoric Heliopolitan hymns formed the basis of the sacred books of a later age. At Edfu the later temple occupies the site of a very ancient structure, traditionally said to date back to the mythic reign of the gods, and to have been built according to a plan designed by Nuhotef the son of Pthah. At Denderah an inscription found by Mariette in one of the crypts of the great temple, expressly identifies the earliest sanctuary built upon the spot with the time of the Horsheshu. It reads, "There was found the great fundamental ordinance of Denderah, written upon goatskin in ancient writing of the time of the Horsheshu. It was found in the inside of a brick wall during the reign of King Pepi (i.e. Pepi-Merira of the sixth dynasty). The name of Chufu, the king of the fourth dynasty, who built the great pyramid, was found by Naville in a restoration of part of the famous temple of Bubastis, and its foundation doubtless dates back to the same prehistoric period.

But the most important prehistoric monuments are those connected with the great Sphynx. An inscription of Chufu (Cheops) preserved in the museum of Boulak, says that a temple adjoining the Sphynx was discovered by chance in his reign, which had been buried under the sand of the desert, and forgotten for many generations. This temple was uncovered by Mariette, and found to be constructed of enormous blocks of granite of Syene and of alabaster, supported by square pillars, each of a single block of stone, without any mouldings or ornaments, and no trace of hieroglyphics. It is, in fact, a sort of transition from the rude dolmen to scientific architecture. But the masonry, and still more the transport of such enormous blocks from Syene to the plateau of the desert at Gizeh, show a great advance already attained in the resources of the country and the state of the industrial arts. The Sphynx itself probably dates from the same period, for it is mentioned on the same inscription as being much older than the great Pyramids, and requiring repairs in the time of Chufu. It is a gigantic work consisting of a natural rock sculptured into the form of a lion's body, to which a human head has been added, built up of huge blocks of hewn stone. It is directed accurately towards the east so as to face the rising sun at the equinox, and was an image of Hormachen, the Sun of the Lower World, which traverses the abode of the dead. In addition to the direct evidence for its prehistoric antiquity, it is certain that if such a monument had been erected by any of the historical kings, it would have been inscribed with hieroglyphics, and the fact recorded in Manetho's lists and contemporary records, whereas all tradition of its origin seems to have been lost in the night of ages.

Although there are no monuments of the Stone Age in Egypt like those of the Swiss lake villages and Danish kitchen-middens, to enable us to trace in detail the progress of arts and civilization from rude commencements through the neolithic and prehistoric ages, yet there is abundant evidence to show that the same stages had been traversed in the valley of the Nile long prior to the time of Menes. Borings have been made on various occasions and at various localities through the alluvial deposits of the Nile valley, from which fragments of pottery have been brought up from depths which show a high antiquity. Horner sunk ninety-six shafts in four rows at intervals of eight miles, across the valley of the Nile, at right angles to the river near Memphis, and brought up pottery from various depths, which, at the known rate of deposit of the Nile mud of about three inches per century, indicate an antiquity of at least 11,000 years. In another boring a copper knife was brought up from a depth of twenty-four feet, and pottery, from sixty feet below the surface. This is specially interesting, as making it probable that here, as in many other countries, an age of copper preceded that of bronze, while a depth of sixty feet at the normal rate of deposit would imply an antiquity of 26,000 years. Borings, however, are not very conclusive, as it is always open to contend that they may have been made at spots where, owing to some local circumstances, the deposit was much more rapid than the average.

These objections, however, cannot apply to the evidence which has been afforded by the discovery of flint implements, both of the neolithic and palæolithic type, in many localities and by various skilled observers. Professor Haynes found, a few miles east of Cairo, not only a number of flint implements of the types usual in Europe, but an actual workshop or manufactory where they had been made, showing that they had not been imported, but produced in the country in the course of its native development. He also found multitudes of worked flints of the ordinary neolithic and palæolithic types scattered on the hills near Thebes. Lenormant and Hamy saw the same workshop and remains of the stone period, and various other finds have been reported by other observers. Finally, General Pitt-Rivers and Professor Haynes found well-developed palæolithic implements of the. St. Acheul type, not only on the surface and in superficial deposits, but from six and a half to ten feet deep in hard stratified gravel at Djebel-Assas, near Thebes, in a terrace on the side of one of the ravines falling from the Libyan desert into the Nile valley, which was certainly deposited in early quaternary ages by a torrent pouring down from a plateau where, under existing geographical and climatic conditions, rain seldom or never falls. These relics, as Mr. Campbell says, who was associated with General Pitt-Rivers in the discovery, are "beyond calculation older than the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs," and they certainly go far to prove that the high civilization of Egypt at the earliest dawn of history or tradition had been a plant of extremely slow growth from a state of provincial savagery.

STATUE OF PRINCE RAHOTEP'S WIFE. (Refined type.)

(Gizeh Museum.—Discovered in 1870 in a tomb near Meydoon.—According to the chronological table of Mariette, it is 5800 years old.—From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo.)

It is remarkable that all the traditions of the Egyptians represent them as being autochthonous. There is no legend of any immigration, no Oannes who comes out of the sea and teaches the arts of civilization. On the contrary, Thoth and Osiris are native Egyptian gods or kings, who reigned long ago in Egyptian cities. There are no legends of an inferior race who were exterminated or driven up the Nile; though it would seem from the portraits on early monuments that there were two types in the very early ages one coarse and approximating to the African, the other a refined and aristocratic type, more resembling that of the highest Asiatic or Arabian races.

KHUFU-ANKH AND HIS SERVANTS—EARLY EGYPTIANS. (Coarse type.)

It has been conjectured that this latter race may have come from Punt, that is, from Southern Arabia, and the opposite African coast of Soumali land, where there are races of a high, civilization at a very early period. This conjecture is based on the fact that Punt is constantly referred to in the Egyptian monuments as a divine or sacred land, while other surrounding nations are loaded with opprobrious epithets. Also the earliest traditions refer the origin of Egyptian civilization not to Lower Egypt, where the Isthmus of Suez affords a land route from Asia, nor to Upper Egypt, as if it had descended the Nile from Africa, but to Abydos and This in Middle Egypt, where the gods were feigned to have reigned, which are comparatively close to Coptos, the port on the Red Sea by which intercourse was most easily kept up between the valley of the Nile and the land of Punt.

This conjecture, however, is very vague, and when we come to positive facts we find that the language and system of writing, when we first meet with them, are fully formed and apparently of native growth, not derived from any Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian speech of any historical nation. It is certainly an agglutinative language originally, but far advanced beyond the simpler forms of that mode of speech as spoken by Mongolians. It shows some distant affinities with Semitic, or rather with what may have been a proto-Semitic, before it had been fully formed, and is perhaps nearer to what may have been the primitive language of the Libyans of North Africa. But there is nothing in the language from which we can infer origin, and the pictures from which hieroglyphics are derived are those of animals and objects proper to the Nile valley, and not like those of the Accadians and Chinese, such as point to a prehistoric nomad existence on elevated plains. The only positive fact tending to confirm the existence of two races in Egypt, one rude and aboriginal, the other of high type, is the difference of type shown by the early portraits and the discovery by Mr. Flinders Petrie, in the very old cemetery of Meydoon, of two distinct modes of interment, one of the ordinary mummy extended at full length, the other in a crouching attitude as is common in neolithic graves.

For any further inquiries as to the origin and antiquity of Egyptian civilization, we have to fall back on the state of religion, science, literature, and art, which we find prevailing in the earliest records which have come down to us, and which I will proceed to examine in subsequent chapters. But before doing so, I will endeavour to exhaust the field of positive history, and inquire how far the annals of other ancient nations contradict or confirm the date of about 5000 years b.c., which has been shown to be approximately that of the accession of Menes.

[CHAPTER II.
CHALDÆA.]

Chronology—Berosus—His Dates mythical—Dates in Genesis—Synchronisms with Egypt and Assyria—Monuments—Cuneiform Inscriptions—How deciphered—Behistan Inscription—Grotefend and Rawlinson—Layard—Library of Koyunjik—How preserved—Accadian Translations and Grammars—Historical Dates—Elamite Conquest—Commencement of Modern History—Ur-Ea and Dungi—Nabonidus—Sargon I., 3800 b.c.—Ur of the Chaldees—Sharrukin's Cylinder—His Library—His son Naram-Sin—Semites and Accadians—Accadians and Chinese—Period before Sargon I.—Patesi—De Sarzec's find at Sirgalla—Gud-Ea, 4000 to 4500 b.c.—Advance of Delta—Astronomical Records—Chaldæa and Egypt give similar results—Historic Period 6000 or 7000 years—and no trace of a beginning.

Chaldæan chronology has within the last few years been brought into the domain of history, and carried back to a date almost, if not quite, as remote as that of Egypt. And this has been effected by a process identical in the two cases, the decipherment of an unknown language in inscriptions on ancient monuments. Until this discovery the little that was known of the early history of Chaldæa was derived almost entirely from two sources: the Bible, and the fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus. Berosus was a learned priest of Babylon, who lived about 300 b.c., shortly after the conquest of Alexander, and wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples, and from the oldest traditions. He began with a Cosmogony, fragments of which only are preserved, from which little could be inferred, except that it bore some general resemblance to that of Genesis, until the complete Chaldæan Cosmogony was deciphered by Mr. George Smith from tablets in the British Museum. Then followed a mythical period of the reigns of ten gods or demi-gods, reigning for 432,000 years, in the middle of which period the divine fish-man, Ea-Han or Oannes, was said to have come up out of the Persian Gulf, and taught mankind letters, sciences, laws, and all the arts of civilization; 259,000 years after Oannes, under Xisuthros (the Greek translation of Hasisastra), the last of the ten kings, a Deluge is said to have occurred; which is described in terms so similar to the narrative of Noah's deluge in Genesis, as to leave no doubt that they are different versions of the same legend.

Prior to the appearance of Oannes, Berosus relates, "that Chaldæa had been colonized by a mixed multitude of men of foreign race, who lived without order like animals," thus carrying back the existence of mankind in large numbers, to some date anterior to 259,000 years before the Deluge. There is also a legend resembling that of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages, recorded in another fragment of Berosus. These accounts are all so obviously mythical that no historical value can be attached to them, and they have only been preserved because early Christian writers saw in them some sort of distorted confirmation of the corresponding narratives in the Old Testament.

For anything like historical dates therefore the Bible remained the principal authority, until the recent discoveries made from the monuments of Chaldæa and Assyria. This authority does not carry us very far back. The first event which can advance any claim to be considered as historical, is that of the migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, and the further migration of his son Abraham from Haran to Palestine. This is said to have taken place in the ninth generation after Noah, about 290 years after the Deluge, and it presupposes the existence of a dense population and a number of large cities both in Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. It mentions also an event, apparently historical, as occurring in Abraham's time, viz. a campaign by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, with four allies, one of whom is a King of Shinar, against five petty kings in Southern Syria. Chedorlaomer has been identified from inscriptions with Khuder-lagomer, one of the kings of the Elamite dynasty, who conquered Chaldæa about 2300 b.c., and were expelled before 2000 b.c.

A long interval then occurs during which the scattered notices in the Bible relate mainly to the intercourse of the Hebrews with Egypt, with the races of Canaan, with the Philistines, with the Phœnicians of Tyre, and with the Syrians of Damascus. Mesopotamia first appears after the rise of the Assyrian Empire had united nearly the whole of Western Asia under the warlike kings who reigned at Nineveh, and when Palestine had become the battle-field between them and the declining power of Egypt, which under the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties had extended to the Euphrates. The capture of Jerusalem in the reign of Rehoboam by Shishak, the first king of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty, affords the first certain synchronism between sacred and profane history. The date may be fixed within a few years at 970 b.c. Assyria first appears on the scene two hundred years later in the reign of Menahem King of Israel, when Pul, better known as Tiglath-Pileser II., came against the land, and exacted a large ransom from Menahem, whom he confirmed as a tributary vassal.

From this time forward the succession of Assyrian kings is recorded more or less accurately in the Bible. Tiglath-Pileser accepted vassalage and a large tribute from Ahaz to come to his assistance against Rezin King of Syria, and Pekah King of Israel, who were besieging Jerusalem, and Tiglath-Pileser came to his aid and captured and sacked Damascus. Shalmaneser came up against Hoshea King of Judah, who submitted, but was deposed for intriguing with Egypt, and Shalmaneser then took Samaria and carried the ten tribes of Israel away into Assyria, placing them in the cities of the Medes. Sennacherib, in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, took all the fenced cities of Judah, and his general, Rab-shakeh, besieged Jerusalem, which was saved by the repulse of the main army under the king when marching to invade Egypt. The murder of Sennacherib by his two sons and the succession of Esarhaddon are next mentioned.

Nineveh then disappears from the scene, and the great Babylonian conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, puts an end to the kingdom of Judæa, by taking Jerusalem and carrying the people captive to Babylon. This historical retrospect carries us back a very short distance, and little can be gathered in the way of accurate chronology from the few vague references prior to this date. So stood the question until the date of Chaldæan history and civilization was unexpectedly carried back at least 3000 years by the discovery of its monuments.

When the first Assyrian sculptures were found by Botta and Layard not fifty years ago in the mounds of rubbish which covered the ruins of Nineveh, and brought home to Europe, it was seen that they were covered with inscriptions in an unknown character. It was called the cuneiform, because it was made up of combinations of a single sign, resembling a thin wedge or arrow-head. This sign was made in three fundamental ways, i.e. either horizontal [symbol], vertical[symbol], or angular [symbol], and all the characters were made up of combinations of these primary forms, which were obviously produced by impressing a style with a triangular head on moist clay. They resembled, in fact, very much the strokes and dashes used in spelling out the words conveyed by the electric telegraph, in which letters are formed by oscillations of the needle.

This mode of writing had apparently been developed from picture-writing, for several, of the groups of characters bore an unmistakable resemblance to natural objects. In the very oldest inscriptions which have been discovered the writing, is hardly yet cuneiform, and the primitive pictorial character of the signs is apparent.

But the bulk of the cuneiform inscriptions not being pictorial, there could be little doubt that they were phonetic, or represented sounds. The question was, what sounds these characters signified, and when translated into sounds, what words and what language did the groups of signs represent?

The first clue to these questions was, as in the parallel case of Egypt, afforded by a trilingual inscription. The kings of the Persian Empire reigned over subjects of various races and languages. The three principal were the Persians, an Aryan race who spoke an inflectional language which has been preserved in old Persian and Zend; Semites, who spoke Aramaic, a language closely allied to Hebrew; and descendants of the older Accadian races, whose language was Turanian, or agglutinative.

It is almost the same at the present day in the same region, where edicts or inscriptions, to be readily intelligible to all classes of subjects, would require to be made in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish.

Accordingly, the pompous inscriptions and royal edicts of these ancient monarchs were frequently made in the three languages, and specimens of these were brought to Europe. The difficulty of deciphering them was, however, great, for the inscriptions were all written, though in different languages, in the same cuneiform characters, so that the aid afforded in the case of the Rosetta stone by a Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription was not forthcoming.

The ingenuity of a German scholar, Grotefend, furnished the first clue by discovering that certain groups of signs represented the names of known Persian kings, and thus identifying the component signs in the Persian inscription as letters of an alphabet.

A few years later Sir Henry Rawlinson copied, and succeeded in deciphering, a famous inscription engraved by the great Persian monarch, Darius the first, high up in the face of a precipice forming the wall of a narrow defile at Behistan, and giving an historical record of the exploits of his reign. The clue thus afforded was rapidly followed up by a host of scholars, among whom the names of Rawlinson, Burnouf, Lassen, and Oppert were most conspicuous, and before long the text of inscriptions in Persian and Semitic could be read with great certainty. The task was one which required a vast amount of patience and ingenuity, for the cuneiform writing turned out to be one of great complexity, Though phonetic in the main, the characters did not always represent the simple elements of sounds, or letters of an alphabet, but frequently syllables containing one or more consonants united by vowels, and a considerable number were ideographic or conventional representations of ideas, like our numerals 1, 2, 3, which have no relation to spoken sounds.

Thus the simple vertical wedge [symbol] represented "man," and was prefixed to proper names of kings so as to show that the signs which followed denoted the name of a man; the sign [symbol] denoted country, and so on. The difficulties were, however, surmounted, and inscriptions in the two known languages could be read with considerable certainty.

The third language, however, remained unknown until the finishing stroke to its decipherment was given by the discovery by Layard under the great mound of Koyunjik near Mosul on the Tigris, the site of the ancient Nineveh, of the royal palace of Asshurbanipal, or Sardanapalus, the grandson of Sennacherib, and one of the greatest Assyrian monarchs, who lived about 650 b.c. This palace contained a royal library like that of Alexandria or the British Museum, the contents of which had been carefully collected from the oldest records of previous libraries and temples, and almost miraculously preserved. The secret of the preservation of these Assyrian and Chaldæan remains, is that the district contains no stone, and all the great buildings were constructed mainly of sun-dried bricks, and built on mounds or platforms of the same material to raise them above the alluvial plain. These, when the cities were deserted, crumbled rapidly under the action of the air and rains, which are torrential at certain seasons, into shapeless rubbish heaps of fine dry dust and sand, under which everything of more durable material was securely buried.

So rapid was the process, that when Xenophon on the famous retreat of the ten thousand traversed the site of Nineveh only two hundred years after its destruction, he found nothing but the ruins of a deserted city, the very name and memory of which had been lost.

As regards the contents of the library the explanation of their perfect preservation is equally simple. The books were written, not on perishable paper or parchment, but on cylinders of clay. It is evident that the cuneiform characters were exceedingly well adapted for this description of writing, and probably originated from the nature of the material. A fine tenacious clay cost nothing, was readily moulded into cylinders, and when slightly moist was easily engraved by a tool or style stamping on it those wedge-like characters, so that when hardened by a slow fire the book was practically indestructible. So much so, indeed, that though the palace, including the library with its shelves and upper stories, had all fallen to the ground, and the book-cylinders lay scattered on the floor, they were mostly in a state of perfect preservation. Other similar finds have been made since, notably one of another great library of the priestly college at Erech, founded or enlarged as far back as 2000 b.c. by Sargon II. Among the books thus preserved there are fortunately translations of old Accadian works into the more modern Aramaic or Assyrian, either interlined or in parallel columns, and, also grammars and dictionaries of the old language to assist in its study. It appears that as far back as 2000 years b.c. this old language had already become obsolete, and was preserved as Latin or Vedic Sanscrit are at the present day, as the venerable language for religious uses, in which the earliest sacred books, historical annals, and astrological and magical formulas had been written. With these aids this ancient Accadian language can now be read with almost as much certainty as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the records written in it are accumulating rapidly with every fresh exploration. Some idea of the wealth of the materials already found may be formed from the fact that the number of tablets in the different museums of Europe from the Nineveh library alone exceeds 10,000. They present to us a most interesting picture of the religion, literature, laws, and social life of a period long antecedent to that commonly assigned for the destruction of the world by Noah's Deluge, or even to that of the creation of Adam. To some of these we shall have occasion subsequently to refer, but for the present I confine myself to the immediate object in view, that of verifying the earliest historical dates.

The first certain date is fixed by the annals of the Assyrian King Asshurbanipal, grandson of Sennacherib, who conquered Elam and destroyed its capital, Susa, in the year 645 b.c. The king says that he took away all the statues from the great temple of Susa, and among others, one of the Chaldæan goddess Nana, which had been carried away from her own temple in the city of Erech, by a king of Elam who conquered the land of Accad 1635 years before. This conquest, and the accession of an Elamite dynasty which lasted for nearly 300 years, is confirmed from a variety of other sources, and its date is thus fixed, beyond the possibility of a doubt, at 2280 b.c. A king of this dynasty, Khudur-Lagamar, synchronizes with Abraham, assuming Abraham and the narrative in the Old Testament respecting his defeat of that monarch to be historical.

This Elamite conquest of Chaldæa is a memorable historical era, for it inaugurates the period of great wars and of the rise and fall of empires, which play such a conspicuous part in the subsequent annals of nations. Elam was a small province between the Kurdish mountains and the Tigris, extending to the Persian Gulf, and its capital, Susa, was an ancient and famous city; which afterwards became one of the principal seats of the Persian monarchs. The Elamites were originally a Turanian race like the Accads, and spoke a language which was a dialect of Accadian, but, as in Chaldæa and Assyria, the kings and aristocracy appear to have been Semites from an early period. It was apparently an organized and civilized State, and the conquest was not a passing irruption of barbarians, but the result of a campaign by regular troops, who founded a dynasty which lasted for more than 200 years. It evidently disturbed the equilibrium of Western Asia, and led to a succession of wars. The invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos followed closely on it. Then came the reaction which drove the Elamites from Chaldæa and the Hyksos from Egypt. Then the great wars of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, which carried the arms of Ahmes and Thotmes to the Euphrates and Black Sea, and established for a time the supremacy of Egypt over Western Asia. Then the rise of the Hittite Empire, which extended over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms with Ramses II. in Syria. Then the rise of the Assyrian Empire, which crushed the Hittites and all surrounding nations, and twice conquered and overran Egypt. Finally, the rise of the Medes, the fall of Nineveh, the short supremacy of Babylon, and the establishment of the great Persian Empire. From the Persian we pass to the Greek, and then to the Roman Empire, and find ourselves in full modern history. It may be fairly said, therefore, that modern history, with its series of great wars and revolutions, commences with this record of the Elamite conquest of Chaldæa in 2280 b.c.

The next tolerably certain date is that of Ur-ea, and his son Dungi, two kings of the old Accadian race, who reigned at Ur over the united kingdoms of Sumir and Accad. They were great builders and restorers of temples, and have left numerous traces of their existence in the monuments both at Ur, and at Larsam, Sirgalla, Erech, and other ancient cities. Among other relics of these kings there is in the British Museum the signet-cylinder of Ur-ea himself, on which is engraved the Moon-God, the patron deity of Ur, with the king and priests worshipping him. The date of Ur-ea is ascertained as follows—Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, 550 b.c., was a great restorer of the old temples, and, as Professor Sayce says, "a zealous antiquarian who busied himself much with the disinterment of the memorial cylinders which their founders and restorers had buried beneath their foundations." The results of his discoveries he recorded on special cylinders for the information of posterity, which have fortunately been preserved. Among others he restored the Sun-temple at Larsam, in which he found intact in its chamber under the corner-stone, a cylinder of King Hummurabi or Khammuragas, stating that the temple was commenced by Ur-ea and finished by his son Dungi, 700 years before his time. Hummurabi was a well-known historical king who expelled the Elamites, and made Babylon for the first time the capital of Chaldæa, about 2000 b.c. The date of Ur-ea cannot therefore be far from 2700 b.c.

The same fortunate circumstance of the habit, by kings who built or restored famous temples, of laying the foundation-stone, such as our royal personages often do at the present day, and depositing under it, in a secure chamber, a cylinder recording the fact, has given us a still more ancient date, that of Sharrukin or Sargon I. of Agade. The same Nabonidus repaired the great Sun-temple of Sippar, and he says "that having dug deep in its foundations for the cylinders of the founder, the Sun-god suffered him to behold the foundation cylinder of Naram-Sin, son of Sharrukin or (Sargon I.), which for three thousand and two hundred years none of the kings who lived before him had seen." This gives 3750 b.c. as the date of Naram-Sin, or, allowing for the long reign of Sargon I., about 3800 b.c. as the date of that monarch. This discovery revolutionized the accepted ideas of Chaldæan chronology, and carried it back at one stroke 1000 years before the date of Ur-ea, making it contemporary with the fourth Egyptian dynasty who built the great Pyramids. The evidence is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho give us the whole series of successive kings and dynasties, a great majority of which are confirmed by contemporary records and monuments. The date of Sargon I. rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than 3000 years later, and may have been mistaken, but he was in the best position to consult the oldest records, and had apparently no motive to make a wilful mis-statement. Moreover, other documents have been found in different places confirming the statement on the cylinder of Nabonidus, and the opinion of the best and latest authorities has come round to accept the date of about 3800 b.c. as authentic. Professor Sayce, in his Hibbert Lecture in 1888, gives a detailed account of the evidence which had overcome his original scepticism, and forced him to admit the accuracy of this very distant date. Since the discovery of the cylinder of Nabonidus, several tablets have been found and deciphered, containing lists of kings and dynasties of the same character as the Egyptian lists of Manetho. One tablet of the kings who reigned at Babylon takes us back, reign by reign, to about 2400 b.c. Other tablets, though incomplete, give the names of at least sixty kings which are not found in this record of the Babylonian era, and who presumedly reigned during the interval of about 1400 years between Khammuragas and Sargon I. The names are mostly Accadian, and if they did not reign during this interval they must have preceded the foundation of a Semite dynasty by Sargon I., and thus extend the date of Chaldæan history still further back. The probability of such a remote date is enhanced by the certainty that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 b.c., and there is no apparent reason why it should not have existed in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates as soon as in that of the Nile.

Boscawen, in a paper read at the Victoria Institute in 1886, says that inscriptions found at Larsa, a neighbouring city to Ur of the Chaldees, show that from as early a period as 3750 b.c. a Semitic population existed in the latter city, speaking a language akin to Hebrew, carrying on trade and commerce, and with a religion which, although not Monotheist, had at the head of its pantheon a supreme god, Ilu or El, from whose name that of Elohim and Allah has been inherited as the name of God by the Hebrews and Arabs. The latest discoveries all point to the earliest dates, and some authorities think that genuine traces of the earliest Accadian civilization can be found as far back as 6000 b.c. There can be no doubt, moreover, that this Sharrukin or Sargon I. is a perfect historical personage. A statue of him has been found at Agade or Accad, and also his cylinder with an inscription on it giving his name and exploits. It begins, "Sharrukin the mighty king am I," and goes on to say, "that he knew not his father, but his mother was a royal princess, who to conceal his birth placed him in a basket of rushes closed with bitumen, and cast him into the river, from which he was saved by Akki the water-carrier, who brought him up as his own child." It is singular how the same or a very similar story is told of Moses, Cyrus, and other heroes of antiquity. It is probable from this that he was a military adventurer who rose to the throne; but there can be no doubt that he was a great monarch, who united the two provinces of Shumir and Accad, or of Lower and Upper Mesopotamia, into one kingdom, as Menes did the Upper and Lower Egypts, and extended his rule over some of the adjoining countries. He says "that he had reigned for forty-five years, and governed the black-headed (Accadian) race. In multitudes of bronze chariots I rode over rugged lands. I governed the upper countries. Three times to the coast of the sea I advanced." If there is any truth in this inscription it would be very interesting as showing the existence in Western Asia of nations to be conquered in great campaigns, with a force of horse-chariots, at this remote period, 2000 years earlier than the campaigns of Ahmes and Thotmes recorded in the Egyptian monuments of the eighteenth dynasty.

CYLINDER SEAL OF SARGON I., FROM AGADE. (Hommel, "Gesch. Babyloniens u. Assyriens.")

The reality of these campaigns is moreover confirmed by inscriptions and images of this Sargon having been found in Cyprus and on the opposite coast of Syria, and by a Babylonian cylinder of his son Naram-Sin, found by Cesnola in the Cyprian temple of Kurion. In another direction he and his son carried their arms into the peninsula of Sinai, attracted doubtless by the copper and turquoise mines of Wady Maghera, which were worked by the Egyptians under the third dynasty. Sargon I. is also known to have been a great patron of literature, and to have founded the library of Agade, which was long one of the most famous in Babylonia. A work on Astronomy and Astrology, in seventy-two books, which was so well known in the time of Berosus as to be translated by him into Greek, was also compiled for him.

Another king of the same name, known as Sargon II., who reigned about 2000 b.c., either founded or enlarged the library of the priestly college at Erech, which was one of the oldest and most famous cities of Lower Chaldæa, and known as the "City of Books." It was also considered to be a sacred city, and its necropolis extends over a great part of the adjoining desert, and contains innumerable tombs and graves ranging over all periods of Chaldæan and Assyrian history, up to an unknown antiquity.

The exact historical date of Sargon I. may be a little uncertain; but whatever its antiquity may be, it is evident that it is already far removed from the beginnings of Chaldæan civilization. Sargon II. is perfectly historical, and his library and the state of the arts and literature in his reign prove this conclusively. He states in his tablets that 350 kings had reigned before him, and in such a literary age he could hardly have made such a statement without some foundation. If anything like this number of kings had reigned before 2000 b.c., the date of Sargon II.'s Chaldæan chronology would have to be extended to a date preceding that of Egypt. Moreover, Sargon was a Semite, who founded a powerful monarchy over a mixed population, consisting mainly of a primitive Accadian race, who had already built large cities and famous temples, written sacred books, and made considerable progress in literature, science, agriculture, and industrial arts. This primitive race was neither Semitic nor Aryan, but Turanian. They spoke an agglutinative language, and resembled the Chinese very much both in physical type and in character. They were a short, thick-set people, with yellow skins, coarse black hair, and, judging from the ancient statues recently discovered, of decidedly Tartar or Mongolian features. They were, like the Chinese, a peaceable, patient, and industrious people, addicted to agriculture, and specially skilled in irrigation. They were educated and literary, but very superstitious in regard to ghosts, omens, and evil spirits. This resemblance to the Chinese has been remarkably confirmed by the discovery made within the last few years, that the Accadian and Chinese languages are closely allied, and that a great many words are identical. The early prehistoric and astronomical legends were almost similar, and in some instances, as in the division of the year, the names and order of the planets, and the number and duration of the fabulous reigns of gods, so identical as to leave no doubt of their having had a common origin. But as the Chinese annals do not extend farther back than about 2700 b.c., the priority of invention must be assigned to the Accadians.

This Turanian population had been long settled in Mesopotamia before the accession of Sargon I., and before the supremacy of the Semitic races began to assert itself. Though called Accadian, which is said to mean "Highlanders," their principal seat was in Shumir or Lower Mesopotamia, in the alluvial delta formed in the course of ages by the Euphrates, Tigris, and other rivers which flow into the Persian Gulf; and their traditions point to their civilization having come from the shores of this Gulf, and having gradually spread northwards. Their most ancient cities and temples were in the Lower Province of Shumir, and the bulk of the population continued for ages to be Turanian, while in Accad or Upper Mesopotamia, where the land rises from the alluvial plain up to the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia, the Semitic element preponderated from an early period, though the civilization and religion long remained those of Shumir or Chaldæa proper.

When the Semite Sargon I. founded the united monarchy, the capital of which was Agade in the upper province, he made no change in the established state of things, maintained the old temples, and built new ones to the same gods. Before his reign we have, as in the parallel case of Egypt before Menes, little definite information from monuments or historical records. We only know that the country was divided into a number of small states, each grouped about a city with a temple dedicated to some god; as Eridhu, the sanctuary of Ea, one of the trinity of supreme gods; Larsam, with its Temple of the Sun; Ur, the city of the Moon-god; Sirgalla, with another famous temple. These small states were ruled by patesi, or priest-kings, a term corresponding to the Horsheshu of Egypt; and a fortunate discovery by M. de Sarzec in 1881 at Tell-loh, the site of the ancient Sirgalla, has given us valuable information respecting its patesi. To the surprise of the scientific world, with whom it had been a settled belief that no statues were ever found in Assyrian art, M. de Sarzec discovered and brought home nine large statues of diorite, a very hard black basalt of the same material as that of the statue of Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid, and in the same sitting attitude. The heads had been broken off, but one head was discovered which was of unmistakably Turanian type, beardless, shaved, and with a turban for head-dress. With these statues a number of small works of art were found, representing men and animals of a highly artistic design and exquisite finish, and also several cylinders. Both these and the backs of the statues are covered with cuneiform inscriptions in the old Accadian characters, which furnish valuable historical information. The name of one of the patesi whose statues were found was Gud-Ea, and his date is computed by some of the best authorities at from 4000 to 4500 b.c., probably earlier, and certainly not later than 4000 b.c. This makes the patesi of Sirgalla contemporary with the earliest Egyptian kings, or even earlier, and it shows a state of the arts and civilization then prevailing in Chaldæa very similar to those of the fourth dynasty in Egypt, and in both cases as advanced as those of 2000 or 3000 years later date.

HEAD OF ANCIENT CHALDÆAN. FROM TELL-LOH (SIRGALLA). SARZEC COLLECTION.

(Perrot and Chipiez.)

Before such a temple as that of Sirgalla could have been built and such statues and works of art made, there must have been older and smaller temples and ruder works, just as in Egypt the brick pyramids of Sakkarah and the oldest temples of Heliopolis and Denderah preceded the great pyramids of Gizeh, the temple of Pthah at Memphis, and the diorite statues, wooden statuettes, and other finished works of art of the fourth dynasty.

STATUE OF GUD-EA, WITH INSCRIPTION; FROM TELL-LOH (SIRBURLA OR SIRGALLA) SARZEC COLLECTION. (Hommel.)

It is important to remark that in those earliest monuments both the language and art are primitive Accadian, with no trace of Semitic influences, which must have long prevailed before Sargon I. could have established a Semitic dynasty over an united population of Accads and Semites living together on friendly terms. The normal Semites must have settled gradually in Chaldæa, and adopted to a great extent the higher civilization of the Accadians, much as the Tartars in later times did that of the Chinese. It is remarkable also that this pre-Semitic Accadian people must have had extensive intercourse with foreign regions, for the diorite of which the statues of Sirgalla are formed is exactly similar to that of the statue of the Egyptian Chephren, and in both cases is only found in the peninsula of Sinai. In fact, an inscription on one of the statues tells us that the stone was brought from the land of Magan, which was the Accadian name for that peninsula. This implies a trade by sea, between Eridhu, the sea-port of Chaldæa in early times, and the Red Sea, as such blocks of diorite could hardly have been transported such a distance over such mountains and deserts by land; and this is confirmed by references in old geographical tablets to Magan as the land of bronze from the copper mines of Wady-Maghera, and to "ships of Magan" trading from Eridhu.

In any case, it is certain that a very long period of purely Accadian civilization must have existed prior to the introduction of Semitic influences, and long before the foundation of a Semitic dynasty by Sargon I. With these facts it will no longer seem surprising that some high authorities assign as early a date as 6000 b.c. for the dawn of Chaldæan civilization, and consider that it may be quite as old or even older than that of Egypt.

The great antiquity assigned to these dates from books and monuments is confirmed by other deductions. The city of Eridhu, which was generally considered to be the oldest in Chaldæa, and was the sanctuary of the principal god, Eâ, appears to have been a sea-port in those early days, situated where the Euphrates flowed into the Persian Gulf. The ruins now stand far inland, and Sayce computes that about 6000 years must have elapsed since the sea reached up to them.

Astronomy affords a still more definite confirmation. The earliest records and traditions show that before the commencement of any historic period the year had been divided into twelve months, the course of the sun mapped out among the stars, and a zodiac established of the twelve constellations, which has continued in use to the present day. The year began with the vernal equinox, and the first month was named after the "propitious Bull," whose figure constantly appears on the monuments as opening the year. The sun, therefore, was in Taurus at the vernal equinox when this calendar was formed, which could only be after long centuries of astronomical observation; but it has been in Aries since about 2500 b.c., and first entered in Taurus about 4700 b.c.

Records of eclipses were also kept in the time of Sargon I., which imply a long preceding period of accurate observation; and the Ziggurat, or temple observatory, built up in successive stages above the alluvial plain, which gave rise to the legend of the Tower of Babel, is found in connection with the earliest temples. The diorite statues also and engraved gems found at Sirgalla testify to a thorough knowledge of the arts of metallurgy at this remote period, and to a commercial intercourse with foreign countries from which the copper and tin must have been derived for making bronze tools capable of cutting such hard materials.

The existence of such a commercial intercourse in remote times is confirmed by the example of Egypt, where bronze implements must have been in use long before the date of Menes; and although copper might have been obtained from Sinai or Cyprus, tin or bronze must have been imported from distant foreign countries alike in Egypt and in Chaldæa.

Chaldæan chronology therefore leads to almost exactly the same results as that of Egypt. In each case we have a standard or measuring-rod of authentic historical record, of certainly not less than 6000, and more probably 7000 years from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date, in presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilization already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organized priesthood, an advanced state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts; writing and books so long known that their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this prehistoric age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilization, from the primitive beginnings of neolithic and palæolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. Bunsen thinks it may have taken 10,000 years, but there are no dates from which we can infer the time that may be required for civilization to grow up by spontaneous evolution, among nations where it is not aided by contact with more advanced civilizations from without. All we can infer is, that it must have required an immense time, probably much longer than that embraced by the subsequent period of historical record. And we can say with certainty that during the whole of this historical period of 6000 or 7000 years there has been no change in the established order of Nature. The earth has revolved round its axis and round the sun, the moon and planets have pursued their courses, the duration of human life has not varied, and there have been no destructions and renovations of life or other traces of miraculous interference. And more than this, we can affirm with absolute certainty that 6000 years have not been enough to alter in any perceptible degree the existing physical types of the different races of men and animals, or the primary linguistic types of their forms of speech. The Negro, the Turanian, the Semite, and the Aryan, all stand out as clearly distinguished in the paintings on Egyptian monuments as they do at the present day; and the agglutinative languages are as distinct from the inflectional, and the Semite from the Aryan forms of inflections, in the old Chaldæan cylinders as they are in the nineteenth century.

[CHAPTER III.
OTHER HISTORICAL RECORDS.]

China—Oldest existing Civilization—but Records much later than those of Egypt and Chaldæa—Language and Traditions Accadian—Communication how effected.

Elam—Very Early Civilization—Susa, an old City in First Chaldæan Records—Conquered Chaldæa in 2280 b.c.—Conquered by Assyrians 645 b.c.—Statue of Nana—Cyrus an Elamite King—His Cylinder—Teaches Untrustworthiness of Legendary History.

Phœnicia—Great Influence on Western Civilization—but Date comparatively late—Traditions of Origin—First distinct Mention in Egyptian Monuments 1600 b.c.—Great Movements of Maritime Nations—Invasions of Egypt by Sea and Land, under Menepthah, 1330 b.c., and Ramses III., 1250 b.c.—Lists of Nations—Show Advanced Civilization and Intercourse—but nothing beyond 2000 or 2500 b.c.

Hittites—Great Empire in Asia Minor and Syria—Turanian Race—Origin Cappadocia—Great Wars with Egypt—Battle of Kadesh—Treaty with Ramses II.—Power rapidly declined—but only finally destroyed 717 b.c. by Sargon II.—Capital Carchemish—Great Commercial Emporium—Hittite Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Monuments—Only recently and partially deciphered—Results.

Arabia—Recent Discoveries—Inscriptions—Sabæa—Minæans—Thirty-two Kings known—Ancient Commerce and Trade-routes—Incense and Spices—Literature—Old Traditions—Oannes—Punt—Seat of Semites—Arabian Alphabet—Older than Phœnician—- Bearing on Old Testament Histories.

Troy and Mycenæ—Dr. Schliemann's Excavations—Hissarlik—Buried Fortifications, Palaces, and Treasures of Ancient Troy—Mycenæ and Tiryns—Proof of Civilization and Commerce—Tombs—Absence of Inscriptions and Religious Symbols—Date of Mycenæan Civilization—School of Art—Pictures on Vases—Type of Race.

CHINA.

The first country to which we might naturally look for independent annals approaching in antiquity those of Egypt and Chaldæa is China. Chinese civilization is in one respect the oldest in the world; that is, it is the one which has come down to the present day from a remote antiquity with the fewest changes. What China is to-day it was more than 4000 years ago; a populous empire with a peaceful and industrial population devoted to agriculture and skilled in the arts of irrigation; a literary people acquainted with reading and writing; orderly and obedient, organized under an emperor and official hierarchy; paying divine honours to ancestors, and a religious veneration to the moral and ceremonial precepts of sages and philosophers. Addicted to childish superstitions, and yet eminently prosaic, practical, and utilitarian. Unlike other nations they have no traditions attributing the origin of arts and sciences to foreign importation, as in the Chaldæan legend of Oannes, or, as in Egypt, to native gods; that is, to development on the soil from an unknown antiquity. The Chinese annals begin with human emperors, who are only divine in the sense of being wise and virtuous ancestors, and who are represented as uttering long discourses on the whole duty of man, in a high moral and philosophical tone.

But these annals do not profess to go back further than to about 2500 b.c., or to a period at least 2000 and probably 3000 years later than the commencement of historical annals, confirmed by monuments in Egypt and Chaldæa, and any traditions prior to this period are of the vaguest and most shadowy descriptions. We only know with certainty that prior to Chinese civilization there was an aboriginal, semi-savage race, the Miou-tse, remnants of whom are still to be found in the mountainous western provinces; and it had been conjectured from the form of the hieroglyphics to which the Chinese written characters can be traced back, that they were invented by a pastoral people who roamed with flocks and herds over the steppes of Central Asia. Thus the sheep plays a very prominent part, the idea of "beauty" being conveyed by an ideogram meaning "a large sheep"; that of "right" or "property" by one which means "my sheep," and so on in many other instances.

There is a tradition also of a clan of 100 families who came down from the West and descended the valley of the Yang-tse-Kiang, expelling the aboriginal Miou-tse. But for any real information as to Chinese origins we are indebted to recent discoveries of Accadian records. It has been proved by Lacouperie, Bell, and other experts in the oldest forms of the Chinese and Accadian languages, that they are not only closely allied, as both forming part of the Ugrian or Turkish branch of the Turanian family, but almost identical. Thus, by following the well-known philological law by which an initial 'g' is often softened in course of time into a 'y,' it was found that by writing 'g' for 'y' in many Chinese words beginning with the latter letter, pure Accadian words were obtained. Thus "to speak" is in Accadian gu, in the Mandarin Chinese yu, and in the old form of Chinese spoken in Japan go; night is ye in Chinese, ge in Accadian. The very close connection between Accadian and Chinese civilization is still more conclusively shown by the identity in many matters which could not have been invented independently. Thus the prehistoric period of Chaldæa before the Deluge is divided, according to Berosus and the tablets, into ten periods of ten kings, whose reigns lasted for 120 Sari or 432,000 years, a myth which is purely astronomical. The early Chinese writers had a myth of precisely the same number of ten kings and the same period of 432,000 years for their united reigns. Chinese astronomy also, said by their annals to have been invented by the Emperor Yao about 2000 b.c., was an almost exact counterpart of that of the earliest Accadian records. They recognized the same planets, and gave them names with the same meanings; they divided the year into the Chaldæan period of twelve months of thirty days each, making the new year begin, as in Chaldæa, in the third month after the winter solstice; and counting the calendar for the surplus days by the same cycle of intercalary days. The oldest Chinese dictionaries give names of the months, which had become obsolete, since the usage of mentioning the months by their numbers, as second, third, and fourth months, had become general, and the meaning of which had been lost. It turns out that several of these names correspond with those of the Accadian calendar.

Such coincidences as these cannot be accidental, and it is obvious that one nation must have derived its civilization from the other, or both from a common source. There can be little doubt in this case that Chaldæa taught China, for its astronomy, knowledge of the arts, and general culture are proved by its records to have existed at least 4000, and probably 5000 years b.c., and then to be attributed to mythical gods and to a fabulous antiquity; while in China they are said to have been taught ready-made by human emperors, at a date from 2000 to 3000 years later. The inference is irresistible that somehow the elements of Accadian civilization must have been imported into China from Chaldæa, at what is a comparatively modern date in the history of the latter country. The only approach to a clue to this date is that the great Chinese historian Szema-Tsien says that the first of their emperors was Nai-kwangti, who built an observatory, and by the aid of astronomy "ruled the varied year." The name is singularly like that of Kuder-Na-hangti, who was the Elamite king who conquered Babylonia about 2280 b.c. It is difficult to see how such an intercourse between Chaldæa and China could have been established across such an enormous intervening distance of mountains and deserts, or by such a long sea-voyage; but it is still more difficult to conceive how not only language, physical characteristics, and civilization should have been so similar, but myths and calendars should have been almost verbatim the same in the two countries, unless a communication really existed between them. Nor will the theory of a common origin apply, for it is impossible to suppose that any common ancestors of the Chinese and Accadians could have attained to such a knowledge of astronomy, and of the industrial arts and agriculture, while wandering as nomad shepherds over the steppes of Central Asia.

We must remember also the fact that caravans actually do travel, and have travelled for time immemorial, over enormous distances, across the steppes of Central and Northern Asia, and that within quite recent historical times, a whole nation of Calmucks migrated under every conceivable difficulty from hostile tribes, pursuing armies, and the extremes of winter cold and summer heat, first from China to the Volga, and then back again from the Volga to China. Nor must we overlook the fact that Ur and Eridhu were great sea-ports at a very remote period, and that the facilities for pushing their commerce far to the east were great, owing to the regular monsoons, and the configuration of the coast.

We must be content, therefore, to take the facts as we find them, and admit that China gives us no aid in carrying back authentic history for anything like the time for which we have satisfactory evidence from the monuments and records of Egypt and Chaldæa.

ELAM.

As regards other nations of antiquity, their own historical records are either altogether wanting or comparatively recent, and our only authentic information respecting them in very early times is derived from Egyptian or Babylonian monuments. The most important of them is Elam, which was evidently a civilized kingdom at a very remote period, contemporary probably with the earliest Accadian civilization, and which continued to play a leading part in history down to the recent date of Cyrus. Elam was a small district between the Zagros mountains and the Tigris, extending to the south along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. Its capital was Shushan or Susa, an ancient and renowned city, the name of which survives in the Persian province of Shusistan, as that of Persia proper does in the mountainous district next to the east of Elam, known as Farsistan. The original population was Turanian, speaking an agglutinative language, akin to though not identical with Accadian, and its religion and civilization were apparently the same, or closely similar. As in Chaldæa and Assyria, a Semitic element seems to have intruded on the Turanian at an early date, and to have become the ruling race, while much later the Aryan Persians to some extent superseded the Semites. The name "Elam" is said to have the same significance as "Accad," both meaning "Highland," and indicating that both races must have had a common origin in the mountains and steppes of Central Asia. The native name was Anshad, and Susa was "the City of Anshad." Elam was always considered an ancient land and Susa an ancient city, by the Accadians, and there is every reason to believe that Elamite civilization must have been at least as old as Accadian. This much is certain, that as far back as 2280 b.c., Elam was a sufficiently organized and powerful state to conquer the larger and more populous country of Mesopotamia, and found an Elamite dynasty which lasted for nearly 300 years, and carried on campaigns in districts as far distant as Southern Syria and the Dead Sea.

The dynasty was subverted and the Elamites driven back within their own frontiers, but there they retained their independence, and took a leading part in all the wars waged by Chaldæa and other surrounding nations against the rising power of the warlike Assyrian kings of Nineveh. The statue of the goddess Nana, which had been taken by the Elamite conquerors from Erech in 2280 b.c., remained in the temple at Susa for 1635 years, until the city was at length taken by one of the latest Assyrian kings, Asshurbanipal, in the year 645 b.c.

We have already pointed out the great historical importance of the Elamite conquest of Mesopotamia in 2280 b.c. as inaugurating the era of great wars between civilized states, and probably giving the impulse to Western Asia, which hurled the Hyksos on Egypt, and by its reaction first brought the Egyptians to Nineveh, and then the Assyrians to Memphis. A still more important movement at the very close of what may be called ancient history, originated from Elam. To the surprise of all students of history, it has been proved that the account we have received from Herodotus and other Greek sources, of the great Cyrus, is to a great extent fabulous. A cylinder and tablet of Cyrus himself were quite recently discovered by Mr. Rassam and brought to the British Museum, in which he commemorates his conquest of Babylon. He describes himself as "Cyrus the great King, the King of Babylon, the King of Sumir and Accad, the King of the four zones, the son of Kambyses the great King, the King of Elam; the grandson of Cyrus the great King, the King of Elam; the great-grandson of Teispes the great King, the King of Elam; of the Ancient Seed-royal, whose rule has been beloved by Bel and Nebo"; and he goes on to say how by the favour of "Merodach the great lord, the god who raises the dead to life, who benefits all men in difficulty and prayer," he had conquered the men of Kurdistan and all the barbarians, and also the black-headed race (the Accadians), and finally entered Babylon in peace and ruled there righteously, favoured by gods and men, and receiving homage and tribute from all the kings who dwelt in the high places of all regions from the Upper to the Lower Sea, including Phœnicia." And he concludes with an invocation to all the gods whom he had restored to their proper temples from which they had been taken by Nabonidus, "to intercede before Bel and Nebo to grant me length of days; may they bless my projects with prosperity; and may they say to Merodach my lord, that Cyrus the King, thy worshipper, and Kambyses his son deserve his favour." This is confirmed by a cylinder of a few years earlier date, of Nabonidus the last King of Babylon, who relates how "Cyrus the King of Elam, the young servant of Merodach," overthrew the Medes, there called "Mandan" or barbarians, captured their King Astyages, and carried the spoil of the royal city Ecbatana to the land of Elam.

How many of our apparently most firmly established historical dates are annihilated by these little clay cylinders! It appears that Cyrus was not a Persian at all, or an adventurer who raised himself to power by a successful revolt, but the legitimate King of Elam, descended from its ancient royal race through an unbroken succession of several generations. He was in fact a later and greater Kudur-Na-hangti, like the early conqueror of that name who founded the first Elamite empire some 1800 years earlier. It may be doubtful whether he was even an Aryan. At any rate this much is certain, that his religion was Babylonian, and that we must dismiss all Jewish myths of him as a Zoroastrian Monotheist, the servant of the most high God, who favoured the chosen race from sympathy with their religion. On his own showing he was as devoted a worshipper of Merodach, Bel, and Nebo, and the whole pantheon of local gods, as Nebuchadnezzar or Tiglath-Pileser.[2]

What a lesson does this teach us as to the untrustworthy nature of the scraps of ancient history which have come down to us from verbal traditions, and are not confirmed by contemporary monuments! Herodotus wrote within a few generations of Cyrus, and the relations of Greece to the Persian Empire had been close and uninterrupted. His account of its founder Cyrus is not in itself improbable, and is full of details which have every appearance of being historical. It is confirmed to a considerable extent by the Old Testament, and by the universal belief of early classical writers, and yet it is shown to be in essential respects legendary and fabulous, by the testimony of Cyrus himself.

PHŒNICIA.

Phœnicia is another country which exercised a great influence on the civilization and commerce of the ancient world, though its history does not go back to the extreme antiquity of the early dynasties of Egypt and of Chaldæa. The Phœnicians spoke a language which was almost identical with that of the Hebrews and Canaanites, and closely resembled that of Assyria and Babylonia, after the Semite language had superseded that of the ancient Accadians. According to their own tradition, they came from the Persian Gulf, and the island of Tyros, now Bahrein, in that Gulf, is quoted as a proof that it was the original seat of the people who founded Tyre. There is no certain date for the period when they migrated from the East, and settled in the narrow strip of land along the coast of the Mediterranean between the mountain range of Lebanon and the sea, stretching from the promontory of Carmel on the south to the Gulf of Antioch on the north. This little strip of about 150 miles in length, and ten to fifteen in breadth, afforded many advantages for a maritime people, owing to the number of islands close to the coast and small indented bays, which afforded excellent harbours and protection from enemies, which was further secured by the precipitous range of the Lebanon sending down steep spurs into the Mediterranean, and thus isolating Phœnicia from the military route of the great Valley of Cœlo-Syria, between the parallel ranges of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, which was taken by armies in the wars between Egypt and Asia. Here the Phœnicians founded nine cities, of which Byblos or Gebal was reputed to be the most ancient, and first Sidon and then Tyre became the most important. They became fishermen, manufacturers of purple from the dye procured from the shell-fish on their shores, and above all mariners and merchants. Before the growth of other naval powers in the Mediterranean they had established factories along the coasts of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, and in all the islands of the Egæan and the Cyclades. They had founded colonies in Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, and on the mainland of Greece at Bœotian Thebes. They had mined extensively wherever metals were to be found, and, as Herodotus states, had overturned a whole mountain at Thasos by tunnelling it for gold. They had even extended their settlements into the Black Sea, along the northern coast of Africa, and somewhat later to Spain, passed the Straits of Gibraltar, and finally reached the British Isles in pursuit of tin.

There can be no question that this Phœnician commerce was a principal element in introducing not only their alphabet, but many of the early arts of civilization, among the comparatively rude races of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Britain. The date however of this earliest Phœnician commerce is very uncertain. All we can discern is that, after having enjoyed an undisputed supremacy, the progress of civilization among the Mediterranean races enabled them to develop a maritime power of their own, superior to that of Phœnicia, and to drive the Phœnicians from most of their settlements on the mainland and islands, confining them to a few trading posts and factories, and directing their more important enterprises towards the Western Mediterranean, where they encountered less formidable rivals.

But although Phœnicia contributed thus largely to the civilization of the ancient world, its antiquity cannot be compared to that of Egypt and Chaldæa. The first reference to the country is found in the cylinder of Sargon I., b.c. 3800, who marched to the coast of the Mediterranean, and crossed over to Cyprus, where a cylinder of his son Dungi has been found, but there is nothing to show that the district was then occupied by the Phœnicians of later times. Kopt, or the land of palms, of which Phœnicia is the Greek translation, is first mentioned in the Egyptian annals of the Middle Empire, and during the rule of the Hyksos the mouth of the Nile had become so thickly populated by Phœnician emigrants as to be known as Kopt-ur, Caphtor, or greater Phœnicia. The priests of the temple of Baal Melcart, the patron deity of Tyre, told Herodotus that it had been founded 2300 years before his time, or about 2750 b.c., and Old Tyre which stood on the mainland was reputed to be more ancient than the city of New Tyre which stood on an island. But this date is negatived by the fact that in an Egyptian papyrus in which an envoy from Ramses II. or Menepthah to the Court of Babylon about 1320 b.c. records his journey, he mentions Byblos, Beryta, and Sidon as important cities, while Tyre is only an insignificant fishing town.

The first distinct mention of Phœnician cities in Egyptian annals is in the enumeration of towns captured by Thotmes III., b.c. 1600, in his victorious campaigns in Syria, among which are to be found the names of Beyrut and Acco, and two centuries later Seti I., the father of Ramses II., records the capture of Zor or Tyre, probably the old city on the mainland.

The first authentic information, however, as to the movements of the Mediterranean maritime races is afforded by the Egyptian annals, which describe two formidable invasions by combined land armies and fleets, which were with difficulty repulsed. The first took place in the reign of Menepthah, son of the great Ramses II. of the eighteenth dynasty, about 1330 b.c.; the second under Ramses III. of the nineteenth dynasty, about 1250 b.c. The first invasion came from the West, and was headed by the King of the Lybians, a white race, who have been identified with the Numidians and modern Kabyles, but were reinforced to a confederacy of nearly all the Mediterranean races who sent auxiliary contingents both of sea and land forces. Among these appear, along with Dardanians, Teucri and Lycians of Asia Minor, who were already known as allies of the Hittites in their wars against Ramses II., a new class of auxiliaries from Greece, Italy, and the islands, whose names have been identified by some Egyptologists as Achæans, Tuscans, Sicilians, and Sardinians.

SEA-FIGHT IN THE TIME OF RAMSES III. (From temple of Ammon at Medinet-Abou.)

The second and more formidable attack came from the East, and was made by a combined fleet and land army, the latter composed of Hittites and Philistines, with the same auxiliaries from Asia Minor, and the fleet of the same confederation of Maritime States as in the first invasion, except that the Achæans have disappeared as leaders of the Greek powers, and their place is taken by the Danaoi, confirming the Greek tradition of the substitution of the dynasty of Danaus for that of Inachus, on the throne of Argos and Mycenæ. The Phœnicians alone of the Maritime States do not seem to have taken any part in these invasions, and, on the contrary, to have lived on terms of friendly vassalage and close commercial relations with Egypt ever since the expulsion of the Hyksos, and the great conquests of Ahmes and Thotmes III. in Syria and Asia. It is probably during this period that the early commerce and navigation of Jebail and Sidon took such a wide extension.

The details of these two great invasions, which are fully given in the Egyptian monuments, together with a picture of the naval combat, in which the invading fleet was finally defeated by Ramses III., after having forced an entrance into the eastern branch of the Nile, are extremely interesting. They show an advanced state of civilization already prevailing among nations whose very names were unknown or legendary. More than 300 years before the siege of Troy it appears that Asia Minor and the Greek mainland and islands were already inhabited by nations sufficiently advanced in civilization to fit out fleets which commanded the seas, and to form political confederations, to undertake distant expeditions, and to wage war on equal terms with the predominant powers of Asia and of Egypt. But though ancient as regards classical history, these beginnings of Greek civilization are comparatively modern, and cannot be carried back further than about 1500 b.c., while there is no evidence to carry the preceding period of Phœnician supremacy and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean, with the existence of the great trading cities of its earliest period, Byblos and Sidon, beyond 2000, or, at the very outside, 2500 b.c.

HITTITES.

The history of another great Empire has been partially brought to light, which was destroyed in 717 b.c. by the progress of Assyrian conquest, after having lasted more than 1000 years, and long exercised a predominant influence over Western Asia, viz. that of the Hittites. The first mention of them in the Old Testament appears in the time of Abraham, when we find them in Southern Syria, mixed with tribes of the Canaanites and Amorites, and grouped principally about Hebron. They are represented as on friendly terms with Abraham, selling him a piece of land for a sepulchre, and intermarrying with his family—Rebecca's soul being vexed by the contumacious behaviour of her daughters-in-law, "the daughters of Heth." This, however, was only an outlying branch of the nation, whose capital cities, when they appear clearly in history, were further north at Kadesh on the Orontes, and Carchemish on the Upper Euphrates, commanding the fords on that river on the great commercial route between Babylonia and the Mediterranean. They were a Turanian race, whose original seat was in Cappadocia, and the high plateaux and mountainous region extending from the Taurus range to the Black Sea. They are easily recognized on the Egyptian monuments by their yellow colour, peculiar features which are of Ugro-Turkish type, and their dress, which is that of highlanders inhabiting a snowy district, with close-fitting tunics, mittens, and boots resembling snowshoes with turned-up toes. They have also the Mongolian characters of beardless faces, and coarse black hair, which is sometimes trained into a pigtail.

KING OF THE HITTITES. (From photograph by Flinders Petrie, from Egyptian Temple at Luxor.)

The earliest mention of them is found in the tablets which were compiled for the library of Sargon I. of Accad, in which reference is made to the Khatti, which probably means Hittites, showing that at this remote period, about 3800 b.c., they had already moved down from their northern home into the valley of the Euphrates and Upper Syria.

Their affinity with the Accadians of Chaldæa is clearly proved by their language, which the recent discovery of papyri at Tell-el-Amara, containing despatches from the tributary King of the Hittites to Amenophus IV., written in cuneiform characters, has proved to be almost identical with Accadian. It seems probable that part of the army which fought in defence of Troy may have been Hittite, and there are many indications that the Etruscans, who were generally believed to have come from Lydia, were of the same race and spoke the same language.

It is in Egyptian records, however, that we meet with the first definite historical data respecting this ancient Hittite Empire. In these they are referred to as "Kheta," and probably formed part of the great Hyksos invasion; but the first certain mention of them occurs in the reign of Thotmes I., about 1600 b.c., and they appear as a leading nation in the time of Thotmes III., who defeated a combined army of Canaanites and Hittites under the Hittite King of Kadesh, at Megiddo, and in fourteen victorious campaigns carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris.

For several subsequent reigns we find the Hittites enumerated as one of the nations paying tribute to Egypt, whose extensive Empire then reckoned Mesopotamia, Assyria, Phœnicia, Palestine, Cyprus, and the Soudan among its tributary states. Gradually the power of Egypt declined, and in the troubled times which followed the attempt of the heretic King Ku-en-Aten to supersede the old religion of Egypt by the worship of the solar disc, the conquered nations threw off the yoke, and the frontiers of Egypt receded to the old limits. As Egypt declined, the power of the Hittites evidently increased, for when we next meet with them it is contending on equal terms in Palestine with the revival of the military power of Egypt under Ramses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, and his son Seti I.

The contest continued for more than a century with occasional treaties of peace and various vicissitudes of fortune, and at last culminated in the great battle of Kadesh, commemorated by the Egyptian epic poem of Pentaur, and followed by the celebrated treaty of peace between Ramses II. and Kheta-Sira, "the great King of the Hittites," the Hittite text of which was engraved on a silver tablet in the characters of Carchemish, and the Egyptian copy of it was engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls of the temples of Ramses, of which we fortunately possess the entire text. The alliance was on equal terms, defining the frontier, and providing for the mutual extradition of refugees, and it was ratified by the marriage of Ramses with the daughter of the Hittite King.

The peace lasted for some time; but in the reign of Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, we find the Hittites again heading the great confederacy of the nations of Asia Minor and of the islands of the Mediterranean, who attacked Egypt by sea and land. The Hittites formed the greater part of the land army, which was defeated with great slaughter after an obstinate battle at Pelusium, about 1200 b.c. From this time forward the power both of the Hittites and of Egypt seems to have steadily declined. We hear no more of them as a leading power in Palestine and Syria, where the kingdoms of Judah, Israel, and Damascus superseded them, until all were swallowed up by the Assyrian conquests of the warrior-kings of Nineveh, and finally the Hittites disappear altogether from history with the capture of their capital Carchemish by Sargon II. in 717 b.c.

The wide extent, however, of the Hittite Empire when at its height is proved by the fact that at the battle of Kadesh the Hittite army was reinforced by vassals or allies from nearly the whole of Western Asia. The Dardanians from the Troad, the Mysians from their cities of Ilion, the Colchians from the Caucasus, the Syrians from the Orontes, and the Phœnicians from Arvad are enumerated as sending contingents; and in the invasion of Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., the Hittites headed the great confederacy of Hittites, Teucrians, Lycians, Philistines, and other Asiatic nations who attacked Egypt by land, in concert with the great maritime confederacy of Greeks, Pelasgians, Tuscans, Sicilians, and Sardinians who attacked it by sea.

The mere fact of carrying on such campaigns and forming such political alliances is sufficient to show that the Hittites must have attained to an advanced state of civilization. But there is abundant proof that this was the case from other sources. They were a commercial people, and their capital, Carchemish, was for many centuries the great emporium of the caravan trade between the East and West. The products of the East, probably as far as Bactria and India, reached it from Babylon and Nineveh, and were forwarded by two great commercial routes, one to the south-west to Syria and Phœnicia, the other to the north-west through the pass of Karakol, to Sardis and the Mediterranean. The commercial importance of Carchemish is attested by the fact that its silver mina became the standard of value at Babylon, and throughout the whole of Western Asia. The Hittites were also great miners, working the silver mines of the Taurus on an extensive scale, and having a plentiful supply of bronze and other metals, as is shown by the large number of chariots attached to their armies from the earliest times. They were also a literary people, and had invented a system of hieroglyphic writing of their own, distinct alike from that of Egypt and from the cuneiform characters of the Accadians. Inscriptions in these peculiar characters, associated with sculptures in a style of art different from that of either Egypt or Chaldæa, but representing figures identical in dress and features with those of Hittites in the Egyptian monuments, have been found over a wide extent of Asia Minor, at Hamath and Aleppo; Boghaz-Keni and Eyuk in Cappadocia; at the pass of Karakol near Sardis, and at various other places. Several of those attributed by the Greeks to Sesostris or to fabulous passages of their own mythology, have been proved to be Hittite, as, for instance, the figure carved on the rocks of Mount Sipylos, near Ephesus, and said to be that of Niobe, is proved to be a sitting figure of the great goddess of Carchemish.

For a long time these inscriptions were an enigma to philologists, but the researches of Professor Sayce and other scholars have quite recently thrown much light on the subject, and enabled us partially to decipher some of them, and the recent discovery of papyri at Tel-el-Amara written partly in the Hittite language in cuneiform characters, removes all doubt as to its nature and affinities.

It may be sufficient to state the result, that the Hittite language was Turanian or agglutinative, closely allied, and indeed almost identical, with Accadian on the one hand, and on the other so similar to the ancient Lydian and Etruscan, as to leave it doubtful whether these nations were themselves Hittites, or only very close cousins descended from a common stock. For instance, the well-known Etruscan names of Tarquin and Lar occur as parts of many names of Hittite kings, and in the same, or a slightly modified form, in Accadian, and survive to the present day in various Turkic and Mongolian dialects. This much appears to be clear, that this Hittite Empire, which vanished so completely from history more than 2500 years ago, had for nearly 1000 years previously exercised a paramount influence in Western Asia, and was one of the principal channels through which Asiatic mythology and art reached Greece in early times, and through the Etruscans formed an important element in the civilization of ancient Rome. It was itself probably an offshoot from the still older civilization of Accadia, though after a time Semitic and Egyptian influences were introduced, as appears from the fact that Sutek, Set or Seth, was the supreme god of the Hittites, as is shown by the text of the treaty of peace between their great King Khota-Sira and Ramses II.

As regards chronology, therefore, Hittite history only carries us back about half-way to the earliest dates of Egypt and Chaldæa, and only confirm these dates incidentally, by showing that other powerful and civilized states already existed in Asia at a remote period.

ARABIA.

The best chance of finding records which may vie in antiquity with those of Egypt and Chaldæa, has come to us quite recently from an unexpected quarter. Arabia has been from time immemorial one of the least known and least accessible regions of the earth. Especially of recent years Moslem fanaticism has made it a closed country to Christian research, and it is only quite lately that a few scientific travellers, taking their lives in their hands, have succeeded in penetrating into the interior, discovering the sites of ruined cities, and copying numerous inscriptions. Dr. Glaser especially has three times explored Southern Arabia, and brought home no less than 1031 inscriptions, many of them of the highest historical interest.

By the aid of these and other inscriptions we are able to reduce to some sort of certainty the vague traditions that had come down to us of ancient nations and an advanced state of civilization and commerce, existing in Arabia in very ancient times. In the words of Professor Sayce, "the dark past of the Arabian peninsula has been suddenly lighted up, and we find that long before the days of Mohammed it was a land of culture and literature, a seat of powerful kingdoms and wealthy commerce, which cannot fail to have exercised an influence upon the general history of the world."[3]

The visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon affords one of the first glimpses into this past history. It is evident that she either was, or was supposed to be by the compiler of the Book of Kings not many centuries later, the queen of a well-known, civilized, and powerful country, which, from the description of her offerings, could hardly be other than Arabia Felix, the spice country of Southern Arabia, the Sabæa or Saba of the ancient world, though her kingdom, or commercial relations, may have extended over the opposite coast of Abyssinia and Somali-land, and probably far down the east coast of Africa. Assyrian inscriptions show that Saba was a great kingdom in the eighth century b.c., when its frontiers extended so far to the north as to bring it in contact with those of the Empire of Nineveh under Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon II. It was then an ancient kingdom, and, as the inscriptions show, had long since undergone the same transformation as Egypt and Chaldæa, from the rule of priest-kings of independent cities into an unified empire. These priest-kings were called "Makârib," or high-priests of Saba, showing that the original state must have been a theocracy, and the name Saba like Assur that of a god.

But the inscriptions reveal this unexpected fact, that old as the kingdom of Saba may be, it was not the oldest in this district, but rose to power on the decay of a still older nation, whose name of Ma'in has come down to us in dim traditions under the classical form of Minæans.

We are already acquainted with the names of thirty-two Minæan kings, and as comparatively few inscriptions have as yet been discovered, many more will doubtless be found. Among those known, however, are some which show that the authority of the Minæan kings was not confined to their original seat in the south, but extended over all Arabia and up to the frontiers of Syria and of Egypt. Three names of these kings have been found at Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament, on the road to Damascus and Sinai; and a votive tablet from Southern Arabia is inscribed by its authors, "in gratitude to Athtar (Istar or Astarte), for their rescue in the war between the ruler of the South and the ruler of the North, and in the conflict between Madhi and Egypt, and for their safe return to their own city of Quarnu." The authors of this inscription describe themselves as being under the Minæan King "Abi-yadá Yathi," and being "governors of Tsar and Ashur and the further bank of the river."

Tsar is often mentioned in the Egyptian monuments as a frontier fortress on the Arabian side of what is now the Suez Canal, while another inscription mentions Gaza, and shows that the authority of the Minæan rulers extended to Edom, and came into close contact with Palestine and the surrounding tribes. Doubtless the protection of trade-routes was a main cause of this extension of fortified posts and wealthy cities, over such a wide extent of territory. From the most ancient times there has always been a stream of traffic between East and West, flowing partly by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and from the ends of these Eastern seas to the Mediterranean, and partly by caravan routes across Asia. The possession of one of these routes by Solomon in alliance with Tyre, led to the ephemeral prosperity of the Jewish kingdom at a much later period; and the wars waged between Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hittites were doubtless influenced to a considerable extent by the desire to command these great lines of commerce.

Arabia stood in a position of great advantage as regards this international commerce, being a half-way house between East and West, protected from enemies by impassable deserts, and with inland and sheltered seas in every direction. Its southern provinces also had the advantage of being the great, and in some cases the sole, producers of commodities of great value and in constant request. Frankincense and other spices were indispensable in temples where bloody sacrifices formed part of the religion. The atmosphere of Solomon's temple must have been that of a sickening slaughterhouse, and the fumes of incense could alone enable the priests and worshippers to support it. This would apply to thousands of other temples through Asia, and doubtless the palaces of kings and nobles suffered from uncleanliness and insanitary arrangements, and required an antidote to evil smells to make them endurable. The consumption of incense must therefore have been immense in the ancient world, and it is not easy to see where it could have been derived from except from the regions which exhaled.

"Sabæan odours from the shores of Araby the blest."

The next interesting result, however, of these Arabian discoveries is, that they disclose not only a civilized and commercial kingdom at a remote antiquity, but that they show us a literary people, who had their own alphabet and system of writing at a date comparable to that of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chaldæan cuneiforms, and long prior to the oldest known inscription in Phœnician characters. The first Arabian inscriptions were discovered and copied by Seetzen in 1810, and were classed together as Himyaritic, from Himyar, the country of the classical Homerites. It was soon discovered that the language was Semitic, and that the alphabet resembled that of the Ethiopic or Gheez, and was a modification of the Phœnician written vertically instead of horizontally. Further discoveries and researches have led to the result, which is principally due to Dr. Glaser, that the so-called Himyaritic inscriptions fell into two groups, one of which is distinctly older than the other, containing fuller and more primitive grammatical forms. These are Minæan, while the inscriptions in the later dialect are Sabæan. It is apparent, therefore, that the Minæan rule and literature must have preceded those of Sabæa by a time sufficiently long to have allowed for considerable changes both in words and grammar to have grown up, not by foreign conquest, but by evolution among the tribes of the same race within Arabia itself. Now the Sabæan kingdom can be traced back with considerable certainty to the time of Solomon, 1000 years b.c., and had in all probability existed many centuries before; while we have already a list of thirty-three Minæan kings, which number will doubtless be enlarged by further discoveries; and the oldest inscriptions point, as in Egypt, to an antecedent state of commerce and civilization. It is evident therefore that Arabia must be classed with Egypt and Chaldæa as one of the countries which point to the existence of highly civilized communities in an extreme antiquity; and that it is by no means impossible that the records of Southern Arabia may ultimately be carried back as far as those of Sargon I., or even of Menes.

This is the more probable as several ancient traditions point to Southern Arabia, and possibly to the adjoining coast of North-eastern Africa, as the source of the earliest civilizations. Thus Oannes is said to have come up from the Persian Gulf and taught the Chaldæans the first arts of civilization. The Phœnicians traced their origin to the Bahrein Islands in the same Gulf. The Egyptians looked with reverence and respect to Punt, which is generally believed to have meant Arabia Felix and Somali-land; and they placed the origin of their letters and civilization, not in Upper or Lower, but in Middle Egypt, at Abydos where Thoth and Osiris were said to have reigned, where the Nile is only separated from the Red Sea by a narrow land pass which was long one of the principal commercial routes between Arabia and Egypt.

The close connection between Egypt and Punt in early times is confirmed by the terms of respect in which Punt is spoken of in Egyptian inscriptions, contrasting with the epithets of "barbarian" and "vile," which are applied to other surrounding nations such as the Hittites, Libyans, and Negroes. And the celebrated equipment of a fleet by the great queen Hatasu of the nineteenth dynasty, to make a commercial voyage to Punt, and its return with a rich freight, and the king and queen of the country with offerings, on a visit to the Pharaoh, reminding one of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, shows that the two nations were on friendly terms, and that the Red Sea and opposite coast of Africa had been navigated from a very early period. The physical type also of the chiefs of Punt as depicted on the Egyptian monuments is very like that of the aristocratic type of the earliest known Egyptian portraits.

CHIEF OF PUNT AND TWO MEN.

One point seems sufficiently clear; that wherever may have been the original seat of the Aryans, that of the Semites must be placed in Arabia. Everywhere else we can trace them as an immigrating or invading people, who found prior populations of different race, but in Arabia they seem to have been aboriginal. Thus in Chaldæa and Assyria, the Semites are represented in the earliest history and traditions as coming from the South, partly by the Persian Gulf and partly across the Arabian and Syrian deserts, and by degrees amalgamating with and superseding the previous Accadian population. In Egypt the Semitic element was a late importation which never permanently affected the old Egyptian civilization. In Syria and Palestine, the Phœnicians, Canaanites, and Hebrews were all immigrants from the Persian Gulf or Arabian frontier, either directly or through the medium of Egypt and Assyria, who did not even pretend to be the earliest inhabitants, but found other races, as the Amorites and Hittites, in possession, whose traditions again went back to barbarous aborigines of Zammumim, who seemed to them to stammer their unintelligible language. The position of Semites in the Moslem world in Asia and Africa is distinctly due to the conquests of the Arab Mohammed and the spread of his religion.

In Arabia alone we find Semites and Semites only, from the very beginning, and the peculiar language and character of the race must have been first developed in the growing civilization which preceded the ancient Minæan Empire, probably as the later stone age was passing into that of metal, and the primitive state of hunters and fishers into the higher social level of agriculturists and traders.

To return from these remote speculations to a subject of more immediate interest, the discovery of these Minæan inscriptions shows the existence of an alphabet older than that of the earliest known inscriptions in Phœnician letters. The alphabets of Greece, Rome, and all modern nations are beyond all doubt derived from that of Phœnicia, and it has been generally supposed that this was formed from an abridgment of the hieroglyphics or hieratics of Egypt. But the Minæan inscriptions raise the question whether the Phœnician alphabet itself and the kindred alphabets of Palestine, Syria, and other countries near the Arabian frontier were not derived from Arabia rather than from Egypt. The Minæan language and letters are certainly older forms of Semitic speech and writing, and it seems more likely that they should have been adopted, with dialectic variations, by other Semitic races, with whom Arabia had a long coterminous position and constant intercourse by caravans, than that these races should have remained totally ignorant of letters, until Phœnicia borrowed them from Egypt. Moreover, as Professor Sayce shows, this theory gives a better explanation of the names of the Phœnician letters, which in many cases have no resemblance to the symbols which denote them. Thus the first letter Aleph, "an ox," really resembles the head of that animal in the Minæan inscriptions, while no likeness can be traced to any Egyptian hieroglyph used for 'a.'

Should these speculations be confirmed, they will considerably modify our conceptions as to the early history of the Old Testament. It would seem that Canaan, before the Israelite invasion, was already a settled and civilized country, with a distinct alphabet and literature of its own, older than those of Phœnicia; and it may be hoped that further researches in Arabia and Palestine may disclose records, buried under the ruins of ancient cities, which may vie in antiquity with those of Egypt and Chaldæa.

But in the meantime we must be content to rely on the records and monuments of these two countries, and especially those of Egypt, as giving us the longest standard of genuine historical time, extending backwards about 7000 years from the present century.

TROY AND MYCENÆ.

The existence of civilization and commerce among other ancient nations which have disappeared from history, have received a remarkable confirmation from the excavations of Dr. Schliemann at Troy and Mycenæ. The site of Troy has been identified with the mound of Hissarlik which formed its citadel, and the accuracy of the descriptions in Homer's Iliad has been wonderfully verified. The ruins of seven successive towns, superimposed one on the other, have been found in excavating the mass of débris down to the bed rock. The lowest of these was a settlement apparently of the later neolithic or earliest bronze ages, while the next, built on the ruins of the first at a level of eleven to twenty feet above it, was a strongly fortified city, which had been destroyed by fire, and which answers almost exactly to the description of Homer's Troy. The citadel hill had been inclosed by massive walls, and was surmounted by a stately palace and other buildings, the foundations of which still remain. It was protected on one side by the river Scamander, and on the other the city extended over the plain at the foot of the citadel, and was itself also surrounded by a strong wall, of which a small fragment remains. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth settlements consisted of mean huts or dwelling-houses built of quarry stones and clay, and the seventh, or uppermost, was the Græco-Roman Ilion of classical writers. The main interest therefore centres in the second city, which, from the articles found in it and the many repairs and alterations of the walls and buildings, must have been for a long time the seat of a nourishing and powerful people, enriched by commerce, and far advanced in the industrial and fine arts.

Notwithstanding the destruction and probable plunder of the city, the quantity of gold and silver found was very considerable, chiefly in the vaults or casemates built into the foundations of the walls, which were covered up with débris when the citadel was burnt, and the roofs and upper buildings fell in. In one place alone Dr. Schliemann found the celebrated treasure containing sixty articles of gold and silver, which had evidently been packed together in a square wooden box, which had disappeared with the intense heat. The nature of these citadels shows a high degree not only of civilization but of wealth and luxury, as proved by the skill and taste of jeweller's work displayed in the female ornaments, which comprise three sumptuous diadems, ear-rings, hairpins, and bracelets.

There are also numerous vases and cups of terra-cotta, and a few of gold and silver, and bars of silver which have every appearance of being used for money, being of the same form and weight. The fragments of ordinary pottery are innumerable, the finer and more perfect vases are often of a graceful form, and moulded into shapes of animals or human heads, and decorated with spirals, rosettes, and other ornaments of the type which is more fully illustrated as that of the pre-Hellenic civilization of Mycenæ.

For Schliemann has not only restored the historic reality of Priam and the city of Troy, but also that of Agamemnon "King of men," and his capital of Mycenæ. The result of his explorations on this site has been to show that a still larger and more wealthy city existed here for a longer period than Troy, and which affected a more extensive area, for its peculiar art and civilization were widely diffused over the whole of the eastern coast of Greece and the adjoining islands, and specimens of it have been found on the opposite coasts of Asia Minor, as we have seen at Troy, and as far off as Cyprus and Egypt, where they were doubtless carried by commerce. The existence of an extensive commerce is proved by the profusion of gold which has been found in the vaults and tombs buried under the débris of the ruined city, for gold is not a native product, but must have been obtained from abroad, as also the bronze, copper, and tin required for the manufacture of weapons. The city also evidently owed its importance to its situation on the Isthmus of Corinth, commanding the trade route between the Gulfs of Argos and of Corinth, and thus connecting the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia with the Western Sea and Europe. The still older city of Tiryns, of which Mycenæ was probably an offshoot, stood nearly on the shore of the eastern gulf, while Mycenæ was in the middle of the isthmus about eight miles from either gulf. Tiryns was also explored by Schliemann, and showed the same plans of buildings and fortifications as Troy and Mycenæ, and the same class of relics, only less extensive and more archaic than those of Mycenæ, which was evidently the more important city during the golden period of this great Mycenæan civilization.

Those who wish to pursue this interesting subject further will find an admirable account of it in the English translation of Schliemann's works and essays, with a full description of each exploration, and numerous illustrations of the buildings and articles found. For my present object I only refer to it as an illustration of the position that Egypt and Chaldæa do not stand alone in presenting proofs of high antiquity, but that other nations, such as the Chinese, the Hittites, the Minæans of Southern Arabia, the Mycenæans, Trojans, Lydians, Phrygians, Cretans, and doubtless many others, also existed as populous, powerful, and civilized states, at a time long antecedent to the dawn of classical history. If these ancient empires and civilization became so completely forgotten, or survived only in dim traditions of myths and poetical legends, the reason seems to be that they kept no written records, or at any rate none in the form of enduring inscriptions. We know ancient Egypt from its hieroglyphics, and from Manetho's history; Chaldæa and Assyria from the cuneiform writing on clay tablets; China, up to about 2500 b.c., from its written histories; but it is singular that the other ancient civilizations have left few or no inscriptions. This is the more remarkable in the case of the Mycenæan cities explored by Dr. Schliemann, for their date is not so very remote, their jewellery, vases, and signet-rings are profusely decorated, their dead interred in stately tombs with large quantities of gold and silver, and yet not a single instance has been found of anything resembling alphabetical or symbolical writing, or of any form of inscription. Atreus, Agamemnon, and a long line of kings lie in their stately tombs, with their gold masks and breastplates, and their arms and treasures about them, without a word or sign to distinguish father from son, ancestor from successor. Their queens are buried in their robes of cloth of gold, their tiaras, necklaces, bracelets, rings and jewels, equally without a word to say which was Clytemnestra and which Electra. How different is this from the Egyptian royal tombs and palaces, where pompous inscriptions record the genealogies of kings for fifty or more generations, and the first care of every Pharaoh is to carve the annals of his exploits on imperishable granite!

Another strange peculiarity of this Mycenæan civilization is the absence of religious subjects. Images and pictures of their gods abound on all the monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa. Every frieze and tablet, every seal and scarabæus, is full of representations of Osiris and Isis, of Thoth and Ammon; or in Chaldæa of Bel, Merodach, and Istar, and their other pantheon of gods, each under its own symbolical form, and innumerable little idols or figurines attested their hold on the population. But at Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenæ there is nothing of the sort. Animals and mortal men are freely depicted on the vases, and moulded as ornaments for domestic utensils, but religious subjects are so scarce that it is even doubtful whether a few scanty specimens bear this character or not.

There is a pit in the central court of the palace at Mycenæ which has been thought to be a sacrificial pit under an altar, but this rather because such an altar is described in Homer, than for any positive evidence. There are also a very few figurines of terra-cotta, which have been thought to be idols, because they are too clumsy to be taken for representations of the human figure by such skilled artists, and because they bear some sort of resemblance to the rude Phœnician idols of the goddess Astarte. But, with this exception, there is nothing at Troy or Mycenæ to indicate a belief in the Homeric or any other mythology.

As a question of dates, we know that the supremacy of Mycenæ and its civilization came to an end with the invasion of the Dorians, which is generally placed about 1000 b.c. We know also that it must have had a long existence, but for anything approaching to a date we must refer to the few traces which connect it with Egypt. A scarabæus was found at Mycenæ with the name of Queen Ti engraved on it who lived in the thirteenth century b.c. Mycenæan vases have been found of the older type with lines and spirals, in Egyptian tombs of about 1400 b.c., and of the later type with animals in tombs of about 1100 b.c., and Mr. Flinders Petrie, by whom they were discovered, says that any error in these dates cannot exceed 100 years. Mycenæan pottery has also been found at Thera under volcanic ashes which geologists say were thrown up about 1500 b.c.

We are pretty safe, therefore, in supposing this Mycenæan civilization to have flourished between the limits of 1600 and 1000 b.c. In this case it must have been contemporary with the great events of the New Empire in Egypt which followed on the expulsion of the Hyksos; with the victorious campaigns of Ahmes and Thotmes which carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and to the Black Sea; with the rise of the Hittite power which extended far and wide over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms in Syria with Ramses II.; and with the coalition of naval powers which on two occasions, in the reigns of Menepthah and Ramses III., commanded the sea and invaded Egypt. The mention of Achæans among the allies whose fleet was defeated in the sea-fight on the Pelusian mouth of the Nile, depicted on the triumphal tablet of Ramses III., becomes an historical reality, and some of the hostile galleys may well have been those of a predecessor of Agamemnon.

It is doubtful, however, whether these Mycenæans or Achæans can be properly called Greek. Both their civilization and art are Asiatic rather than Hellenic; they have left no clue to their language in any writing or inscription; and the type of the race, as far as we can judge of it from paintings on the vases, was totally unlike that of classical Greece.

QUEEN SENDING WARRIOR TO BATTLE. (From "Warrior Vase," Mycenæ. Schliemann.)

In one instance alone the human form is represented on the vases found at Mycenæ, viz. on that known as the great "warrior vase." This is a large amphora, with a broad band of figures round it, representing on one side attacking warriors hurling spears, and on the other a queen, or female figure, sending out warriors to repel them. The vase is broken, but there are in all eight figures with their heads nearly perfect, and all of the same type, which is such an extraordinary one, that I annex a copy of the woman and one of the warriors.

One asks oneself in amazement, can this swine-snouted caricature of humanity be the divine Helen, whose beauty set contending nations in arms, and even as a shade made Faust immortal with a kiss; and this other, Agamemnon, king of men, or the god-like Achilles? And yet certainly they must be faces which the dwellers in Mycenæ either copied from nature, or introduced as conventional ideals. They cannot be taken as first childish attempts at drawing the human face, like those of the palæolithic savages of the grottos of the Vezere, for they are the work of advanced artists who, in other cases, drew beautiful decorations and life-like animals; and in these figures the attitudes, dress, and armour show that they could draw with spirit and accuracy, and give a faithful representation of details when they chose to do so.

ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT. (From a Babylonian cylinder.)

The only approach to a clue I can find for an explanation of these extraordinary Mycenæan faces is afforded by the picture of Adam and Eve, with the Serpent and Tree of Life, on an old Babylonian cylinder in the British Museum.

It will be seen at once that there is a considerable resemblance between the two types of countenance, and it strikes me as possible that, as Mycenæan art was so largely derived from Babylonian, this may have become a conventional type for the first human ancestors, in which it was thought by the Mycenæan copyists that heroes and kings ought to be represented.

This, however, is a mere conjecture, and all we can infer with any certainty from Troy and Mycenæ is, that a considerable civilization and commerce must have prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean at a date long prior to the commencement of classical history, though much later than that of the older records of Egypt and Chaldæa.

[CHAPTER IV.
ANCIENT RELIGIONS.]

Egypt—Book of the Dead—Its Morality—Metaphysical Character—Origins of Religions—Ghosts—Animism—Astronomy and Astrology—Morality—Pantheism and Polytheism—Egyptian Ideas of Future Life and Judgment—Egyptian Genesis—Divine Emanations—Plurality of Gods and Animal Worship—Sun Worship and Solar Myths—Knowledge of Astronomy—Orientation of Pyramids—Theory of Future Life—the Ka—the Soul—Confession of Faith before Osiris.

Chaldæan Religion—Oldest Form Accadian—Shamanism—Growth of Philosophical Religion—Astronomy and Astrology—Accadian Trinities—Anu, Mull-il, Ea—Twelve great Gods—Bel-Ishtar—Merodach—Assur—Pantheism—Wordsworth—Magic and Omens—Penitential Psalms—Conclusions from.

The religious ideas of a nation afford a pretty good test of the antiquity of its civilization. Thus, if 5000 years hence all traces of England being lost except a copy of the Athanasian Creed, it would be a legitimate inference that the race who retained such a creed as part of their ritual, had long passed the primitive period of fetichism or animism, had schools of priests and philosophers, and that their religion had developed into a stage of subtle and profound metaphysical speculations. If this would be true in the hypothetical case of England, it is equally true in the actual case of Egypt. In its sacred book, the Todtenbuch, or Book of the Dead, which we meet with at the earliest periods of Egyptian history, we find conceptions of the Great First Cause of the Universe, which are in many respects identical with those of Athanasius. In fact, with some slight alterations of expression, his creed might be a chapter of the Todtenbuch, and it is clear that in his controversy with Arius he got his inspiration from his native Alexandria, and from the old Egyptian religion stripped of its polytheistic and idolatrous elements, and adapted to the modern ideas of the Neo-Platonic philosophy and of Christianity.

The Egyptian religion, as disclosed to us in the earliest records, is one which of itself proves its great antiquity. There is an extensive literature of a religious character; the Book of the Dead, which contains many of the principal prayers and hymns, and descriptions of the Last Judgment, is already a sacred book. Portions of it are certainly older than the time of Menes, and it had already acquired such an authority in the times of Pepi, Teta, and Unas, of the sixth dynasty, about 3800 b.c., that the inner walls of their pyramids are covered with hieroglyphics of chapters taken from it. From this time forward, almost every tomb and mummy-case contains quotations from it, just as passages of the Bible are quoted on our own gravestones. The Book of Isis, and hymns to various gods, are of the same nature and early date; and in addition to these, there are ethical treatises, ascribed to kings of the oldest dynasties, as well as works on medicine, geometry, mensuration, and arithmetic. Education was very general, as is proved by the fact that the workmen at the mines of Wady Magarah could scrawl hieroglyphic inscriptions on the walls of their tunnels, and on their blocks of dressed stone. Birch, in his Ancient History of Egypt from the Monuments, which I prefer to quote from as, being published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, it cannot be suspected of any bias to discredit orthodoxy, says that, "In their moral law the Egyptians followed the same precepts as the Decalogue (ascribed to Moses 2500 years later), and enumerated treason, murder, adultery, theft, and the practice of magic as crimes of the deepest dye." The position of women is one of the surest tests of an advanced civilization; for in rude times, and among savage races, force reigns supreme, and the weaker sex is always the slave or drudge of the stronger one. It is only when intellectual and moral considerations are firmly established that the claims of women to an equality begin to be recognized. Now in the earliest records of domestic and political life in Egypt, we find this equality more fully recognized than it is perhaps among ourselves in the nineteenth century. Quoting again from Birch, "The Egyptian woman appears always as the equal and companion of her father, brethren, and husband. She was never secluded in a harem, sat at meals with them, had equal rights before the law, served in the priesthood, and even mounted the throne."

In fact the state of civilization in Egypt 6000 years ago appears to have been higher in all essential respects than it has ever been since, or is now, in any Asiatic and in many European countries. And it has every appearance of being indigenous, and having grown up on the soil. There are no traces in the oldest traditions of any foreign importation, such as we find in the early traditions of other countries. There is no fish-man who comes up out of the Persian Gulf and teaches the Chaldæans the first elements of civilization; no Cadmus who teaches the Greeks their first letters; no Manco-Capac who lands on the shore of Peru. On the contrary, all the Egyptian traditions are of Egyptian gods, like Osiris and Thoth, who reigned in the valley of the Nile, and invented hieroglyphics and other arts.

These are lost in a fabulous antiquity, and the only trace of a link to connect the historical Egyptians with the neolithic races whose remains are found in abundance in the form of flint knives and arrows, and are brought up by borings through thick deposits of Nile mud, or the still older palæolithic savages, whose rude implements were found by General Pitt-Rivers and other explorers in quaternary gravels near Thebes of geological antiquity, is furnished by the use of a stone knife to make the first incision on the corpse in turning it into a mummy, and by the animal worship, which may have been a relic of primitive fetichism and totemism.

The highly metaphysical nature of the Egyptian creed is another conclusive proof of the antiquity of the religion. Among existing races we find similar religions corresponding to similar stages of civilization. With the very rudest races, religion consists mainly of ghost worship and animism. Herbert Spencer has shown how dreams lead to the belief that man consists of two elements, a body and a spirit, or shadowy self, which wanders forth in sleep, meets with strange adventures, and returns when the body awakes. In the longer sleep of death, this shadowy self becomes a ghost which haunts its old abodes and former associates, mostly with an evil intent, and which has to be deceived or propitiated, to prevent it from doing mischief. Hence the sacrifices and offerings, and the many devices for cheating the ghost by carrying the dead body by devious paths to some safe locality. Hence also the superstitious dread of evil spirits, and the interment with the corpse of food and implements to induce the ghost to remain tranquilly in the grave, or to set out comfortably on its journey to another world.

Animism is another tap-root of savage superstition. As the child sees life in the doll, so the savage sees life in every object, animate or inanimate, which comes in contact with him, and affects his existence. Animals, and even stocks and stones, are supposed to have souls, and who knows that these may not be the souls of departed ancestors, and have some mysterious power of helping or of hurting him? In any case the safer plan is to propitiate them by worship and sacrifice.

From these rude beginnings we see nations as they advance in civilization rising to higher conceptions, developing their ghosts into gods, and confining their operations to the greater phenomena of Nature, such as the sky, the earth, the sea, the sun, the stars, storms, seasons, thunder, and the like. And by degrees the unity of Nature begins to be felt by the higher minds; priestly castes are established who have leisure for meditation; ideas are transmitted from generation to generation; and the vague and primitive Nature worship passes into the phase of philosophical and scientific religion. The popular rites and superstitions linger on with the mass of the population, but an inner circle of hereditary priests refines and elevates them, and begins to ask for a solution of the great problems of the universe; what it means, and how it was created; the mystery of good and evil; man's origin, future life and destiny; and all the questions which, down to the present day, are asked though never answered by the higher minds of the higher races of civilized man. In this stage of religious development metaphysical speculations occupy a foremost place. Priests of Heliopolis, Magi of Eridhu and of Ur, reasoned like Christian fathers and Milton's devils of

"Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,"

and like them

"Found no end, in wandering mazes lost."

Theories of theism and pantheism, of creations and incarnations, of Trinities and atonements, of polarities between good and evil, free-will and necessity, were argued and answered, now in one direction and now in another. Science contributed its share, sometimes in the form of crude cosmogonies and first attempts at ethnology, but principally through the medium of astronomy. An important function of the priests was to form a calendar, predict the seasons, and regulate the holding of religious rites at the proper times. Hence the course of the heavens was carefully watched, the stars were mapped out into constellations, through which the progress of the sun and planets was recorded; and myths sprang into existence based on the sun's daily rising and setting, and its annual journey through the seasons and the signs of the zodiac. Mixed up with astronomy was astrology, which, watching the sun, moon, and five planets, inferred life from motion, and recognized Gods exerting a divine influence on human events. The sacred character of the priests was confirmed by the popular conviction that they were at the same time prophets and magicians, and that they alone were able to interpret the will of personified powers of Nature, and influence them for good or evil.

The element of morality is one of the latest to appear. It is only after a long progress in civilization that ideas of personal sin and righteousness, of an overruling justice and goodness, of future rewards and punishments, are developed from the cruder conceptions and superstitious observances of earlier times. It was a long road from the jealous and savage local god of the Hebrew tribes, who smelt the sweet savour of burnt sacrifices and was pleased, and who commanded the extermination of enemies, and the slaughter of women and children, to the Supreme Jehovah, who loved justice and mercy better than the blood of bulls and rams. It is one great merit of the Bible, intelligently read, that it records so clearly the growth and evolution of moral ideas, from a plane almost identical with that of the Red Indians, to the supreme height of the Sermon on the Mount and St. Paul's definition of charity.

There is one phenomenon which appears very commonly in these ancient religions, that of degeneration. After having risen to a certain height of pure and lofty conception they cease to advance, branch out into fanciful fables accompanied by cruel and immoral rites, and finally decay and perish. This is an inevitable consequence of the law of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death, which underlies all existence.

"The old order changes, giving place to new."

Environment changes, and religions, laws, and social institutions change with it. Empires rise and fall, old civilizations disappear, old creeds become incredible, and often, for a time, the course of humanity seems to be retrograde. But as the flowing tide rises, though the successive waves on the shore advance and recede, evolution, or the law of progress, in the long run prevails, and amidst the many oscillations of temporary conditions, carries the human race ever upwards towards higher things.

In the case of ancient religions it is easy to see how this process of degeneration is carried out. Priests who were the pioneers of progress, and leaders of advanced thought, became first conservatives, and then obscurantists. Pantheistic conceptions, and personifications of divine attributes, lead to polytheism. As religions become popular, and pass from the learned few to the ignorant many, they become vulgarized, and the real meaning of myths and symbols is either lost or confined to a select inner circle.

But for my present purpose, which is mainly chronological, these vicissitudes in religious beliefs are not important. If, at the earliest date to which authentic history extends, we find a national religion which has already passed from the primitive into the metaphysical stage, and which embodies abstract ideas, astronomical observations, and a high and pure code of morals, it is a legitimate inference that it is the outcome of a long antecedent era of civilization. This is eminently the case with regard to the ancient religions of Egypt and Chaldæa.

The ancient Egyptians were the most religious people ever known. Their thoughts were so fixed on a future life that, as Herodotus says, they looked upon their houses as mere temporary inns, and their tombs as their true permanent homes. The idea of an immediate day of judgment for each individual soul after death was so fixed in their minds that it exercised a constant practical influence on their life and conduct. Piety to the gods, loyalty to the throne, obedience to superiors, justice and mercy to inferiors, and observance of all the principal moral laws, and especially that of truthfulness, were enforced by the conviction that no sooner had the breath departed from the body, and it had been deposited as a mummy, with its Ka or second shadowy self, in the tomb, than the soul would have to appear before the supreme judge Osiris, and the forty-two heavenly jurors, where it would have to confess the naked truth, and be tried and rewarded or punished according to its merits. It is very interesting, therefore, to learn what the religion was which had taken such a firm hold of the minds of an entire nation, and which maintained that hold for the best part of 5000 years.

JUDGMENT OF THE SOUL BY OSIRIS.—WEIGHING GOOD AND BAD DEEDS. (From Champollion's Egypt.)

Our authority for the nature of this religion is derived mainly from the Todtenbuch or Book of the Dead, which was the Egyptian bible. This sacred Book was of immense antiquity, and much of it was certainly in existence before the time of Menes. We know it from the multiplied copies which were frequently deposited in tombs, and from the innumerable extracts and quotations which appear on almost every mummy-case and sarcophagus, as well as from the many manuscripts of works on religious subjects which have been preserved in papyri.

The fundamental idea was that of a primitive ocean, or, if you like to call it chaos, of nebulous matter without form and void, and of a one infinite and eternal God who evolved himself and the Universe from his own essence. He is called in the Todtenbuch "the one only being, the sole Creator, unchangeable in his infinite perfection, present in all time, past and future, everywhere and yet nowhere." But although one in essence, God is not one in person. He exists as Father, but reproduces himself under another aspect as Mother, and under a third as Son. This Trinity is three and yet one, and has all the attributes of the one—infinity, eternity, and omnipotence. Thus far the Athanasian Creed might be a chapter of the Todtenbuch, and it is very evident where the Alexandrian saint got those subtle metaphysical ideas, which are so opposed to the rigid monotheistic creeds of Judaism and Mahometanism.

But the Egyptian religion was more logical, and carried these ideas much further than an original Trinity. It is evident that if we admit the two fundamental ideas, 1st, that God is the only real existence, author of and identical with the universe; 2nd, that this incomprehensible essence or First Cause can be made more comprehensible by personifying his various qualities and manifestations, there is no reason why we should stop at three. If we admit a Trinity of Father, Mother, and Son, why not admit a daughter and other descendants; or if you personify the Power to make a universe, the Knowledge how to make it, and the Will to do it, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, why not the Benevolence to do it well, the Malevolence to do it badly, and a hundred other attributes which metaphysical ingenuity can devise to account for the complication of the known, and the mysteries of the unknown facts of existence?

The Egyptian priests accepted this view, and admitted a whole Pantheon of secondary gods who were either personifications of different attributes of the Supreme God, or separate portions of the one Divine Essence. Thus Ammon was God considered in his attribute of the first Generative power; Pthah the supreme Artist who fashioned all things wisely; Osiris the good and benevolent aspect of the Deity; Set or Typhon his opposite or the Author of Evil, and so on. And once personified, these attributes soon came to be considered as separate beings; to have a female principle or wives added to them, and to be worshipped as the patron gods of separate temples and provinces. Finally, the pantheistic idea became so prevalent, and that of separate personifications of the Deity was carried so far, that portions of the Divine essence were supposed to be incarnated in the sun and heavenly bodies, in the Pharaoh and his family, and even in bulls, cats, and other sacred animals. In the latter case it may be a question whether we do not see a survival of the old superstitious fetiches and totems of semi-savage times, adopted by the priests into their theology, as so many pagan superstitions were by the early Christian missionaries. At any rate such was the result, a mixture of the most childish and absurd forms of popular superstition, with a highly philosophical and moral creed, held by the educated classes and stamped upon the mass of the nation by the firmly established belief in a future life and day of judgment.

Among the more philosophical articles of this creed, astronomy assumed a prominent place from a very early date. The sun, it is true, was described in the original Cosmogony as having been called into existence by the word of the Supreme God, but it came to be taken as his visible representative, and finally worshipped as a god itself. Its different phases were studied and received different names, as Horus when on the horizon rising or setting, Ra in its midday splendour, Osiris during its journey in the night through the underground world of darkness. Of these Ra naturally had the pre-eminence; the title of Pharaoh, or Pi-ra, was that given to kings, who were assumed to be semi-divine beings descended from the Sun. The Osiris myth which was the basis of the national belief in a future life and day of judgment was clearly solar. Egyptian astronomy, like that of the Chaldees and all early nations, assumed that the sky was a crystal dome or firmament which separated the waters of the upper world from the earth and waters below, and corresponded with a similar nether world of darkness below the earth. The Sun was born or rose into the upper world every morning, waxed in strength and glory as his bark navigated the upper waters until noon, then declined and finally sank into the nether world or died, slain by an envious Typhon, but to be born again next morning after traversing the perils and encountering the demons of the realm of darkness. The same idea was repeated by the annual course of the sun through Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, and it translated itself as applied to man into the ideas of birth, growth, manhood, decline, and death, to be followed by a sojourn in Hades, a day of judgment, and a resurrection.

The Egyptian religion, however, seems never to have been so largely astronomical as that of Chaldæa, and to have concentrated itself mainly on the Sun. The planets and signs of the zodiac did not, as with the Chaldees, afford a principal element of their sacred books and mythologies. The Egyptian priests had doubtless long studied astronomy; they had watched the stars, traced the annual course of the sun, divided the year into months and the circle into 360°, and constructed calendars for bringing the civil into correspondence with the sidereal year. They not only had intercalated the five supplemental days, bringing the duration of the year from 360 to 365, but they had invented a sothic cycle for the odd quarter of a day, by which at the end of every 1460 years a year was added, and the sun brought back to rise on the first day of the first month of Thoth in the same place in the heavens, determined by the heliacal risings of the brightest of the stars, Sothis or Sirius.

But they applied this knowledge, which must have been gathered from long observations, mainly to practical purposes, such as the reform of the calendar and the orientation of the pyramids, temples, and tombs, rather than to mythology. The idea of a future life, which took such a firm hold of all classes of ancient Egypt, is that to which we are indebted for the preservation of these wonderful records of the remote past. The theory was that man consisted of three parts; the body or ordinary living man; the Ka or Double, which was a sort of shadowy self which came out of the body and returned to it as in dreams; and the soul, a still more subtle essence, which at death went to the gods, was judged, and either rewarded for its merits by living with them in heaven, or punished for its sins by being sent to the nether world of torment. But this soul still retained such a connection with its former body as to come down from time to time to visit it; while the Ka or Double retained the old connection so closely as to live habitually in it, only coming out to eat, drink, and repeat the acts of its former life, but incapable of existing without a physical basis in the old body or some likeness of it. The same doctrine of the Double was applied to all animated and even to inanimate objects, so that the shadowy man could come out of his mummy, live in his own shadowy house, feed on shadowy food, be surrounded by shadowy geese, oxen, and other objects of his former possessions. Hence arose the extraordinary care in providing a fitting tomb and preserving the mummy, or, failing the mummy, which in course of time might decay, providing a portrait-statue or painted likeness, which might give a point d'appui for the Ka, and a receptacle for the occasional visits of the soul. While these were preserved, conscious personal life was continued beyond the grave, and the good man who went to heaven was immortal. But if these were destroyed and the physical basis perished, the Ka and soul were left without a home, and either perished also, or were left to flit like gibbering ghosts through the world of shadows without a local habitation or a name. The origin of this theory as regards the Ka is easily explained. It is, as Herbert Spencer has conclusively shown, a natural inference from dreams, and is found everywhere, from interments of the stone period down to the crude beliefs of existing savages. It even survives among many civilized races in the belief in ghosts, and the precautions taken to prevent the Ka's of dead men from returning to haunt their former homes and annoy their posterity. The origin of the third element or soul is not so clear. It may either be a relic of the animism, which among savage races attributes life to every object in nature, or a philosophical deduction of more advanced periods, which sees an universal spirit underlying all creation, and recognizing in man a spark of this spirit which is indestructible, and either migrates into fresh forms, or into fresh spheres of celestial or infernal regions, and is finally absorbed in the great ocean from which it sprang.

It is singular that we find almost the precise form of this Egyptian belief among many existing savage or semi-civilized men separated by wide distances in different quarters of the world. The Negroes of the Gold Coast believe in the same three entities, and they call the soul which exists independently of the man, before his birth and after his death, the Kra, a name which is almost identical with the Egyptian Ka. The Navajos and other tribes of Red Indians have precisely the same belief. It seems probable that as we find it in the earliest Egyptian records, it was a development, evolved through ages of growing civilization by a succession of learned priests, from the primitive fetichism and fear of ghosts of rude ancestors; and in the animal worship and other superstitions of later times we find traces of these primitive beliefs still surviving among the mass of the population. Be this as it may, this theory of a future life was firmly rooted at the dawn of Egyptian history, and we are indebted to it, and to the dryness of the climate, for the marvellous preservation of records which give us such an intimate acquaintance with the history, the religion, the literature, and the details of a domestic and social life which is distant from our own by an interval of more than 6000 years.

No other nation ever attained to such a vivid and practical belief in a future existence as these ancient Egyptians. Taking merely the material test of money, what an enormous capital must have been expended in pyramids, tombs, and mummies; what a large proportion of his income must every Egyptian of the upper classes have spent in the preparations for a future life; how shadowy and dim does the idea of immortality appear in comparison among the foremost races of the present day!

The elevated moral code of the Todtenbuch is another proof of the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Morality is a plant of slow growth which has hardly an existence among rude and primitive tribes, and is only slowly evolved either by contact with superior races or by long ages of settled social order. How many centuries did it take before the crude and ferocious ideas of the Hebrew tribes wandering in the desert or warring with the Canaanites, were transformed into the lofty and humane conceptions of the later prophets, of Hillel and of Jesus! And yet we find all the best maxims of this later morality already existing 5000 years before the Sermon on the Mount, in the Sacred Book of ancient Egypt. The prayer of the soul pleading in the day of judgment before Osiris and the Celestial Jury, which embodies the idea of moral perfection entertained by the contemporaries of Menes, contains the following articles—

"I have told no lies; committed no frauds; been good to widows; not overtasked servants; not lazy or negligent; done nothing hateful to the gods; been kind to slaves; promoted no strife; caused no one to weep; committed no murder; stolen no offerings to the dead; made no fraudulent gains; seized no lands wrongfully; not tampered with weights and measures; not taken the milk from sucklings; not molested sacred beasts or birds; not cut off or monopolized watercourses; have sown joy and not sorrow; have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothed the naked:

"I am pure, I am pure."

It is evident that such an ideal of life, not imported from foreign sources, but the growth of an internal civilization, must be removed by an enormous time from the cannibal feasts and human sacrifices of the first glimpses of ideas of a future life in the stone ages.

It is to be observed also that the religion of ancient Egypt seems to be of native growth. No trace is to be found, either in record or tradition, of any importation from a foreign source, such as may be seen in the Chaldæan legend of Oannes and other religions of antiquity. On the contrary, all the Egyptian myths and traditions ascribe the invention of religion, arts, and literature, to Thoth, Osiris, Horus, and other native Egyptian gods.

The invention of the art of writing by hieroglyphics affords strong confirmation of this view. It is evidently a development on Egyptian soil, in prehistoric times, of the picture-writing of a primitive period. The symbols are taken from Egypt and not from foreign objects, and are essentially different from those of the Chaldæan cuneiform, which is the only other form of writing which might possibly compare in point of antiquity with the Egyptian hieroglyphics and hieratic. These were certainly known prior to the time of Menes, and they are the parents of the Phœnician, Hebrew, Greek, and all more modern alphabets.

In all other ancient systems of writing, such as Chaldæan and Chinese, we see the development from the original picture-writing into conventional signs, syllabaries, and finally into ideographs and phonetics; but in the case of Egyptian, when we first get sight of it in the earliest dynasties, it is already fully formed, and undergoes no essential changes during the next 5000 years. Even the hieratic, or cursive hieroglyphic for ordinary purposes, was current in the Old Empire, as is proved by the celebrated Prisse papyrus.

The Chaldæan religion is not so easily described as that of Egypt, for it started from a lower level, and went through more changes in the course of its evolution. In the case of Egypt, the earliest records show us a highly intellectual and moral religion, with only a few traces remaining of primitive barbarism in the form of animal worship, and this religion remained substantially unchanged until the conversion of the country to Christianity. The influences of Semitic and other foreign conquests and intercourse left few traces, and the only serious attempt at a radical religious revolution by the heretic king who endeavoured to dethrone the old Egyptian gods, and substitute a system more nearly monotheistic under the emblem of the winged solar-disc, produced no permanent effect, and disappeared in one or two generations. But in Chaldæa, Semitic influences prevailed from a very early period, and when we reach the historical periods of the great Babylonian and Assyrian empires, the kings, priests, and nobles were Semite, and the Accadian had become a dead language, which could only be read as we read Latin or Hebrew, by the aid of translations and of grammars and dictionaries. Still its records remained, as the Hebrew Bible does to us, and the sacred books of the old religion and its fundamental ideas were only developed and not changed.

In the background of this Accadian religion we seem to see a much nearer approach than we do in that of Egypt to the primitive superstitions peculiar to the Turanian race. To this day the religion of the semi-barbarous races of that stock is essentially what is called "Shamanism"; a fear of ghosts and goblins, a belief that the universe swarms with myriads of spirits, mostly evil, and that the only escape from them is by the aid of conjuror-priests, who know magical rites and formulas which can baffle their malevolent designs. These incantations, and the interpretation of omens and auguries, occupy a great part of the oldest sacred books, and more than 100 tablets have been already recovered from the great work on Astronomy and Astrology, compiled from them by the priests of Agade, for the royal library of Sargon I. They are for the most part of the most absurd and puerile character; as, for instance, "if a sheep give birth to a lion there will be war "; "if a mare give birth to a dog there will be disaster and famine"; "if a white dog enter a temple its foundation will subsist; if a gray dog, the temple will lose its possessions," and so on. This character of magicians and soothsayers clung to the Chaldæan priests even down to a later period, and under the Roman Empire Chaldæan rites were identified with sorcery and divination.

But out of this jungle of silly superstitions the elements of an enlightened and philosophical religion had evolved themselves in early Accadian times, and were continually developed as Semitic influences gradually fused themselves with Accadian, and formed the composite races and religions which came to be known in later times as Babylonian and Assyrian. The fundamental principle of this religion was the same as that of Egypt, and of most of the great religions of the East, viz. Pantheism. The great underlying First Cause, or Spirit of the universe, was considered as identical with his manifestations. The subtle metaphysical conceptions which still survive in the Creed of St. Athanasius, were invoked to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, by emanations, incarnations, and personified attributes. These again were attached to the striking phenomena of the universe, the sun, moon, and planets, the earth and sky, the winds, rains, and thunder. And ever as more phenomena were observed more gods were invented, who were thought to be symbols, or partial personifications, of the one great Spirit, and not more inconsistent with his unity than the "and yet there are not three Gods, but one God" of Athanasius.

But the Chaldæan, like the Egyptian priests, did not stop at one Trinity, but invented a whole hierarchy of Trinities, rising one above the other to form the twelve great gods, while below them were an indefinite number of minor gods and goddesses personifying different aspects of natural phenomena, and taken for the most part from astronomical myths of the sun, moon, planets, and seasons. For the religion of the Chaldees was, even more than that of the Egyptians, based on astronomy and astrology, as may be seen in their national epic of Izdubar, which is simply a solar myth of the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac, the last chapter but one being a representation of the passage through the sign of Aquarius, in the fable of a universal deluge.

The first Accadian triad was composed of Anu, Mull-il, and Ea. Anu, or Ana, is the word for heaven, and the god is described as the "Lord of the starry heavens," and "the first-born, the oldest, the Father of the gods." It is the same idea in fact as that expressed by the Sanscrit Varuna, the Greek Ouranus. Mull-il, the next member of this triad, is the god of the abyss and nether world, while Ea is the god of the earth, seas, and rivers, "the Lord of the Deep," and personifies the wise and beneficent side of the Divine Intelligence, the maintainer of order and harmony, the friend of man. Very early with the introduction of Semitic influences Mull-il dropped out of his place in the Trinity, and was superseded by Bel, who was conceived as being the son of Ea, the personification of the active and combative energy which carries out the wise designs of Ea by reducing the chaos to order, creating the sun and heavenly bodies, and directing them in their courses, subduing evil spirits and slaying monsters. His name simply signifies "the Lord," and is applied to other inferior deities as a title of honour, as Bel-Marduk, the Lord Marduk or Merodach, the patron god of Babylon. In this capacity Bel is clearly associated with the midday sun, as the emblem of a terrible yet beneficent power, the enemy of evil spirits and dragons of darkness.