lers, Richardson, Barth, and Overweg,397 in 1850 ; at a mountain-pass
called Wadee Taldja, about nine days’ journey after leaving Mour-
zook, the capital of Eezzdn. Here is the account, in the words of
M. Vivien de Saint-Martin :—
“A little before reaching the descent we have just described, at
the bottom of the valley through yffiich one arrives at it, our travellers
made a singular discovery. They found some figures engraved
in deep cuttings upon the face of the rock [a very Egyptian method
of recording conquests, as at Wadee Magàra, near ML Sinai, by
steles]. The ancient people of the East lovèd thus to sculpture, upon
the granite, warlike or religious scenes : there exist tableaux of this
nature in Assyria and in Media, in Phoenicia and Asia Minor.
Those which our explorers have discovered at the entrance of the
[Sahara] desert have a peculiar character. They form several distinct
tableaux, of which two are above all remarkable. One offers
an allegorical scene, the other represents, a scene of pastoral life.
In the first, one beholds two personages, one with the head of a bird,
and the other with a bull’s, both armed with buckler and bow, and
seemingly combating for the possession of a bull: the other show's a
group of bulls that appear descending towards a spring to slake their
thirst. The first of these two tablets has a character altogether Egyptian
; and .the ensemble of these: sculptures is very superior to what
the nomad inhabitants of the north of Africa could now execute [See
Pulszky’s Chap. H., pp. 188—192, on “ Unartistical Races ”]. The
men of the neighborhood, moreover, attribute them to an unknown
people who, they say, possessed the country long before them.
Barth copied with care the two principal tablets, and he sent his
drawings, accompanied with a detailed notice, to the learned Egyptologist
of. London, Mr. Birch ; who will doubtless maké them .the
object of a serious study. According to the very competent judgment
of the traveller, the sculptures of Wqdee Télissaréh [naine of
the place where they are found] bear in themselves] the stamp of
incontestable antiquity. One is struck, furthermore, by a characteristic
circumstance, viz : the absende of the camel, which always holds
nowadays the first place in thé clumsy, sketches [as at Mt. Sinai]
traced, here and there, by present tribes upon other rocks in divers
parts of the dfesCrt. It is now recognized that the camel Was introduced
into Africa by the first Arab conquerors of the Ehalifaté [this
is not exact—say rather about the 1st century B . c . ] , during the Vllth
century of-our era: more anciently the onfy caravan beasts of burthen,
between the maritime zone and Higritia, were the ox and the
G ü m p r e c h t , Barlh u n i Ovérwegs Untèrsuchungs-Beise nach dem Tschad-Seê, B e r l i n ,
1852;—a s c i t e d b y S a i n t - M a r t i n , ( S u p r a , n o t e 390) p p . 434-5.
M 7 D O I
horse. Strabo relates {lib. xvii.) how the Maurusians [only a dialectic
mutation of Pharusians, the PTiRSIM398 of Xth Genesis], in
order to traverse the desert, suspended water-skins under the bellies
of their horses. Among several tribes of the Sahara, the ox is still
used as a beast of transportation and carriage. Richardson saw a
gieat number of them in a caravan that had just crossed a part of
the Sooddn.” .
A sight of Barth’s copy would suffice to-establish whether a breath
of Egyptian art passed over the sculpture ; but this narration is all I
can now learn about it. Isolate in itself, this fact scarcely attracted
my attention before ; but here come some fresher coincidences of real
Egyptian monuments, still further west in Barbary, that shed some
plausibility upon these (by myself unseen) petroglyphs. An Egyptian
black-granite royal statue, broken, ’tis <true, bearing inscriptions
with:the name of T hotmes I (XYHth dynasty, 16th century b . c.),
has turned up at Gherchel, in Algeria;393 and a Phoenico-Egyptian
scarabæus, brought from the same, locality, is now in Paris.4“ How,
as the-cited scholars both coincide, those monuments may have been
carried thither either by Phoenician traders, or by later Roman dilettanti.
Neither of them proves, anything for pharaonic conquests in
Africa ; but we have lived to see, in the case of Egyptian conquests
in Assyria, such positive evidence grow out of the smallest, and, at
first, most dubious indication, that I feel tempted to add another,
inedited, fact (long unthought of in my portfolio) to the chain of
posts — epochas left aside — now existing between ancient Egypt and
old Mauritania.
On the 26th Dec;, 1842, my revered friend, the late H on. J ohn
P ick er ing - - a most scientific philologist — of Boston, gave me an
impression491 of a fragment of true Egyptian greenish-basalt stone,
inscribed with some sixteen or eighteen pure hieroglyphical "characters
[without cartouche,- but broken from a statue, part of an arm
being on its reverse, in good relievo). This was said to have been
picked up on the ruins of Oarthage, by an officer of the TJ. S. Havy,
during the Tripolitan war; and brought directly to this country’
898 Types of Mankind, pp. 518-20.
899 G r e e n e , Bulletin Archéologique de l’Aihenceùm Français, May, 1856, pp. 38-9.
400 F r a n ç o is L e n o r m a n t , op. cit., June, pp. 46-7.
401 Mislaid among old papers, I have no leisure now to search for it; but, from an entry
made at the time in my “ Analecta Ægyptiaca,” I can state that its dimensions were about,
length ,7 inches, breadth 4 |, and thickness 2. The hieroglyphics, intaglio, style Saitic, are
out on a sort of jamb or plinth. Until production of my copy, let me terminate with a note
made on its reception If it does not go in support of the conquests of the Pharaohs in
Barbary, it proves intercourse, at least, with Carthage” — that is, if found at Carthage, for
which I fear all proofs are now, after so many years, obliterated.