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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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