WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS?
Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius.
What were the origin and affinities of the ancient Egyptians? To what
race, or races, of mankind did they belong? At what time, whence, and
by what route did they enter Egypt? The answer to these questions, if
attainable, would not be barren.
We have just been looking at the physical characteristics of the country,
and noting some of the effects they must have had on the character
and history of the people. The inquiry now indicated, if carried to a
successful issue, will enable us, furthermore, to understand, to some
extent, what were the aboriginal aptitudes the people themselves brought
with them. These were the moral and intellectual elements on which the
influences of nature had to act. The result was the old Egyptian. He was
afterwards modified by events and circumstances, by increasing knowledge,
and by the laws and customs all these led to; but the two conditions we
are now speaking of were the starting-points, and which never ceased to
have much influence in making this people feel as they felt, and enabling
them to do what they did. To have acquired, therefore, some knowledge
about them will be to have got possession of some of the materials that
are indispensable for reconstructing the idea of old Egypt. We feel with
respect to these old historical peoples as we do about a machine: we are
not satisfied at being told that it has done such or such a piece of
work; we also want to know what it is within it, which enabled it to do
the work—what is its construction, and what its motive power.
Six thousand years before our own time may be taken as the starting-point
of the monumental and traditional history of the old monarchy. This
inquiry, however, will carry us back to a far more remote past.
There is but one way of treating this question: that is, to apply to it
the method we apply to any question of science—to that, for instance,
of gravitation, or to any other: precisely the same method applied in
precisely the same way. We must collect the phenomena; and the hypothesis
which explains and accounts for them all is the true one. This will act
exclusively: in establishing itself it will render all others impossible.
Other hypotheses, however, which have been, or may be, entertained must
not be passed by unnoticed, in order that it may be understood that they
do not account for the phenomena; or, to put it reversely, that the
phenomena contradict them.
When history begins to dawn, the first object the light strikes upon,
and which for a long time alone rears its form above the general gloom,
is the civilization of Egypt. It stands in isolation, like a solitary
palm by the side of a desert spring. It is also like that palm in being a
complete organism, and in producing abundance of good fruit. All around
is absolute desert, or the desert sparsely marked with the useless forms
of desert life. On inquiry we find that this thoroughly-organized
civilization, fully supplied with all the necessaries, and many of the
embellishments of life, and which is alone visible in the dawning light,
must have existed through ages long prior to the dawn. It recedes into
unfathomable depths of time far beyond the monuments and traditions.
Some salient particulars at once arrest our attention. The people, though
African by situation, do not, at first sight, strike us as possessing,
preponderantly, African affinities. If there be any, they are not so much
moral, or intellectual, as physical. They appear to be more akin to the
inhabitants of the neighbouring Arabian peninsula, from which there is a
road into Egypt. But here also the resemblances are not great: even that
of language is far from conclusive. Their complexion, too, is fairer. On
neither side is there any suspicion, or tradition of kindred. There is
even deep antipathy between the two. Their religion, again, and religion
is the _summa philosophia_—the outcome of all the knowledge, physical
and moral, of a people, is unlike that of their neighbours. The Greeks,
however, and this is worthy of remark, thought it only another form of
their own. They were laborious, skilful, and successful agriculturists;
and there was no record of a time when it had been otherwise with
them. They were great builders. They had always practised the ordinary
arts of life, spinning and weaving, metallurgy, pottery, tanning, and
carpentering. They had always had tools and music. They had a learned
and powerful priesthood. Their form of government was that of a monarchy
supported by privileged classes, or of an aristocracy headed by a king,
and resting on a broad basis of slavery, and a kind of serfdom. Their
social order was that of castes.
We cannot ascertain precisely at what point in the valley this
civilization first showed, or established itself. Of two points, however,
which are of importance, we are sure. It did not descend the Nile from
Ethiopia, and it did not ascend it from the coast of the Delta. It is
true that Memphis was the first great centre of Egyptian life of which
we have full and accurate knowledge. The founder, however, of the first
historical dynasty, and who appears to have made Memphis his capital,
came from This, or Abydos, in Upper Egypt. We may almost infer from this
that Abydos was an earlier centre of Egyptian power than Memphis.
The idea, then, of an unmixed African origin may, I think, be at once and
summarily dismissed.
Something may be alleged in support of a Semitic origin. Where, however,
we may ask, is the theory on behalf of which nothing can be alleged?
If it were so it would never have come into existence. What we have to
consider in this, as in every doubtful or disputed matter, is not what
can be said in favour of certain views, or what can be said against them,
but which way the balance inclines when the arguments on each side have
been fairly put into their respective scales.
To begin, then, with the language, which is the most obvious ground for
forming an opinion in a matter of this kind. It happens that in this case
nothing conclusive can be inferred from the language. First, because in
it no very decisive Semitic affinities have been made out; and, secondly,
because, had they been found to be much more important than some have
supposed them to be, this would not of itself prove a preponderance of
Semitic blood.
Colour is rather adverse to the Semitic theory. The Egyptian was not so
swarthy as the Arab; whereas, if he had been a Semite, he ought to have
been, at the least, as dark. In the wall-paintings a clear red represents
the complexion of the men, and a clear pale yellow that of the women. In
this clearness of tint we miss the swartness of the Arab.
It is true he was darker than the Jew. Little, however, can be inferred
from this, for the Jews were an extremely mixed people. Abraham came from
Haran, in Mesopotamia, and is called in Deuteronomy a Syrian. He must, in
fact, have been a Chaldean. The wife of Joseph was a high-caste Egyptian.
The wife of Moses was a Cushite. And when the Israelites went up out of
Egypt ‘a mixed multitude’ went out with them. This can only mean that in
the multitude of those who threw in their lot with them there was a great
deal of Semitic blood, through the remnant of the Hyksos, which had been
left behind when the great mass of that people had been expelled from
Egypt, and also a great deal of Egyptian blood. From these sources, then,
were derived no inconsiderable ingredients for the formation of what
was afterwards the Jewish nation. The great-grandmother of David was a
Moabitish woman. Solomon’s mother was a Hittite, and one of his wives an
Egyptian. And we know that a very considerable proportion of conquered
Canaanites were eventually absorbed by their conquerors. No argument,
therefore, can be founded upon the complexion of so mixed a people as the
Jews.
In features, taking the sculptures and paintings for our authority, the
Egyptian was not a Semite. His nostrils and lips were not so thin, and
his nose was not so prominent. In this particular, which is important, he
presents indications of a cross between the Caucasian and the Ethiopian,
or modern Nubian.
Their social and political organization—that of castes, and of a
well-ordered, far-extended state—was completely opposed to Semitic
freedom and equality, in which the ideas of the tribe, and of the
individual, preponderated over those of the state, and of classes.
Religion is the interpretation of the _ensemble_. It takes cognizance of
the powers that are behind, or within, visible external nature, and of
the reciprocal relations between these powers and man. The mind of man is
the interpreter. As is the interpreter so will be the interpretation.
Now, from the hard simplicity of nature in the Semitic region, or from
the simplicity of life and thought resulting from it, or from the early
apprehension by that part of the human family of the idea of a Creator,
or from other causes not yet made out (though, indeed, it is the fact,
and not the cause, that we are now concerned with), there has always
been a disposition in the Semitic mind to think of God as one. In the
earliest indications we possess of their religious thought each tribe,
each city, almost each family, appears to have had its own God. They
never could have created, or accepted, a Pantheon. The idea of Polytheism
was unnatural, illogical, repulsive to them. The inference, therefore,
is that in the large hierarchy of heaven, which approved itself to
the Egyptian mind, there could be nothing Semitic. The religion, the
religious thought of Egypt, which so stirred the whole heart, and swayed
the whole being of the people as to impel them to raise to the glory of
their gods the grandest temples the world has ever seen, was, in its
whole cast and character, an abomination to the Semite.
Next after Religion, the most important effort of the human mind is Law.
Law is distinguishable from Religion. It is not an effort to embrace and
interpret the whole, but a general and enforced application of some of
the conclusions of that interpretation to the regulation of the conduct
of men towards each other. Its principles are those of justice and
expediency, but with very considerable limitations—not absolute justice,
but justice as then and there understood; and not in every point and
particular, but in those matters only in which evidence is possible, and
the observance also of which can be enforced by penalties; nor absolute
expediency, but again, as it is then and there understood, and limited
to such matters as admit of being carried out, and enforced, by public
authority.
This, it is plain, may be regarded—and as a matter of observation and
history is still, and has in all times been, regarded—either as something
distinct from, or as a department of, religion.
If treated as a part of religion, then either the very letter itself of
the law, or else the principles on which it is founded, and of which it
is an application, must be accepted as from God. In the former case God
is regarded as the actual legislator, and sometimes going a step further,
as the actual executor of His own law. In the latter case He is regarded,
because He is the primary source, at all events, of its principles, as
ultimately their guardian, and the avenger of their violation.
The Semitic sentiment, looked upon law in the former of these two lights.
It formed this conception of it, because the people held in their minds
the two ideas, that God was One, and that He was the Creator. A people
who have come to regard God as one will necessarily concentrate on the
idea of God all moral and intellectual attributes. Out of this will arise
a tendency to exclude all merely animal attributes, and, to a great
extent, such phenomena as present themselves to the thought as merely
human—such, for instance, as were the attributes of Mars, Venus, and
Mercury. God then, being the perfection of wisdom, justice, and goodness,
is the only source of law. He is, also, the actual Lawgiver in right of
His being the Creator. The world, and all that it contains, is His. His
will is the law of His creation. The gods of Egypt, however, like those
of Greece, were not anterior to Nature, were not the creators of Nature,
but came in subsequently to it, and were in some sort emanations from it;
the highest conception of them, in this relation, was that they were the
powers of Nature.
Now, in this important and governing matter of law, the Egyptian mind
did not take the Semitic view. God appeared to the Egyptian, not so much
in the character of the direct originator, as in that of the ultimate
guardian of the law, in our sense of these words. They had had kings who
had been wise legislators, and the complete punishment for violations of
the law would be in the life to come.
A review, then, of the whole field makes it appear highly improbable that
the Egyptians were Semites.
But if they were neither African nor Semitic, what were they? There are
not many alternatives to choose from. The process soon arrives at a
complete exhaustion. They must have been—there is no other possible race
left—mainly Aryan: that is, of the same race as ourselves.
There is no antecedent improbability in this. That an Aryan wave should
have reached the Nile was, indeed, less improbable than that others, as
was the case, should have reached the Ganges and the Thames. That one had
not, would almost have needed explanation.
That the Egyptians themselves had not the faintest trace, either of a
tradition, or of a suspicion, that it had been so, is only what we might
have been sure of. No other branch of the race, from the Ganges to the
Thames, had preserved any record of their ancestors’ migrations, or any
tradition of their old home, or of their parentage. This only shows—which
will explain much—that the migration took place at so remote a period, so
long before the invention of letters, that we feel as if it might have
resulted from some displacement, or variation, of the axis of our earth
in the glacial epoch.
That the complexion of the Egyptians is not so fair as that of Europeans,
is a remark of no weight. Europeans may have become fairer by the
operation of causes analogous to those which made the Egyptians darker.
Among the Hindoos, the Brahman, who is indubitably Aryan, is generally
as dark as the Egyptian was. The colour of the Egyptian may have been
heightened in precisely the same way as that of the Brahman; first, by
intermixture with the previous possessors of the soil, and afterwards by
exposure through a long series of generations, with but little clothing,
to the floods of light and heat of a perennially cloudless and all but
tropical sun.
They might, on their arrival, have found an Ethiopic race in possession
of the valley of the Nile, and having come from a distance with but few
women, may have largely intermarried with the conquered, and displaced
aborigines.
That there had been some intermixture may be inferred from the complexion
of the Egyptians, and from the thickening of their features.
There is also a moral argument in favour of this supposition in the fact
that the Egyptians never, even in their best days, showed repugnance to
intermarriage with the Ethiopians, or even to being ruled by Ethiopian
sovereigns. They followed Tirhakah and Sabaco into Syria just as readily
as they had followed Sethos and Rameses. We see on the sculptures the
Ethiopian Queen of Amenophis.
Had the language been manifestly Aryan in its roots and structure, this,
under the circumstances, would have been conclusively in favour of our
supposition. Its not being so is, however, not conclusive against it.
The Northmen, who invaded, and settled in Normandy, abandoned their own
language, and adopted that of France. Again, the Norman invasion led to
a great modification of the language of England, but the new tongue was
not that of the invaders. Indeed, it seems only in accordance with what
might have been expected—that the non-Aryan element in the people having
been so potent as, to a great extent, to cloud the Aryan complexion, and
coarsen the Aryan features, the language which was ultimately formed,
should not have been, to any great extent, Aryan.
We find caste existing in Egypt from the earliest times. This becomes
intelligible on the supposition of an Aryan origin. It is a parallelism
to what took place on the ground occupied in India by another, but later,
offset of this race. Caste could not develop itself spontaneously in
the bosom of an indigenous, and homogeneous people. It is impossible
to conceive such a phenomenon under such circumstances. It must be the
result of two causes: foreign conquest, and pride of blood. As to the
former, we are sure that there could have been no other means by which
the Egyptians could have been introduced into the valley of the Nile, as
they were not indigenous Africans; and as to pride of blood, we know that
this feeling exists so strongly among Aryan peoples, that it may almost
be regarded as one of the characteristics of the race. It was natural,
therefore, that, wherever they came to dwell on the same ground with a
conquered and subject population of a colour different from their own,
they should introduce this, or some equivalent, organization of society.
If they had found a dark race in Europe we should have had caste in
Europe; but here the hardness of the struggle for existence in old times,
aided by the absence of difference in colour between the conquerors
and the conquered, made it impossible. In all European aristocracies,
whatever may have been their origin, we can detect traces of this old
Aryan disposition towards exclusiveness founded on pride of blood.
In religion, which is for those times one of the surest criteria of
race, there was so close an approximation of the gods, and of the whole
system of Egypt, to those of Greece, that, as has been observed already,
the Greeks supposed that the two were identical. They were in the habit
of speaking of the deities of Egypt as the same as their own, only that
in Egypt they had Egyptian names. Of course, it is impossible for any
people to suppose that the religion of another people is identical with
its own, unless the fundamental ideas of the two systems are the same.
This similarity, then, indicates that they were both offsets from the
same stock, and that they parted from the old home after the fundamental
and governing ideas of the mythology they carried with them had been
elaborated there.
But in this matter we may go much further than Greece. If we view all the
Aryan religions collectively, we shall find that the one idea that was
the life-giving principle in every one of the whole family was the belief
in a future life. The Hindoo and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman,
the Celt and the Teuton, all alike, as if by a common instinct, agreed
in this. This, therefore, is distinctly Aryan, and no religion from which
it is absent could belong to that race. How, then, and this is almost
a crucial test, does the religion of old Egypt stand in this matter?
Exactly as it ought to do, on the supposition that it had an Aryan
origin. This was its central, its formative, its vital idea. It was this
that built the thousand mighty temples in which the living might learn
those virtues, and practise that piety, which would be their passport to
the better world to come. It was this that embalmed the bodies of the
dead, whose souls were still alive. Without it the religion of old Egypt
could never have been a living force, nor anything but the merest mummy
of a religion. At all events, without it, it could have had no origin in
Aryan thought.
Another point to be considered is that of artistic tastes and aptitudes.
These are shown most conspicuously in the architecture of a people, and
the subsidiary architectonic arts of sculpture and painting; they may
be followed also into the arts which minister to the conveniences and
embellishments of everyday life, and which are chiefly exhibited in the
style of the dress of a people, and of the furniture of their houses.
Here, again, I think the working of the Aryan mind is seen in old Egypt.
Their ideas and tastes in these matters were singularly in harmony with
the ideas and tastes that have in all ages developed themselves in the
bosom of Aryan communities wherever settled. On the whole, our taste
approves of what they did in these applications of man’s creative power,
the necessary deductions having been made for the trammels which the
fixity of their religious ideas imposed upon them; and for the fact
that all that they did were but first unaided essays, uncorrected by
comparisons with the arts of other people. When we consider what great
disadvantages in this respect they worked under, we must come to the
conclusion that no nation ever showed so much invention, or more native
capacity for art. We cannot suppose that they borrowed from any other
people the idea of the pillar with its ornamented capital; the arch; the
ornamentation of buildings with the sculptured and painted forms of man,
of animals, and of plants; the use of metallic colours; the art of making
glass; the forms of their furniture; the art of embalming the dead;
the art of writing; and a multitude of other arts which were in common
practice among them in very remote times.
The same may be said of their aptitude for science, which has ever been
a distinct characteristic of Aryans, and never of Semites. Science is
a natural growth among the former, and has appeared among the latter
only occasionally, and then evidently as an exotic. The mechanics, the
hydraulics, the geometry, the astronomy, of the old Egyptians were all
their own.
We also find among them evidences of a genius for organization in a high
degree, and of a singular power of realizing to their thoughts, and
of working for the attainment of, very distant objects, both of which
are valuable peculiarities of the Aryan mind, and in both of which the
Semitic mind is markedly deficient.
One point more. Herodotus observes that the Egyptians resembled the
Greeks in being content each of them with a single wife. On our
supposition, this is just what might have been expected. There are no
practices among mankind so inveterate as those connected with marriage;
and the ancient Egyptians, having been an offset from the race of mankind
which had originally been monogamic, could not, although they had
long been settled in the polygamic region, bring themselves to adopt
polygamy. The primæval custom of the race could not be unlearnt. We see,
too, from the sculptures that the affectionate relation between husband
and wife was rather of the European than of the Asiatic pattern. The
wife places her hand on the shoulder, or round the arm of the husband,
to symbolize unitedness, attachment, and dependence. This is done in a
manner one feels is not quite in harmony with oriental sentiment.
The last questions are—Where did they come from? and, How did they get
into Egypt? I have at times thought that they came from the mouth of the
Indus, or from the Persian Gulf, and entered Egypt by the way of the Red
Sea. If Abydos was the first centre of Egyptian power, and the balance
of historical argument inclines towards it, there seems to be no other
way of accounting for its having been so than by supposing a landing at
Myos Hormos, or Berenice, as they were afterwards called. In one of those
harbours I can imagine the _May Flowers_ of that old, old world, hauled
up upon the beach, and the stout hearts, that had crossed in them the
Indian Ocean, preparing for their inland march across the desert hills
to the wondrous river. The distance is not great. On the third day they
will drink its water. The natives they are to encounter are gentle, and
industrious. They will dispossess them of their land, and enslave them.
They will take their daughters for wives. They will increase rapidly in
their happy valley. The language they brought with them will be lost,
and a new language formed by their descendants, which will be mainly
that of the people they subdued, and with whom they intermarried. The
religion, however, and the arts they brought with them, they will never
forget; and as the centuries roll on, and they have increased greatly in
numbers, and come to have many goodly cities, and much wealth, they will
add largely both to their religion, and to their arts. But by the time
they have added to their other arts that one which will enable them to
perpetuate the memory of events, so long a time will have passed, that
they will have lost all tradition of how their first fathers came into
the valley, and how they possessed themselves of it. For them, therefore,
the history of Egypt will commence with the discovery of letters; but for
us, who are able to recover something of the history of words, of races,
and of mythologies, it will reach back into far more distant tracts of
time.
There is no reason which should lead us peremptorily to decide against
their having come by sea. There is no antecedent improbability. The
distant voyages and settlements both of the Phœnicians, and of the
Normans, show what can be achieved in very small vessels. Evidence to the
same point was again supplied by the insignificant capacity of many of
the vessels employed by some of our early trans-Atlantic explorers, and
circumnavigators. And in the spirit-stirring and invigorating era of the
Aryan migrations we may believe that some enterprises of this kind were
undertaken. At all events, there is nothing to preclude our believing
that, in the prehistoric period, Indian and Arabian vessels were wafted
by the reciprocating monsoons, to and fro, across the Indian Ocean. Nor,
indeed, are we at all obliged to suppose that those vessels were of
insignificant capacity.
But this entrance into Egypt must have taken place at so remote a date
that the physical features of that part of the world might then have been
somewhat different from what they are now. The Dead Sea might not then
have been thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and
the isthmus we have just seen canalized might then have been navigable
water.
But it will make the point in question more distinct if I endeavour to
speak more precisely about it. The immigration into Egypt could not
possibly have been an offset of the Aryan immigration into India, which
resulted in the formation of the Hindoo, or of its westward outflow,
which resulted in the formation of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. These
dispersions must, we know, speaking broadly, have been contemporaneous.
Their date, however, as has been already observed, was so remote that no
one branch of the race retained the slightest trace of a tradition of its
original seat, or of the way in which they themselves came to their new
home, or of any particulars of the occurrence. We will suppose, then,
that the event to which they all belong, and of which each is a part,
occurred 10,000 years ago. I merely use these figures to make myself
intelligible. But the Aryan immigration into Egypt belongs to a still
more remote epoch, and to another order of events. In the stratifications
of history its place is far lower down. It is a part of what forms a
distinct and more primitive stratum. Again, for the purpose of making my
meaning distinct, I will say that it belonged to a series of events which
took place 15,000 years ago. The peoples and civilization of Europe, as
they now exist, are to be traced back to the first-mentioned of these two
world-movements. To that which preceded it may possibly be referred some
fragments of a previous condition of things in Europe which have been
enigmas to historians and ethnologists, as the Etruscans, the Finns, the
Laps, and the Basques. The Egyptians may have been a part of that first
original wave coming down freely of their own accord into Egypt. Or they
may have been driven out of Persia, or from the banks of the Indus, at
the epoch of the rise and outflow of the second wave. At all events,
this is clear, that they were no part of the second wave itself; because
their language was older than the Aryan tongue of that epoch. And if, as
appears probable, it was also older than that of the Semitic peoples,
they, too, must have come into being after the Egyptians.[2]