lypical difference cannot be mistaken. It is note-worthy, besides,
that many of these Egypto-Gaucasian heads are not only strongly
Semitic, but even Abrahamic in type : thus affording support to
legends running through'the fragments of Manetho, and his mutilator,
J o se ph u s , as to connections between the Hyksos and the early
population of Canaan. The same Chaldaic features beheld in some
of the royal likenesses of the XYIIth, XYHIth and XTXtb dynasties,
are seen upon the sculptures of the IYth, Yth and YIth.
Philological science generally admits that the roots of thq| modern
Coptic language are, in the -main, (alien engraftments deducted) the
same as those of the 1 lingua sancta,” or Old Egyptian tongue, spoken
by the priesthood and educated classes, from Roman times, through
‘all dynasties, back to the earliest Pharaohs, when the latter was the
colloquial idiom of every native. As a medium of oral communication,
the Coptic language ceased to be jj used in the twelfth century,
and the last person who could - speak it is said to have died in a . d .
1663 i 282 but an old.Egyptian (G. R. Gt.) avers that he met with good
authority for its decease about ninety years agd, with a priest, in the
Thebaid.
The ¡cpa SiaXexTos',283 sacerdotal dialect, or antique language, affords
one of the strongest evidences of the high antiquity of the early
population of Egypt, and also of their Miotic or aboriginal emanation.
Egypt has been, literally, for many thousands of years, the
football of foreign conquerors; and her primordial language became
infiltrated, from age to age, with Arabic, Persian, Greek, Libyan,
Latin, and words of other tongues, known to us only at a later stage
of development; but, when these exotic injecta are abstracted, there
remains, nevertheless, a stone-recorded vernacular, possessing all the
marks of originality, and in itself totally distinct from the utmost
circumference of Asiatic languages. The proper names of very few
Miotic objects, natural or artificial, in primitive hieroglyphics, are
really identical with the vocalization of Syro-Arabian languages; and
their Egyptian structure is characteristically different; being monosyllabic,
in lieu of the posterior triliteral shape in which Semitic
tongues have come down to us/ “ If all these languages be kindred,
B eetfey, who has compared them most elaborately, holds, they must
have split off from a parent stock, not only at a period too remote for
all historical or monumental evidence,!but eveh for plausible conjecture.”
284 Such, in brief, are the current opinions of.Lepsius, Birch,
of Bunsen, Hincks, De Saulcy, Lanci, and other eminent authorities
of the day, as regards Egypt: supported, moreover, by the philological
discoveries of Rawlinson, Hincks, and De Longperier, in cuneiform
Assyria; and by the studies of Gesenius, Ewald, Munk, and Eresnel,
in Shemitish palaeography. i It is the deduction of Lepsius, that
Egypt had possessed an African population, and a Miotic language,
before the foundation of the Old Empire ; and that various disturbing
causes superimposed, gradually, an Asiatic type and Semitic dialects
upon the anterior people of the Lower Mie, without obliterating the
aboriginal frame-work which, as well in type of man as in speech,
was exclusively African.
Affinities, tending to establish a remote contemporaneousness, have
been traced among various languages of Horthern Africa: and
Hodgson, quoted in the last chapter, long ago put forth the doctrine
that the Berber speech, as now extant, had preceded the Coptic of
Christianized Egypt. He insisted that many old names of places,
divinities, &c., along the Mie, were Berber, and neither Coptic nor
Semitic. Allowance made for some slight anachronisms, in terms
rather than in facts, we think our learned countryman’s arrow has
not flown wide of the target.
The high antiquity formerly claimed for civilization in India, and
many coincidences of doctrine and usages that, imagined by Indologists,
have entirely vanished from Egypt since her hieroglyphics have
become readable, had led Prichard, and other scholars less eminent,
to connect the Ganges with the Mie : but, so far from any evidence
of intercommunication, we have nothing to show that the nations on
these" two rivers, in the time of Solomon, much less of Moses or
Abraham, were even1 acquainted with each others’ existence. The
ancient Egyptians never surmised a Hindostanic origin for their own
Ihation ; they believed themselves to be, in the strictest sense, autoc-
thones, natives of the soil. Hor do East-Indians (since W jx fo r d’s
misconceptions i becaméferposed) possess any tradition of having received
an Egyptian or sent forth a Hindoo colony.285 Moreover, the
rumored resemblances between the languages of India and Egypt —
Sanscrit and Coptic—compared in their modern phases, are few and
slight, where not altogether factitious. The whole- genius of both,
and almost their entire stock of words, are entirely different. The
hieroglyphic system of : Egypt is clearly indigenous to the valley of
the Mie, whilst not even a legendary tale refrain s to show that such
mode of writing ever prevailed in India.
When we reflect that this hieroglyphic writing is found in high
perfection'on thè earliest monuments extant, viz.: those of the IVth
dynasty, 3400 years b . c., and, therefore, must have existed many centuries
previously ; that the figure of every animal, plant, or tiling,
delineated in these hieroglyphics, is Nilotic to thè exclusion of every
foreign idea ; and that Egyptian economy in manners, customs, arts,
&c., must have been radically diverse from those. of all other races,