people, darker in hue than Greeks, who emigrated from the Indus.
The era, assigned for their migration to countries south of Egypt, is
attributed to that of one among many Pharaohs, called by Grecian
narrators “ Amenophis; ” and the legend reaches us through a Byzantine
monk, the Syncellus (writing 2000 years after the events), at once
the most diligent, and the least critical, compiler the seventh century
of our era produced. To say the least, the historical surface we tread
on trembles, as though it floated over a quagmire. These doubts
suggested, we submit extracts from the Qrania JEgyptiaca: —
“ 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 other, 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.1,347
F ig . 190.
“ 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 (Fig. 191), as
sculptured in the temple of Debod, in Nubia.. The
date of this king has not yet been ascertained; but,
as he ruled over Meroe, and not in Egypt, (probably
in Ptolemaic times [ b. o. 200-300],) he may be regarded
as an 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 (Fig. 192),
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 ?”
F ig. 191.
So great is our respect for Morton’s judgment; such manifold experiences
have we acquired of his perceptive acuteness in cramological
anatomy, that we should prefer the affirmatory decisions of others
relative to this Hindoo-Mero'ite problem, to any negation on our own
p a r ts . ■••u». |
The preceding brief digressions enable us to leave Meroe, and resume
with a more positive, because osteological, proof of the perdurable
continuance of the Negro type.
This semi-embalmed cranium of a
Negress (Fig. 198), from Morton’s
cabinet, is preserved at the Academy
of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Beyond the fact that mummification
ceased towards the fifth
century of our era; and that, being
from an ancient tumulus at the sacred
Isle of Beghe, the female
F ig . 193.348
owner of the annexed skull may
have been a domestic slave of some
“ Ethiopian” worshipper at the
shrine of Osiris, on the adjacent Isle of Philse; all that can be said
as to the antiquity of our specimen confines it to a period between
the fourth century b . c. (when Pharaoh N eotanebo founded the temple
of Philse), and the extinction of embalming, coupled with the substitution
of Christianity (as understood by “ Ethiopians,”) for the religion
of Osiris, about the fifth century after o.349 Fifteen hundred
years may, therefore, be assumed as the reasonable lapse of time since
this aged Negress was consigned to the mound where hundreds of
other Osirian pilgrims lie, coarsely swathed in bitumenized wrappers.
The specimen is unique in the annals of Egyptian embalmment; inasmuch
as no other purely-Negro vestiges have as yet turned up in
tumuli or catacombs.
Trivial to many as the incident may seem, Science* nevertheless,
can make “ these dry bones speak” to the following points. First,
they establish Nigritian indelibility of type, even to the woolly h a ir;
because, our American cemeteries could yield up thousands of heads
identical with this woman’s. Secondly, they attest the comparative
paucity of Negro individuals in Egypt during all ancient times; because,
although the priests embalmed every native pauper, such Nigritian
mummies have never, that we can learn, been discovered by
ransackers of that country’s sepulchres. And, thirdly, as this skull
is a* solitary exception, among millions of mummies disinterred, it
demonstrates that the Egyptians possessed no craniological proximity