X X I Id Dynasty—M an e th o ’s “ Bubastitos
Proved by Mr. Bircb to bave Assyrian names; but the Pharaonic
stock has now become so mixed, that it is difficult to determine
whether the Hellenic, the Semitic, or the Egyptian preponderates.
Fid. 67. Pi«- 68.
S h e s h o n k I. OSOBKON III.
There are little or no remains of the X X.llLd or XXlVth dynasties;
but, in order to show that the so-called “ Ethiopian” dynasty had no
Negro blood in their veins, we subjoin their three portraits. Dr.
Morton calls them “Austro-Egyptians; ” and we opine that they may
be derived from an Egyptian colony, crossed with Old Beja (Begawee),
or perhaps with Cushite-Arabian blood.
— b . c. 719 t o 695.
XXVth Dynasty
Fid. 69.
Fid. 70.
S h a b a K-Sabaco. | S h a b a t o k -Sevechm.
(Meroite ?) (Pharaoh Sua. 2 Kings, xvii. 4.)
Fid. 71.
It is unnecessary, for ethnological purposes, to continue the series
of Egyptian portraits down to the Ptolemies, and ending with C leopatra
(already given, Fig. 8, page 104,) and her son by J tjlius Cæ sa r ,
Cæ sa r iq n .- The reader can behold the whole of them in Rosellini’s
magnificent folios. Having presented the royal likenesses, to serve
as evidence of Egyptian artistic accuracy, we shall now investigate
the foreign nations with whom the men, whose portraits we have just
seen, were acquainted ; together with such others as their ancestors
had known during twenty centuries previously.
It will become apparent, in a succeeding chapter, that even as far
back as the IVth dynasty, b . c. 3500, the population of Egypt already
exhibited abundant instances of mixed types of African and Asiatic
origins ; at the same time that the language then spoken on the Lower
Nile, and recorded in the earliest hieroglyphics, also presents evidence
of these amalgamations. The series of Royal portraits just
submitted not only demonstrates this commingling of races, but
shows that Asiatic intruders had, at the foundation of the New Empire,
to a great extent, supplanted, in the royal family at least, the indigenous
Egyptians. Their foreign type is vividly impressed upon the
iconographie monuments. So much do the Pharaonic portraits of
the XVIIth, XVlIIth, and XTXth dynasties resemble those of the
later Greek and Roman sovereigns, that the eye passes through the
long series given by Rosellini without being arrested by any striking
contrast between the former and the latter. Although the common
people were also greatly mixed, the Egyptian type proper, nevertheless,
among them, predominated over the Asiatic- Even admitting
that the autocthonous Egyptian race was always, down to the Persian
conquest, b . c. 525, the ruling one, yet the royal families of the Nile,
as in other countries, become modified by marriages with alien races.