races on the west, we have not beheld the Types of Mankind rising,
almost continuously, higher and higher in the scale of physical and
intellectual gradations ?
Such are the phenomena. Climate, most certainly, does not explain
them; nor will any student of Natural History sustain that each type
of man in Africa is not essentially homogeneous with the fauna and
the flora of the special province wherein his species now dwells.
Two questions arise:—1st, Within human record, has it not always
been thus ? and 2d, Do the Egyptians, northernmost inhabitants of
Africa, obey the same geographical law of physical, and consequently
of mental and moral, progression ?
Our succeeding chapters may suggest, to the reflective mind, some
data through which both interrogatories can be answered.
C H A P T E R VII.
E G Y P T A N D E G Y P T I A N S .
Ouk survey of African races, so far, has been rapid and imperfect,
but still we hope it is sufficiently full to develop our idea of gradation
in the inhabitants of that great continent. A more copious analysis
would have surpassed our limits, while becoming unnecessarily tedious
to the reader. Prichard has devoted a goodly octavo of his “Physical
History” to these races alone; whereas we can afford but a few pages.
We now approach Egypt, the last geographical link in African
Ethnology. She has ever been regarded as the mother of arts and
sciences; and, strange as it may seem, Science now appeals to her to
settle questions in the Natural History of Man, mooted since the days
of Herodotus, the father of our historians.
When we cast a retrospect through the long and dreary vista of
years, which leads to the unknown epoch of Man’s creation, in quest
of a point of departure where we can obtain the first historical
glimpse of a human being on our globe, the Archaeologist is compelled
to turn to the monuments of the Nile. The records of India
cannot any longer be traced even to the time of Moses. Hebrew
chronicles, beyond Abraham, present no stand-point on which we
can rely; whilst their highest pretension to antiquity falls short
by 2000 years of the foundation of the Egyptian Empire. The
Chinese, according to their own historians, do not carry their true
historic period beyond 2637 years before Christ. Nineveh and Babylon,
monumentally speaking, are still more modern. But, Egypt’s
proud pyramids, if we are to believe the Champollion-school, elevate
us at least 1000 years above every other nationality. And, what is
more remarkable, when Egypt first presents herself to our view, she
stands forth -not in childhood, but with the maturity of manhood’s
age, arrayed in the time-worn habiliments of civilization. Her tombs,
her temples, her pyramids, her manners, customs, and arts, all betoken
a full-grown nation. The sculptures of the IVth dynasty, the earliest
extant, show that the arts at that day, some 3500 b . c., had already
arrived at a perfection little inferior to that of the XVTHth dynasty,
which, until the last five years, was regarded as her Augustan age.
Egyptian monuments, considered ethnologically, are not only inestimable
as presenting us two types of mankind at this early period,
but they display other contemporary races equally marked — thus
affording proof that humanity, in its infinite varieties, has existed
much longer upon earth than we have been taught; and that physical
causes have not, and cannot transform races from one type into
another.
Among former objections against the antiquity of Egyptian monuments,
it has been urged, that such numerous centuries could not
have elapsed with so little change in people, arts, customs, language,
and other conditions. This adverse charge, however, does not in
itself hold good, because the fixedness of civilization,- or veneration
for the customs of ancestors, seems to be an inherent characteristic
of Eastern nations. Through the extensive portion of Egyptian history
which is now known with sufficient certainty, we may admit a
comparative adhesion to fixed formulas, and an indisposition to
change: but n o ' Egyptologist will deny that, during nearly 6000
years, for which monuments are extant, the developing mutations in
Egyptian economy obeyed the same laws as in that of other races —
with this signal advantage in the former’s favor, that we possess an
almost unbroken chain of coetaneous records, for each progressive
step, Oriental history anteceding Christian ages (when viewed
through the eye-glasses of pedagogues who rank among C a k e y l e ’ s
“ doleful creatures,”) looms monstrously, like a chaotic blur, precisely
where archaeology, using mere naked eyes, has long espied most luminous
stratifications: and human developments, requiring “ chiliads
of years,” even yet are popularly restricted to the action of one
patriarchal lifetime. Eor ourselves, referring to the works of the
hierologists for explanation, we would readily join issue with objectors
upon the following heads: —