Part 7

An able but anonymous author not only asserts the Arab origin of the monumental Ethiopians, but endeavours to prove, by an ingenious series of facts and reasonings, that they were the “Blemies of history, a Bejáwy branch of the Arabian family;” that they were broken and finally dispersed by the policy of the Roman government, which, in the reign of Dioclesian, introduced Negro colonies from Kordofan; and, finally, that the Nubians of our day are not, as a nation, descended from the ancient stock. The last proposition, as a general rule, is undeniable; but the preceding conclusions are not yet susceptible of proof.[77]

Convinced as we are that the Egyptians were a distinct and aboriginal people, the sentiment of M. Jomard may yet become, to a certain extent, an axiom in ethnography:—“L’Arabie à été de tout temps, et elle est encore de nos jours, l’aliment de la population Egyptienne.”[78]

4. THE HINDOOS.

I observe among the Egyptian crania, some which differ in nothing from the Hindoo type either in respect to size or configuration. I have already, in my remarks upon the ear, mentioned a downward elongation of the upper jaw, which I have more frequently met with in Egyptian and Hindoo heads than in any others, although I have seen it occasionally in all the races. This feature is remarkable in two of the following five crania, (A, B,) and may be compared with a similar form from Abydos. (Plate V., Fig. 2.)

The Hindoo head is also remarkable for its small size, its narrow form, especially in front, and often, also, for the delicacy of the osteological structure. The bones of the face, however, project more than those of the European, and there is not unfrequently a manifest eversion of the upper jaw. (B.) The nose is rather small, and the bones are variously aquiline, straight, or moderately compressed. My observations have been made on thirty-seven crania, for which I am indebted to Drs. Burrough and Carson, of this city, and to Dr. Martin and Mr. H. Piddington, of Calcutta. Of these, twenty-four are adult, varying from eighteen to eighty years of age, and give an average internal capacity of but eighty cubic inches; the largest head measuring ninety cubic inches, the smallest only sixty-nine.[79] They pertain, for the most part, to _low-caste_ Bengalees.

It is in that mixed family of nations which I have called Austral-Egyptian that we should expect to meet with the strongest evidence of Hindoo lineage; and here, again, we can only institute adequate comparisons by reference to the works of Champollion and Rosellini. I observe the Hindoo style of features in several of the royal effigies, and in none more decidedly than in the head of Asharramon, as sculptured in the temple of Debod, in Nubia. The date of this king has not yet been ascertained; but as he ruled over Meroë, and not in Egypt, (probably in Ptolemaic times,) he may be regarded as a good illustration of at least one modification of the Austral-Egyptian type.

Another set of features, but little different, however, from the preceding, is seen among the middling class of Egyptians as pictured on the monuments, and these I also refer to the Hindoo type. Take, for example, the four annexed outlines, copied from a sculptured fragment preserved in the museum of Turin. These effigies may be said to be essentially Egyptian; but do they not forcibly remind us of the Hindoo?[80] The mummied head figured Plate X., Fig. 6, has the same general form and cast of features.

The Hindoos are also represented on the monuments as prisoners and tribute-bearers to the kings. My drawing, Plate XIV., Fig. 21, is copied from the “Grand Procession” of Thotmes IV. The man leads a bear; an indication that he is of a foreign country, for there are no bears indigenous to Africa. Moreover, the characters of the animal, as delineated in Rosellini, are not unlike those of the celebrated grotesque species of India called by naturalists _Ursus labiatus_, which has been, in all ages, a favourite with Hindoo mountebanks. The man himself has an aquiline and pointed nose, thin beard, receding forehead, and comparatively fair complexion, which assimilate him to some Indo-Semitic or Indo-Persian tribe.

In the same celebrated scene I notice another head of the same general cast, but of a darker complexion and more delicate features, who answers yet more accurately to the type of the northern Hindoos. He wears a light dress and grass hat, and moreover leads an elephant, all of which point to a warm climate. Mr. Hoskins remarks that “the elephant must be from Ethiopia: if, therefore, they [the attendants] are Scythians, as some suppose, they must be employed as slaves bringing the produce of Ethiopia.” And he concludes by suggesting that they may be white slaves of the latter country, sent as a present to the Egyptian king. This appears to me to be an involved and unsatisfactory explanation. The elephant, like the bear, is obviously an Asiatic animal, (for the Egyptians made no use of the living native species,) and it is evident that this group is merely typical of some conquered Hindoo nation, or proximate and cognate tribe.

Winkelman, Blumenbach, and other authors, have also been struck with these cranial resemblances; and certain physical analogies were familiar to the writers of antiquity. They are especially recorded by Strabo and Arrian, who compare the southern Hindoos to the Ethiopians, and the northern Hindoos to the Egyptians. Various shades of complexion, as we have remarked, were common to both countries, together with a small stature and slender limbs.

History, mythology and the arts discover various additional analogies between these venerable nations. Apis, the Egyptian bull, was the symbol of Osiris; and the white bull is the animal on which Siva is represented on the Indian pagodas: worship was bestowed alike on the Ganges and the Nile; both nations paid homage to the sun and the serpent; and even at the present time, the objects held in greatest veneration by the Hindoos of the Vishnu sect are the ape, the monkey, the bird called garruda, and the serpent capella. Among the symbols of superstition in each are the sphinx, the lotus, the lingam, and the cross. “The dog, sacred to Bhairava, a form of Siva, and the jackall of Durga, remind us of the barking Anubis, the companion of Osiris. The dogs of Yama, one of which was termed Cerbura, or spotted, and was feigned to have three heads, corresponds remarkably, as Mr. Wilford has observed, with the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of Pluto.”[81]

This affinity is also recognised in their almost exclusive vegetable diet, and by the singular institution of castes. Analogies are, moreover, traced in the architecture of the two nations, whether in their monolithic temples and subterranean sanctuaries, or in the statuary and minor decorations of their stupendous temples.[82]

That there was extensive and long-continued intercourse between the Hindoos and Egyptians is beyond a question; and history speaks, also, of conquest and migration. Which was primitively the dominant power? The Egyptians very naturally decided this point in their own favour; for they assert that Osiris crossed Arabia to the utmost inhabited parts of India, and built many cities there. “He left, likewise,” says Diodorus, “many other marks of his being in these parts, which have induced the inhabitants to believe and affirm, that this god (Osiris) was born in India.”[83] Thus it appears that, in the age of Diodorus, the Hindoos not only worshipped, but claimed as original to themselves, the principal divinity of the Egyptians. There is, moreover, a passage in Syncellus which directly asserts that the Hindoos, who, as we have observed, are sometimes called Ethiopians in ancient history, formed colonies in Egypt. “Æthiopes ab Indo fluvio profecti, supra Ægyptum sedem sibi eligerunt.” Heeren, from whom I derive this quotation, remarks, that as the Hindoos would necessarily arrive by sea, they would establish themselves on the coast. We grant it; but a commercial and migratory people would soon find their way to the great mart of Meroë, and thence to every part of the Egyptian provinces. It has been observed by Mr. Bonomi, that the affiliation of the Hindoos with the people of the upper Nile is confirmed by the affinity which exists between the Ethiopic and Sanscrit systems of writing, as pointed out by Dr. Wall and Mr. Tudor.[84]

Dr. Prichard, whose profound investigations into this and all other questions in ethnography, command our highest respect, while he admits that great difficulties present themselves in the present inquiry, remarks “that a common origin, if not of the races themselves, at least of the mental culture characteristic of both of them, has been proved; and that the people of India and of Egypt derived from one source the first principles of all their peculiarities of thought and action, of their religious and social observances, and civil and political institutions; and that these principles had even been developed to a considerable extent, before the nations themselves were entirely cut off from communication with each other or with a common centre.”[85]

It has been proved by the philosophic Heeren, that Meroë was the grand emporium of the trade between the richest and most productive portions of the earth; the gold countries of eastern Africa, the spice lands of India, and the region of frankincense and precious stones in southern Arabia. He has shown that the communication between these countries was established in the most ancient periods, and continued without interruption through successive ages of time; that the ruins of Adulé, Azab, and Axum, yet mark the caravan routes between Meroë and Arabia Felix; and that Yemen, though separated from India by an open sea, is yet connected with it by nature in an extraordinary manner. “One half of the year,” he adds, “from spring to autumn, the wind regularly sets in and wafts the vessels from Arabia to India; the other half, from autumn to spring, it as regularly carries them back from India to Arabia.”[86]

In truth, what Diodorus says, in general, of early Egyptian commerce and conquest by sea, need be no longer regarded as fabulous, although the details, like much that we glean from the remote history of all heathen nations, are to be received with circumspection. He tells us that Sesostris (Rameses III.) fitted out a fleet of four hundred ships in the Arabian gulf, with which he conquered all the countries bordering on the Erythrean sea, as far as India, whence he led an army beyond the Ganges until he again reached the ocean. This account is not likely to be _all_ fable, especially since it comes from a Greek historian; and we may safely regard it as an indication of that extensive maritime enterprise in which the Egyptians engaged with the southern nations of Asia. When the Romans under the guidance of Hippalus, eighty years after their conquest of Egypt, began to trade with India by way of the Red Sea and Malabar, they only re-established the ancient route, which had been long forgotten amidst the chaos of political revolutions. In fine, if the Egyptians had been their own historians, we should probably learn that they were as familiar with India in ancient as the English are in modern times.[87]

While we conclude, therefore, that the Egyptians were a distinct people from either the Arabs or Hindoos, we cannot deny those resemblances which are too obvious to be mistaken, yet not to be accounted for without difficulty; nor can there be a reasonable doubt that the people of both these nations formed an important part of the once multitudinous population of Egypt.[88]

5. THE HYKSHOS.

There is no fact in history more familiar than the rule of the Hykshos or shepherd kings in Egypt. The word Hykshos is the same as we have seen (p. 38,) both in the Egyptian and Berber or Libyan tongues, and signified a _shepherd_ or a wanderer. It was applied to all those foreigners who at different times displaced the native dynasties,—Scythians, Hellenic tribes, Phenicians, and others.

Reserving some remarks for a future part of this memoir, we shall briefly observe that there is no monumental record of more than one of these sovereignties, namely, that which was expelled by Amunoph the First of the eighteenth dynasty, about eighteen centuries before Christ. These people, whose name was held in execration by the Egyptians, are said by Herodotus and other historians to have possessed a fair complexion, blue eyes, and reddish hair. That they were of the Caucasian race there is no question; but the preceding traits apply equally to the Scythians, the Phenicians, and the Edomim or Edomites, and it is probable that the shepherd dynasties of Manetho embraced kings from all these sources.[89]

The portraits of these intrusive kings, as recently discovered in various parts of Egypt, not only present a physiognomy entirely different from that of the legitimate monarchs, but the symbol of their religion is also different, being “the sun, whose rays terminate in human hands,” while the accompanying hieroglyphic legends make no allusion to the Egyptian deities. “Their features,” observes Mr. Perring, from whom I derive these facts, “do not at all resemble the Egyptian; and, though much defaced, are evidently the same as those found on the propyla of Karnak, where we may recognise a similarity with the tall, white, slender, blue-eyed, and red-haired race, painted on the soles of the Egyptian sandals, and appearing also on the monuments, where they are emphatically called the _wicked race of Scheto_.”[90] One of these effigies is found only on fragments of stone which had pertained to temples antecedent to the eighteenth dynasty, which structures were overturned by the legitimate kings of that and the succeeding reigns, and the _materials_ used in erecting those splendid Pharaonic monuments of which they yet form a part.

The three following heads are copied from Mr. Perring’s very interesting memoir.

No. 1, the portrait of a king whose name is read _Skai_ by Champollion, copied from his tomb in the western valley near Thebes. The bold, heavy features, and harsh expression are very remarkable, and Mr. Perring observes that this personage is represented of a much lighter red than is usual with the Egyptians.

No. 2. Head of another king of this exotic dynasty, with long sharp features, whose name reads _Atenre-Backhan_ on the monuments, copied from a stone in the second propylon of Karnak.

No. 3. Another effigy of the same king, from the grottoes of El Tell, of which Mr. Perring remarks, that having been copied in haste it is somewhat in caricature.

El Tell, or Tel-el-Amarna, appears to have been the stronghold of these “foreign marauders,” respecting whom Mr. Gliddon, after suggesting the probability that the sovereigns may have been of Arabian origin, inquires—“whether the present inhabitants, whose village occupies the once warlike camp or city of _Atenre_, have in their views and in their physical conformation, some vestiges of that early tribe of heterodox conquerors? And may not then the cause of the almost instinctive terror with which the natives of other parts of Egypt regard this vicinity, proceed from vague traditions of ancient predatory habits,—some fitful legend that has outlived thirty-five centuries?”[91]

There are many effigies of the same general character of the age of the fourth Rameses. One of them, a captive, is figured in the margin. Wilkinson reads their name Tochari on the monuments; Rosellini translates it Fekkaro. To my view they have the lined and hardy features of the Celts or Gauls, of whom, however, we have little knowledge at that remote date, (B.C. 1400,) although even then they occupied a large part of southern Europe. They perhaps rather pertain to the Phenician branch of the Caucasian race.

There are other paintings, especially some at Abousimbel of the age of Rameses III., which correspond in every particular with the Scythian physiognomy as recorded in history;[92] and the name of _Scheto_, by which they are designated on the monuments, confirms the suggestion of the hieroglyphists that they represent a Scythian or Scytho-Bactrian people.[93]

The researches of Lord Lindsay seem to prove that the Assyrians were also among the Hykshos conquerors of Egypt; and the shepherds who invaded Egypt before the time of Abraham are called _Cushim_ by the ancients, which means Ethiopians or Babylonians; for the country on both sides of the Persian Gulf was called _Cush_.[94]

Plutarch, quoting Manetho, asserts that Tiphonean or red-haired men were sacrificed in the temples of Eletheias, and their ashes scattered to the winds. Was this done in commemoration of the hatred which the Egyptians bore to the red-haired Hykshos?

6. THE COPTS.

From various antecedent remarks it will be perceived that I regard the Copts as a mixed community, derived in diverse proportions from the Caucasian and the Negro; and this diversity of origin may explain the dissimilar characteristics which travellers have ascribed to them.

Denon, for example, described them as having “flat foreheads, eyes half closed, and raised up at the angles, high cheek bones, a broad, flat, and short nose, a large, flattened mouth, placed at a considerable distance from the nose, thick lips, a little beard, a shapeless body, crooked legs, without expression in the contour, and long, flat toes.”[95] Denon even thinks that these features correspond, in a remarkable manner, with the human face and figure as represented in Egyptian painting and sculpture! And Sonnini, after describing them in nearly analogous terms, adds the moral reproach, that while “they are the ugliest of men, they are the filthiest and most disgusting.”[96]

If we compare these seemingly exaggerated descriptions with those of Brown, Lane, and some other travellers, the discrepancy is so great as, at first thought, to baffle all explanation. Brown, for example, “was not struck with any resemblance to the Negro features or form;” and he saw nothing remarkable in the texture of the hair.[97] “The eyes of the Copts,” says Mr. Lane, “are generally large and elongated, slightly inclining from the nose upwards, and always black. The nose is straight, excepting at the end, where it is rounded and wide; and the lips are rather thick, and the hair is black and curly.”[98] Madden adds that they are characterized by a remarkable distance between the eyes. Belzoni observed among them some as fair as Europeans; Rosellini assures us that they are largely mixed with Jewish and Roman blood;[99] and D’Avezac, like Depauw, discovers in them a partial Chinese ancestry. These, and numberless other opinions which might be cited, prove that the Copts differ greatly among themselves; and that they are, physically and morally, a mixture of all the nations which have successively held dominion in Egypt, or swelled its varied population—Egyptians of various castes, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Hebrews, Negroes, and some others Such was, at least in part, the opinion of Pugnet, (whose memoir I have not seen,) for he separates them “into two divisions; those whose ancestry has been intermixed, and partly of Greek and Latin descent, and a class of purely Egyptian origin.”[100] But, after all, perhaps the traces which are most invariable in the Copt are derived from the Negro; and they are manifest in the very bones of the head and face.

“The inhabitants of the towns of Arabia and Egypt,” says Burckhardt, “are in the daily habit of taking in wedlock Abyssinian as well as Negro slaves;”[101] and, in a subsequent part of his travels, the same intelligent author describes a class of people in Nubia who are the direct offspring of this mixture of race, and who seem, from his description, to answer the characters of the Copts themselves. “The Nouba slaves (among whom must be reckoned those who are born in Senaar of male Negroes and female Abyssinians) form a middle class between the blacks and the Abyssinians. Their features, though they retain evident signs of Negro origin, have still something of what is called regular; their noses, though smaller than those of Europeans, are less flat than those of Negroes their lips are less thick, and the cheek bones less prominent. The hair of some is woolly but among the greater part it is similar to the hair of Europeans, but _stronger_, and always curled.” Another, and yet more striking example of the Negroid conformation is seen in the vast Foulah or Fellatah population of central Africa, which is now spread over a region of fifteen hundred miles from east to west, and five hundred miles from north to south. That they are a mixed progeny of Arabs, Berbers and Negroes, no longer admits of a reasonable doubt. Such is the opinion of D’Avezac and Hodgson, Vater, Adelung, and most other inquirers. “In the midst of the Negro races,” observes M. D’Avezac, “there stands out a métive population, of tawny or copper colour, prominent nose, small mouth, and oval face, which ranks itself among the white races, and asserts itself to be descended from Arab fathers and Taurodo mothers. Their crisped hair, even woolly, though long, justifies their classification among the _Oulotric_ (woolly-haired) populations; but neither the traits of their features, nor the colour of their skin, allow them to be confounded with Negroes, however great the fusion of the two types may be.”[102] These and other facts derived from the slave trade, when considered in connexion with the Negro colonization of Nubia in the reign of Dioclesian, will account, I may repeat, not only for every blending of race observable in that country, but also assists us in tracing the origin of the Copts;—not to a _period_ of time, it is true, but to circumstances which have been in operation for ages, and which were once, in all probability, far more active than they are at present.

By the kindness of Mr. Gliddon I possess three Coptic skulls, two of which are adult, and are accurately sketched in the subjoined drawings, (A and B.)

In A the cranium is elongated, narrow, but otherwise mediately developed in front, with great breadth and fulness in the whole posterior region. The nasal bones, though prominent, are broad, short, and concave, and the upper jaw is everted. There is, also, a remarkable distance between the eyes. The facial angle measures 81°, the internal capacity 85 cubic inches.

In the second head, B, the head is long and narrow, with a receding forehead, flat or concave nasal bones, and short, everted upper maxilla. Facial angle 78°; internal capacity 77 cubic inches.

A glance at these two crania will satisfy any one that they possess, in degree, both the conformation and expression of the Negro.