they even suspected that 1m was already a plural termination, they would not have
doubled it by printing “ Cherubims” for Cherubs, or “ Seraphims” for SerqphsI What
should we think of the French scholarship of a person who wrote tableauxes ?
That these people were Libyans no commentator now doubts, although Bochart dissents
; and that in LHB, the soft aspirate he, H, may be equivalent to such vowels
as a, e, i, o, u, no palaeographer will contest: nor that the LUBiwi of 2 Chron. (xii. 3 ;
xvi. 8), of Nahum (iii. 9), and of Daniel (xx. 43), are the same as the LHB&m; especially
in Nahum’s text, where a conjunction couples them to PAUT; already- shown to
have been a generic appellative for the whole of Barbary.
Aifivr] of the Homeric Greeks possessed a wider territorial extension than the Libya
of the Romans; the former signifying Barbary in general; the latter the coast from
Egypt to the Greater Syrtis: hence we may infer that the more precise information
of Roman geographers rested upon better acquaintance with the localities where the
LHBs were domiciled. T-LIBI is the homonyme in Coptic MSS; but perhaps in a sense
restricted to tribes on the immediate west of the Nile’s alluvium; which also suggests
the easternmost limit of Libyan encampments.
Among the Berber tribes enumerated by Ebn Khaledoon occur the LeWaTaH; which
word in Oriental palaeography is the same as LeHaB-afaA; and its analogies with
LeHaB-fore are salient. Arab tradition invests the present i?m-LeWA, of Amazirgh
stock, with sufficient correspondences to resolve all these .appellatives into the
Asvadac, AefiavSai, of Procopius, about the sixth century b . c , ; not forgetting the
Languantan of Corippus.
Any one investigating such subjects, without preconceptions, will recognise in the
LHBs of Xth Genesis a nomadic population of Gcetulian race, and of Barbaresque
habitats.613
80 . D’l i n S J — I'TPATiKAIM— ‘K aphtuhim.’
Before commencing analyses that arise through new resuscitations of Egyptology,
it is desirable to remind the reader of a principle that governs our philological inquiries
into 10th Genesis. Extremely simple, it is still, even where known, more or
less disregarded by rabbinical writers.
The genesiacal writer’s classification of nations is tripartite, under the titular headings
“ S h em , H am , and J a p h e t h ; ” and his lists, therefore, embv&ce,.Semitic, Hamitic,
and Japethic families; corresponding [supra, pp. 85, 86] to the yellow, the red, and the
white colors given by Egyptian ethnographers to such varieties of man as were known
to them about the sixteenth century b . c . : but the Hebrew map excludes the Negro ;
which race, the fourth in the quadripartite ethnography of Thebes, is, on the monuments,
painted black.
Arabian languages are necessarily represented in the proper names of nations, belonging
to the Semitic stock; the Egyptian“ sacred tongue” is the most ancient and
reliable nucleus for those of the Hamitic; while those of the Japethic/ almost a distinct
world, must belong either to the Indo- Germanic or to the Scythic class of human
idioms.
To suppose that the “ speech of Kanaan ” (misnamed Hebrew) can answer the purpose
of an “ open Sessame” to the significations of all proper names in Xth Genesis,
which the writer himself has carefully segregated from each other into three groups of
tongues, spoken by three groups of humanity (in his day as in ours, from each other
entirely distinct), is one of those aberrations that no educated person of our generation
would be likely to boast of; if he reflected that, in considering Hebrew as a fitting key
to any thing more than to one, the Semitic, of these three linguistic portals,, he would
be as great a dolt as if he sustained that .English might be contained in a Chinese
radical or in a Mandingo root.
No philologist at the present day, when he beholds in Xth Genesis the proper
name NPAT ¿KAIM, would seek for its explanation in a Hebrew vocabulary; because a
proper name belonging to the Hamitic group of languages ought first to be examined
within the sphere of its own positive domiciliations-; and it is only when these are
wanting, or when comparative philology is the investigator’s object, that speculative
analogies of such an antique cognomen may be hunted for in the modern Arabic Qa-
mdos, or other Shemitish lexicon.
NPATiKAIM is a plural, of which the singular expression is NPATiKA.
In Coptic days, according to authentic MSS., the western skirts of Lower Egypt, on
the south of Lake Mareotis, Marea, Mariout, were called NIFAIAT; whence, deducting
the plural prefix, NI, we obtain FAIAT as the Coptic vocalization of the hierogly-
phical root F-T; or PAeT, meaning a bow; as we explained under the head PAUT.
The occupants of these localities, along the desert ridges from Marea to Ptiminhor
(now Damanhoor) spoke a Berber dialect, and not pure Egyptian; in this, resembling
the inhabitants, of the nearest pasis, that of Ammon, or Seewah, who, already in the
time of Herodotus, 430 b. o., were a mixed “ colony of Egyptians and Ethiopians,”
i. e., sun-burned-fbees; “ subfusci^coloris,” like all Berber derivations. We have
settled that the preceding affiliations of the MTsRlwz occupied parts of Barbary,
and belonged to branches of the great Gcetulian trunk. We shall see that others
of the Hamitic brethren did so likewise. What, then, more natural than to find,
on the western flank of MTsR (Egypt) herself, the NIPHAIAT nomads of that race,
speaking their national tongue, the Berber ?
As usual, Champollion was the first to carry back the NIPHAIAT of Coptic Christian
literature to the ancient Pharaonic monuments; confirmed by Rosellini, Peyron, &c.,
and since universally accepted by Egyptologists as designations of Libya and Libyans.
But, without doubting in the least the Barbaresque application of the word, whether
in its Coptic or in its hieroglyphical form, the original name PA-T-AáA sometimes
occurs in the singular number, “ Bow-country,” or plural “ Nine-bow-country.” Now,
the same distinction holds in Xth Genesisj where PAUT refers to Barbary as a whole;
and NPATiEAIM, in which the same radical PAT is preserved, to tribes of the same
Hamitic stock. May we not assign “ Bow-country” to Phtjt, and “ Nine-bow-country”
to the others ? With this reservation, Hengstenberg is right in seizing upon Niphaiat
as the probable representative of “ Naphtuchim.” It is easy to prove this identity.
The Masorete punctuation, through which Naphtoukhlm is its present phonetism,
commands no reverence ; being merely the rabbinical intonation, in the sixth and later
centuries after Christ, of a foreign proper name antedating them, and the writer of Xth
Genesis himself, by unnumbered ages. All that science can now accept are the six
letters — NPATiKAIM.
The' hieroglyphical root is PA-T; the later Copts added the medial vowels, and it
became PAaiaT: to make it an Egyptian plural, the NI, or N, was prefixed, and NI-
PAaiaT, thus formed, is simply ¿Ae-PAaiaT-s — the proper ñame, as above shown, of a
Berber tribe on the western frontier of Lower Egypt. But, Chan&pollion’s Grammaire
tells us how, “ in the graphical system, as in the Egyptian spoken tongue, the plural
number (of nouns) was expressed .by the desinences or terminations” — OU, or U: so
that, Egyptologically, the name must have been orthographed NI-PAaiaTU. Such
was the word that presented itself to the researches of the compiler of Xth Genesis,
when he classified the MTsR¿¿e “ affiliations of KÁaM, after their families, after their
tongues, in their countries, in their nations” [Gen. x. 20). We have only to take
the square-lettérs which the later Jews substituted for his own (unknown) calligraphy,
and, inserting the omitted vowels, write them below the older Egyptian form — thus,
Ni-P7¿aiaTU, 1 to perceive that this diligent writer (not being conversant,
Ni-PAaiaT¿-uKA-IM, J unhappily, with Nilotic syntaxis) has suffixed the Hebrew
plural, IM, to a proper name, NIPHAIATU, that was already in its indigenous pliiral
form when it reached the chorographic bureau of Jerusalem or Babylon. Hence the
following conclusions: —