CHAPTER I. THE EGYPTIAN RACE AND ITS ORIGIN

Egypt is a long Contree; but it is streyt, that is to seye narrow; for thei may not enlargen it toward the Desert, for defaute of Watre. And the Contree is sett along upon the Ryvere of Nyle; be als much as that Ryvere may serve be Flodes or otherwise that whanne it flowethe it may spreden abrood thorghe the Contree; so is the Contree large of Lengthe. For there it reyneth not but litylle in the Contree; and for that Cause, they have no Watre, but zif it be of that Flood of that Ryvere. And for als moche as it ne reyeneth not in that Contree, but the Eyr is alwey pure and clear, therefor in that Contree ben the gode Astronomyeres; for thei fynde there no Cloudes to letten hem.--_The voyage and travile of Sir John Maundeville, Kt._

Two theories as to the origin of the Egyptians have been prominent, the one supposing that they came originally from Asia, the other that their racial cradle lay in the upper regions of the Nile, particularly in Ethiopia. Even to-day there is no agreement among Egyptologists as to which of these theories is correct. Among the earlier students of the subject, Heeren was prominent in pointing out an alleged analogy between the form of skull of the Egyptian and that of the Indian races. He believed in the Indian origin of the Egyptians.

One of the most recent authorities, Professor Flinders Petrie, inclines to the opinion that the Egyptians were of common origin with the Phœnicians, and that they came into the Nile region from the land of Punt, across the Red Sea. Professor Maspero, on the other hand, inclines to the belief in the African origin of the race; and the latest important anthropological theory, as propounded by Professor Sergi, contends for the Ethiopic origin of the entire Mediterranean race, of which the Egyptians are a part. According to this theory, a race whose primitive seat of residence was in the upper regions of the Nile spread gradually to the north, finally invading Asia by way of the Isthmus of Suez, and crossing to the peninsulas of southern Europe by way of Crete and Cyprus and Sicily, and perhaps also, after a long journey to the west along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, by way of the Straits of Gibraltar.

The true scientific status of the matter amounts merely to a confession of almost entire ignorance. The theory of Sergi, just referred to, finds a certain support in the data of cranial measurements, but it would be going much beyond warrantable conclusions to affirm anything like certainty for the inferences drawn from all the observations as yet available. The historian is obliged, therefore, to fall back upon the simple fact that for a good many thousands of years before the Christian era, a race of people of unknown origin inhabited the Nile Valley, and had attained a very high state of civilisation. Whatever the origin of this people, and however diversified the racial elements of which it was composed, the climatic conditions of Egypt had long since imposed upon the entire population an influence that welded all the diverse elements into a single racial mould, so that, as Professor Maspero points out, at the very dawn of Egyptian history the inhabitants of the entire land of Egypt constituted a single race, speaking one language and showing very little diversity of culture.

It is one of the standing surprises for the student of antiquity that the most massive structures ever built by man should be found in Egypt, dating from a period so remote as to be almost prehistoric. One finds it hard to avoid the feeling that there was a race sprung suddenly to a very high plane of civilisation, as if by a sheer leap from barbarism; but, of course, no modern student of the subject considers the matter in this light. It is uniformly accepted that a vast period of time lies back of the Pyramids, in which the Egyptians were slowly working their way upward. Professor Maspero estimates that for at least eight or ten thousand years the people had inhabited this land, all along developing their peculiar civilisation. Of course such an estimate makes no claim to historical accuracy; it is only a general conclusion based upon what seems a reasonable rate of progress.

The recent explorations in Egypt have endeavoured to penetrate the mysteries of what has hitherto been the prehistoric period, and these efforts have met with a certain measure of success. In the Fayum, Professor Petrie has made excavations that revealed the remains of a much earlier period than that of the first dynasties hitherto recognised. Among other interesting relics, sarcophagi were found containing mummified bodies in a marvellous state of preservation. One of these now exhibited at the British Museum in London shows the body of a man of full proportions lying on his side with knees folded up against his body. Unlike the mummies of the later Egyptian period, this ancient effigy has no wrappings of any kind, but so remarkable are the results of the processes of embalming to which it has been subjected, that the form of the various members, and the features even, have been preserved with marvellously little shrinkage or distortion. The skin is indeed dry and dark, yet its resemblance to the skin of a living person of a dark-hued race is so striking that one can hardly realise, in looking at it, that the corpse before him is the body of a person who lived perhaps eight or ten thousand years ago.

As to other remains found by the later explorations, among the most interesting and suggestive are flint implements chipped in the manner characteristic of the Palæolithic or rough stone age. We are guarded, however, against drawing too sweeping inferences from these antiquities by Professor Petrie’s assurance that the Egyptians continued to use such chipped flint implements throughout the period from the IVth to the Xth Dynasty. It has been doubted whether any of these stone implements can be regarded as of strictly prehistoric origin, or whether, indeed, any of the antiquities discovered in Egypt evidence an uncivilised stage of racial history. The latest opinion, however, is that the makers of the pottery and flint implements were the aborigines of the country, who were displaced by the invasion of the Egyptians of history.

The most important excavations of the last eight or ten years, carried on by Amélineau, Petrie, and De Morgan have had for their object the collection of remains of this pre-dynastic era.

We are not likely to hear more of the contention that the archaic objects found at Naqada and other places were the work of a “New Race” of invaders that had intruded somewhere in those dark ages between the VIth and XIth Dynasties, for this long and bitter controversy is now replaced by a state of complete agreement among the authorities that the people who could lay claim to the pottery and flint objects were the aborigines, living in Egypt when the Egyptians of history invaded the country.

In their possession of the country these aborigines were ousted by the race which gradually loomed upon the historic horizon and to whom it has long been the custom to assign Menes as the first king, treating the preceding periods as the time of the gods and demigods, to whose rule tradition assigns an epoch which varies from 1000 to nearly 40,000 years. But the indications are that within a few years there will be much light thrown on the period preceding King Menes. Just why this king should have been placed at the head of the Ist Dynasty now seems quite clear. He was the first “Lord of the Two Lands”--the united Upper and Lower Egypt.

It must be recognised by any one who would gain a clear idea of national existence, that the character of a race is enormously influenced by the physical and climatic features of its environment. There have been differences of opinion among students of the subject as to the amount of change that may be effected by altered surroundings. But whoever considers the matter in the light of modern ideas, can hardly be much in doubt as to the answer to any question thus raised.

If it be admitted that all the races of mankind sprang originally from a single source,--an hypothesis upon which students of the most diverse habits of thought are agreed,--then in the last analysis it would appear that we must look to such environing conditions as soil and climate for the causes of all the differences that are observed among the different races of the earth to-day. The man inhabiting equatorial regions has a dark skin and certain well-marked traits of character, simply because his ancestors for almost endless generations have been subjected to the influences of a tropical climate; and the light-skinned inhabitant of northern Europe owes his antagonistic characteristics to the widely different climatic conditions of high latitudes. And what is true of these extreme instances, is no less true of all intermediate races.

In a word, then, the Egyptian would not have been the individual that we know, had he not lived in the valley of the Nile. The Mesopotamian required the environment of the Tigris and Euphrates to develop his typical characteristics, and similarly with the Greek and Roman, and with the members of every other race.

But, in accepting this view, one must not be blinded to the fact that the changes wrought by environment in the character of a race, are of necessity extremely slow. The peculiar traits that give racial distinction to any company of people have not been attained except through many generations of slow alteration; and such is the conservative power of heredity that the characteristics thus slowly stamped upon a race are well-nigh indelible. How pertinacious is their hold is best illustrated in the case of the modern Jews, who retain their racial identity though scattered in all regions of the globe. With this illustration in mind, it cannot be matter for surprise that any race that remains in the same environment, and as a rule does not mingle with other races, shall have retained the same essential characteristics throughout the historic period. That such is really the historic fact regarding any particular race of antiquity, might not at first sight be obvious. It might seem, for example, that the modern Egyptian, who plays so insignificant a part in the world-history of the nineteenth century, must be a very different person indeed from his ancient progenitor, who maintained for many centuries the dominant civilisation of the world.

But it must not be forgotten that national standards are relative; in other words, that the status of a people depends, not alone upon the plane of civilisation of that people itself, but quite as much upon the relative plane of civilisation of its neighbours. When the Egyptians sank from power, it was not so much that they lost their inherent capacity for progress, as that other nations outstripped them in the race, and came presently to dominate and subjugate them, and thus to stamp out their ambition. In support of this view, note the fact that the Egyptians again and again, at intervals of many centuries, were able to rouse themselves from a lethargy imposed by their conquerors, and to regain for a time their old position of supremacy. But the best tangible illustration of the fixity of the character of a race is furnished by the modern historians, who have at the same time most profoundly studied the ancient conditions as recorded on the monuments, and, while doing so, have been brought in contact with the present inhabitants of the Nile Valley.

No other scholars of the present generation have made more profound investigations than Professor Petrie and Professor Erman, both of whom have been led to comment on the extraordinary similarity of manner and custom and inherent characteristics between the ancient and the modern Egyptians. Here is Professor Erman’s[g] verdict:

“The people who inhabited ancient Egypt still survive in their descendants, the modern Egyptians. The vicissitudes of history have changed both language and religion, but invasions and conquests have not been able to alter the features of this ancient people. The hundreds and thousands of Greeks and Arabs who have settled in the country seem to have been absorbed into it; they have modified the race in the great towns, where their numbers were considerable, but in the open country they scarcely produced any effect. The modern fellah resembles his forefather of four thousand years ago, except that he speaks Arabic, and has become a Mohammedan. In a modern Egyptian village, figures meet one that might have walked out of the pictures in an ancient Egyptian tomb. We must not deny that this resemblance is partly due to another reason besides the continuance of the old race. Each country and condition of life stamps the inhabitants with certain characteristics. The nomad of the desert has the same features, whether he wanders through the Sahara or the interior of Arabia; and the Copt, who has maintained his religion through centuries of oppression, might be mistaken at first sight for a Polish Jew, who has suffered in the same way. The Egyptian soil, therefore, with its ever constant conditions of life, has always stamped the population of the Nile Valley with the same seal.

“As a nation the Egyptians appear to have been intelligent, practical, and very energetic, but lacking poetical imagination; this is exactly what we should expect from peasants living in this country of toilsome agriculture. ‘In his youth the Egyptian peasant is wonderfully docile, sensible, and active; in his riper years, owing to want and care, and the continual work of drawing water, he loses the cheerfulness and elasticity of mind which made him appear so amiable and promising.’ This picture of a race, cheerful by nature, but losing the happy temperament and becoming selfish and hardened, represents also the ancient people.”

But, however freely it may be admitted that soil and climate put their seal upon a race, opinions will always differ as to just how the racial characteristics are to be interpreted. In the case of all Oriental nations the European mind has found such interpretation peculiarly difficult. The Egyptians are no exception to this rule, as we shall see.[a]

THE COUNTRY AND ITS INHABITANTS

The whole of North Africa is covered by a great desert, bordered only on the northwest by a considerable arable district, which at present forms the states of Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis. Except for this, if we set aside a single strip of coast land in the country between the two Syrtes (Tripolis, Leptis) and in Cyrenaica (Bengari), this whole territory is totally destitute of all higher civilisation. It forms the natural frontier of the Mediterranean world, beyond which not even ancient civilisation ever penetrated. The interior of Africa was practically unknown to the Greek and Roman world.

The formidable desert land, embracing more than three million square miles, contains a series of depressed levels in which springs are harboured, and vegetation, especially the date-palm, thrives. These are the oases. Here, and here only, are permanent human settlements possible. At the same time the oases form stations in the wearisome and difficult way through the desert, where the trader who wants to acquire goods in the countries on the other side is exposed not only to the dangers that threaten him from want of water, loss of his way, and sand-storms, but also to the attacks of vagrant robber hordes that traverse the desert in nomadic confusion.

East of the great desert, at a distance of a few days’ journey from the Arabian Gulf, lies a straggling fruitful valley, which in some sense may be regarded as an oasis of colossal dimensions. This is Egypt, the valley of the Lower Nile. On both sides it is bounded by desert land. On the west rises the plateau of the Libyan Desert, flat, absolutely barren, covered with impenetrable sand-banks. On the east a rocky highland of solid quartz and chalk rises in a gradual slope, at the back of which the crystalline masses of the so-called Arabian Mountains ascend to a height of about six thousand feet. In geological structure the two territorial districts are entirely different, but, although it is true that nomadic hordes can, at a pinch, keep body and soul together in the eastern desert, and that they are not entirely cut off from vegetation, from springs and cisterns in which the rainwater is gathered up from storm and tempest, civilisation is as much sealed to them as it is to the Libyan waste, through which it is impossible to penetrate, and which is habitable only in the oases.

Between the two deserts, occupying a breadth of from fifteen to thirty-three miles, lies the depression forming the valley of Egypt. It forms the bed which the river has dug for itself in the soft chalky soil with untiring activity. Formerly, thousands of years ago,--thousands indeterminate,--it poured through the country in riotous cascades, the traces of which are still clearly recognisable in many spots. Gradually the river cleaned out the whole bed and established a regular surface level. When the historical period begins, the creative career of the river has already long been completed; from this time forward, the Nile flows in manifold curves and with numerous tributaries through the wrinkled valley, which it floods to a considerable degree only in midsummer, when the Ethiopian snow melts and seeks an outlet. The fertile land extends precisely as far as the waters of the Nile penetrate, or are guided by the hand of man in the flood season; a sharp line of demarcation separates the black fertile land formed of the muddy deposit left by the river, from the gray-yellow of the bordering desert. The breadth of the fertile territory is variable; on an average it covers eight, rarely more than ten, miles. Only at the mouth of the Nile it expands to the wide marsh lands of the Delta, intersected by numerous swamps and lakes.

Also on the south the border-land of Egypt has a sharp natural line of demarcation. A little above the 24th degree of latitude, at Gebel Silsilis, the sandstone plateau joins right on the river, higher up covering the whole of Nubia. The narrow neck of river at Gebel Silsilis is the southern boundary of fertile Egypt. A significant saga rising from the Arabian name of the mountain range (Silsilis means “the chain”) tells how once upon a time the stream was cut off by a chain that connected the opposite mountains. About eight miles higher up, at Assuan (Syene) a mountain range of granite and syenite opposes the course of the river like a cross-rail. True, the river has broken through the hard stone, but it has not had the power to rub it away, as it has done with the chalk-stone of Egypt; in numerous rapids it forces a passage between neighbouring rocks and innumerable islands raised from its bed. Without doubt, however, the torrent has continued to make its bed deeper here also. We know from old Egyptian accounts of the Nile levels that about four thousand years ago, at the time of the XIIth Dynasty, the Nile at the fortresses of Semneh and Kumneh, above the second cataract, must have been at least eight metres higher than it is at the present day. This can be explained only by supposing that, since then, the river must have burrowed an equivalent depth in the rocks of the cataract district.

This “First Cataract,” which makes real navigation very nearly an impossibility,--a vessel can be steered through the rapids only with considerable difficulty and danger,--has always formed the southern boundary of Egypt. Above it, the Nile flows in a great curve through the Nubian sandstone plateau. At numerous places its way is blocked by hard stone material, through which it digs a bed in cataracts. The river valley has throughout no more than a breadth of from five to nine miles. The fertile land, which at the time of the old empire was pretty thickly wooded, confines itself, where it does not cease altogether, to a narrow seam on the banks, so that the inhabitants, in order to leave as little as possible of it unutilised, formed their villages on the barren, unfruitful heights above it. The whole stretch of 1000 miles from Khartum to the first cataract contains at the present day only 1125 square miles of laid-out land. South of the Tropic only, the country on the Red Sea is gradually becoming capable of fertilisation; for the most part, here it bears the character of the Steppes. Also in the Nile, therefore, Egypt is almost totally shut off from Africa. The campaign of the English against the Mahdi has again given us a vigorous picture of how wearisome and difficult is the connection here; of the dangers that a tropical sun, a deficiency of habitations, and the difficulties of communication offer to a small army that tries to advance here.

Egypt is the narrowest country in the world; embracing an expanse of 570 miles in length, it does not contain more than 12,000 square miles of fertile land, that is to say, it is not larger than the kingdom of Belgium. It is necessary to keep this fact clearly in view, especially as the maps accessible may only too easily convey quite a false impression, because they include the desert land within the boundary line of Egypt, and as a rule do not distinguish it by any sign from the fertile land. The ancient indigenous conception is in complete accordance with the geographical character of the land. Egypt, or Kamit, as the country is termed in the indigenous language (the name certainly signifies “the dark country”), is only the fertile valley of the Nile. Here only do the Egyptians dwell. The oases in the west and the “red country” (Tasherit) in the east, _i.e._ the naked, reddish, glimmering plateaus of the Arabian Desert, are reckoned as foreign with consistent regularity, and they are not inhabited by Egyptians. The true state of affairs is quite accurately portrayed in the oracle which decreed, “Egypt is all the country watered by the Nile, and Egyptians are all those who dwell below the town Elephantine and drink Nile water.”

Herodotus defines Egypt accurately as a “bequest of the river”; to the river alone it owes its fertility and its well-being. But for the flowing river, the sand of the Libyan Desert would cover that whole wrinkled valley, which, with the aid of the river, has become one of the most fertile and most thickly populated countries on the earth.

At the time in which our historical information begins, we find the Lower Nile Valley inhabited by a race which, after the precedent of the Greeks, we call Egyptians. Whence the word comes, we know not; we can only say that Aigyptos in the first instance denotes the river--almost without exception in the _Odyssey_ it is thus. The word was then transferred to the country and its inhabitants, and the river received the name of Neilos (Nile), the origin of which is equally obscure. An indigenous name of the population did not exist; the Egyptians denoted themselves, in distinction from foreigners, simply as “men” (rometu). Their country, as we have already mentioned, they called Kamit, “Black Country”; the river was named Ha-pi. Semitic people called Egypt, we know not why, Mior or Musr (Hebrew Mizraim, the termination being a very common one with the names of localities). In its Arabian form, Masr, this word, at the present day, has become the indigenous name of the country and of its capital, which we call Cairo. From the name Egyptians, on the contrary, was developed the modern denotation of the Christian successors of the old indigenous population, the Copts.

Controversy has been abundant and vigorous with regard to the ethnographical place of the Egyptians. While philologists and historians assume a relation with the neighbouring Asiatic races, separating the Egyptians by a sharp line of distinction from the negro race, ethnologists and biologists, Robert Hartmann pre-eminent amongst them, have defined them as genuine children of Africa who stood in indisputable physical relation with the races of the interior of the continent. And certainly in the type of the modern Egyptian there are points of contact with the typical negro, and we shall not here dispute the validity of the possible contention that a gradual transition from the Egyptians to the negroes of the Sudan can be demonstrated, and that in the Nile Valley we never are confronted with an acute ethnological contrast.

We should note, however, that an acute contradiction in races is nowhere on earth perceptible. Everywhere may be found members to bridge over the gap, and the classification which we so much need does not ever start with the intermediate stages, but with the extremes in which the racial type finds its purest illustration.

Moreover, the type of the modern Egyptian cannot straightway determine the question as to the origin of the ancient Egyptian population, even if we do not take into account the difficult problem of how far climate and soil exercise a moderating influence upon a race. The inhabitants of the Lower Nile Valley at the time of the New Kingdom, and from that time forward in the whole course of history, have mingled so extensively with pure African blood, that it would have been a miracle if no assimilation had taken place. It is an undoubted fact that the Turks belong to the peoples resembling the Mongolians; but who will put the modern Osman in the same line with the Chinaman, or fail to recognise the assimilation to the Armenian, Persian, Semitic, Greek type? The same is true, for example, of the Magyars. A strictly analogous state of things is found in Egypt. It has been proved that, in the skull-formation of the modern Egyptian, the influence of the African element is more clearly discernible than in the days of the ancients. Moreover, a careful comparison leads to the conclusion that in ancient, as in modern Egypt, there are two coexistent types: one resembling the Nubian more closely, who is naturally more strongly represented in Upper Egypt than in Memphis and Cairo; and one sharply distinguished from him whom we may define as the pure Egyptian. Midway between these two stands a hybrid form, represented in numerous examples and sufficiently accounted for by the intermixture of the two races.

While the Nubian type is closer akin to the pure negro type and is indigenous in Africa, we must regard the purely Egyptian type as foreign to this continent; this directs us toward the assumption that the most ancient home of the Egyptian is to be sought in Asia. The Egyptians have depicted themselves, times out of number, on monuments, and enable us clearly enough to recognise their type.

For the most part, they are powerful, close-knit figures, frequently with vigorous features. Not infrequently, as Erman has sagaciously suggested, the heads have a “clever, witty expression just like what we are accustomed to meet with in cunning old peasants.” We have a recurrence of the same trait in several early Roman portraits. Side by side with this we have finely cut features: for instance, we are reminded of the almost effeminate expression in the head of Ramses II. The Egyptian type is altogether different from the negro type; the structure of the nose, for instance, is delicate for the most part, and there is no trace of prognathismus, or the protrusion of the lower part of the face.

On the monuments the colour of the skin in male Egyptians, who in ancient days went totally naked but for a loin cloth, is a red-brown. On the other hand, the women, who were clad in a long robe and were not equally exposed to the effects of air and sun, are painted in a lighter brown or yellow. In quite similar fashion the Greeks of old represented men on their vases as red and women as white. We should not forget that the art of depicting the finer shades of colours in paint had not yet been learnt.

Just as the Egyptians are distinguished from the population of the interior of Africa, so they have their nearest kinsmen in the inhabitants of the northern zone of the continent. West of them, on the coast lands on the Mediterranean as well as in the oases of the desert, dwell races which are comprehended by Egyptians under the term Thuhen. Following the precedent of the Greeks, we have transferred to all of them the name of the Libyans, that race which was settled in the territory of Cyrene, where the Greeks first learned of their existence. In Egyptian memorials we find them again under the name of Rebu (we should observe here, once for all, that neither Egyptian speech nor Egyptian writing has an L, and so in foreign words every R may be read as an L). The name Rebu, as the Greek form of the name tells us, was pronounced Lebu [Libu]. To the east of these Libyans proper, in the desert plateau of the country of Marmarica, dwell the Tuhennu, who spread as far as the borders of Egypt, and even also settled in the western portion of the Delta. Further westward, presumably in the neighbourhood of the Syrtes, we find the Mashauasha. The Greeks, especially Herodotus, have preserved for us a great number of other names. All these tribes, to which the dwellers in the oases also belong, are most closely related to one another, and form, together with the inhabitants of western North Africa, the Numidians and the Moors, a great group of nations, which we denote by the term Libyan or Moorish, or in modern terminology the group of Berber nations. The Libyans are light in colour; on the Egyptian monuments they are represented by a white-gray skin tint.

In the Moors the old type is to some extent still preserved. They are warlike, brave tribes, not without talent. But none of them, it is true, developed a high civilisation, although they adopted certain elements of civilisation from the Egyptians, and later on, in Mauretania, from the Carthaginians. According to the representations on the monuments, the custom of tattooing their arms and legs ruled amongst them; among the engraved signs we also meet with the symbol of Nit, the patron goddess of Saïs, whose population would appear to have consisted chiefly of Libyans.

As in the west, Libyans and Moors, to judge from their language, are connected with the Egyptians, so this is true in the south of a great number of tribes east of the Nile Valley. These are the ancestors of the modern Bedia tribes (_i.e._ of the Ababde, the Bischarin, and others, dwelling in the deserts and steppes east of the Upper Nile Valley), and of their relations the Falaschas, the Gallas, the Somali. Among them the country and people of Cush attained particular pre-eminence in antiquity; they were the southeastern neighbours of the Egyptians, who had their original settlements in the wastes and steppes of the mountain country east of the Nile. In the course of history they press forward against the negroes of the Nile Valley, the ancestors of the modern Nubians, and finally establish here a powerful empire.

The Hebrews and the Assyrians are accustomed to call this country Cush, and we too are in the habit of using this name Cushite instead of Egyptian. The Greeks call them Ethiopians. In the Christian era this name was adopted by a people living much farther south, the Semitic inhabitants of the great highlands of Habesh (Abyssinia), and this people and its language (Ge-ez) are therefore to-day called Ethiopian. But care must be taken not to transfer this term of modern usage in its modern significance to the circumstances of antiquity. The Ethiopia of antiquity is geographically about coterminous with modern Nubia.

A still more bewildering confusion has been engendered by the term Cushites. In the Old Testament, in the review of the races taking their departure from Noah, the name Cush has been transferred to Babylonia (Gen. x. 8; possibly also in the story of the Fall, ii. 13). This is to be explained by the fact that the robber mountain horde of the Kossæans, or, as they called themselves, the Kasshu, maintained supremacy for centuries in Babylonia; this name was identified by the Hebrew narrator with that denoting the African tribe. Recent experts have derived the most illusory consequences from this misunderstanding. In consequence of it the Cushites have become for them an Asiatic-African aboriginal people of wide extent, appearing everywhere and never at home; and wherever we encounter riddles in the matter handed down to us, or a bold combination has to be made possible, these Cushites are trotted out, only to sink again into nothingness as soon as they have done their work. Conceptions of this character have found their way into ethnographical, philological, and historical works of high merit.

From the abortion that has grown out of the amalgamation of the Babylonian robber and warrior hordes with an African tribe, originally of quite a low grade of cultivation and the scantiest mental endowment, has been manufactured a people to whom the beginning of all civilisation has been referred, to whose inspiration the great monuments of Egypt, as of Babylonia, are supposed to owe their origin, but whose personality ceases to be tangible anywhere from the moment that positive historical evidence begins.

In the face of this we must again dwell on the fact that the Kossæans and the Cushites have not the slenderest historical connection with each other. The latter is a very real people that gradually absorbed a certain degree of external civilisation from the Egyptians.

With these East African nationalities on the one side, and the Libyans and Moors on the other, the Egyptians form a great group of nations whose languages are closely related to one another, and whom one may designate as North Africans. The North African languages again, in their grammatical structure as well as in their vocabulary, reveal a kindred spirit, however distant, with that in the language of their eastern Asiatic neighbours, the Semites, _i.e._ the inhabitants of Arabia, Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia. Especially in the most ancient form of Egyptian handed down to us, in the language of the time of the Pyramids, are we everywhere confronted with this kindred spirit. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that there was a time when the forefathers of the Egyptians and of the rest of the North Africans enjoyed a community of speech with the Semites.

Such being the case, we are inclined to conclude that the North Africans belong to the so-called Caucasian race of men, and that they reached their later domicile in prehistoric times, after their detachment from the Semites.

If this assumption can claim for itself a high degree of probability, we have not advanced a very great deal toward the understanding of the historical development of Egypt. For these wanderings and migrations belong in any case to times remote--ay, very remote--from all historical evidence, and they provide us with no new disclosures from any direction as to the character and the development of the Egyptians. A further inference has been expressed that the immigrants into Egypt found it occupied by an indigenous population, which they subdued, and that from this population came the bondmen whom we find in ancient Egypt, while the immigrants went to make the lords and the aristocracy.

Possibly this assumption is just; in support of it we may cite the agreement subsisting between the nature of the Egyptian animal worship and the religious conceptions of several of the African peoples. But we must never lose sight of the fact that the Egyptians themselves have no knowledge of any such theory.

If an immigration and an amalgamation of peoples took place, at the time of the Pyramids it had already long been buried in oblivion; the Egyptians regard themselves as autocthonous, and--with the exception of a part of the population in the lower lands of Nubia, Libya, and Asia--as a single nation, within which there can be no question of a clash of mental conceptions, and within which the proud and the humble, the lord and the bondman, have nothing to distinguish them externally.

Historical presentation demands that we should treat the Egyptians throughout as one people, whatever may be the number of different tribes that settled in the Nile Valley in prehistoric time.[b]

The earliest stage of man that is known in Egypt is the Palæolithic; this was contemporary with a rainy climate, which enabled at least some vegetation to grow on the high desert, for the great bulk of the worked flints are found five to fifteen hundred feet above the Nile, on a tableland which is now entirely barren desert. Water-worn palæoliths are found in the beds of the stream courses, now entirely dried up, and flaked flints of a rather later style occur in the deep beds of Nile gravels, which are twenty or thirty feet above the highest level of the present river. This type of work, however, lasted on to the age of the existing conditions, for perfectly sharp and fresh palæoliths are found on the desert as low down as the present high Nile.

PREHISTORIC EGYPT

The date of the change of climate is roughly shown by the depth of the Nile deposits. It is well known by a scale extending over about three thousand years, that in different parts of Egypt the rise of the Nile bed has been on an average about four inches per century, owing to the annual deposits of mud during the inundation. And in various borings that have been made, the depth of the Nile mud is only about twenty-five or thirty feet. Hence an age of about eight or nine thousand years for the cultivable land may be taken as a minimum, probably to be somewhat extended by slighter deposit in the earlier time.

The continuous history extends to about 5000 B.C., and the prehistoric age of continuous culture known to us covers probably two thousand years more; hence our continuous knowledge probably extends back to about 7000 B.C., or to about the time when the change of climate took place. At that time we find a race of European type starting on a continuous career, but with remains of a steatopygous race, of “Bushman” (Koranna) type known and represented in modelled figures. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that this steatopygous race was that of Palæolithic man in Egypt, especially as that equivalence is also known in the French cave remains. It is noticeable that all the figures known of this race--in France, Malta, and Egypt--are women, suggesting that the men were exterminated by the newer people, but the women were kept as slaves, and hence were familiar to the pioneers of the European race. These Palæolithic women were broadly built, with deep lumbar curve, great masses of fat on the hips and thighs, with hair along the lower jaw and over most of the body.

The fresh race which entered Egypt was of European type--slender, fair-skinned, with long, wavy brown hair. The skull was closely like that of the ancient and modern Algerians of the interior; and as one of the earliest classes of their pottery is similar in material and decoration to the present Kabyle pottery, we may consider them a branch of Algerians. They seem to have entered the country as soon as the Nile deposits rendered it habitable by an agricultural people. They already made well-formed pottery by hand, knew copper as a rarity, and were clad in goatskins. Entering a fertile country, and mixing probably with the earlier race, they made rapid advance in all their products, and in a few generations they had an able civilisation. Their work in flint was fine and bold, with more delicate handiwork than that of any other people except their descendants; their stone vases were cut in the hardest materials with exquisite regularity; their carving of ivory and slate was better than anything which followed for over a thousand years; and they had a large number of signs in use, which were probably the first stages of our alphabet.

After some centuries of this culture a change appears, at the same point of time in every kind of work. A difference of people seems probable, but no great change of race, as the type is unaltered. The later people show some Eastern affinities; and it seems as if a part of the earlier Libyan people had entered Syria or North Arabia and had afterward flowed back through Egypt, modified by their Semitic contact. It is perhaps to this influx that the Semitic element in the Egyptian language is due.

This later prehistoric people brought in new kinds of pottery and more commerce, which provided gold, silver, and various foreign stones; they also elaborated the art of flint-working to its highest pitch of regularity and beauty, and they generally extended the use of copper, and developed the principal tools to full size. But they show even less artistic feeling than the earlier branch, for all figure-carving quickly decayed, both in ivory and in stone. The use of amulets was brought in, and also forehead pendants of shell. And the signs which were already in use almost entirely disappeared.

This prehistoric civilisation was much decayed when it was overcome by a new influx of people, who founded the dynastic rule. These came apparently from the Red Sea, as they entered Egypt in the reign of Coptos, and not either from the north or from the Upper Nile. They were a highly artistic people, as the earliest works attributable to them--the Min sculptures at Coptos--show better drawing than any work by the older inhabitants; and they rapidly advanced in art to the noble works of the Ist Dynasty. They also brought in the hieroglyphic system, which was developed along with their art. It seems probable that they came up from the Land of Punt, at the south of the Red Sea, and they may have been a branch of the Punic race in its migration from the Persian Gulf round by sea to the Mediterranean. They rapidly subdued the various tribes which were in Egypt, and at least five different types of man are shown on the monuments of their earliest kings.[d] Of these there were two distinct lines, the kings of Upper and the kings of Lower Egypt. The Palermo stone gives us the names of seven independent kings of Lower Egypt who ruled before the time of Menes--Seker, Tesau, Tau, Thesh, Neheb, Uat´-nar, and Mekha, while within the past few years the names of three pre-dynastic kings of Upper Egypt have been revealed--Te, Re, and Ka. To discover when and where these early monarchs reigned is probably the most interesting and important problem engaging the Egyptologist to-day.[a]