Human Origins

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—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.