tion to reach the noon of this XEXth century; what longer extent
of time must, I ask, he allowed for the Egyptians to have attained to
that social development attested by the kingly pyramids, princely and
aristocratic tombs of the IVth Memphite dynasty,440 when,— unlike
ourselves, who have improved the patrimony, by them, their content-
poraries, and successors, bequeathed to us—they seem to have begun
life without precedents: and, consequently, having had to grope
through their anterior stages of adolescence, childhood, and infancy,
before reaching the manhood of their first monumental recognition
by us, must have found each civilizing acquirement the more arduous,
exactly in the ratio as, retroceding in antiquity, their national life
approximated to its nursery.
Yet the Egyptians dwelt upon purely alluvial land, bounded on
either side by rocky deserts; and the river itself betokens, at every
period of its flow into the Mediterranean, the ever-tranquil operation
of the same laws that constitute its organism at the present day.
I Linked, through its perennial rise at the summer solstice, with
the astronomical revolutions of the divine Orb of day at the acme of
his ardent power, and most glorious effulgence, — marked, in the
sky’s cerulean blue, during the period of its increase, by the heliacal
ascent of Sirius,—each monthly phenomenon of the deified river was
consecrated by sempiternal correspondencies in the heavens; at the
same time that, to the mind of the devout Egyptian, H apimoou, the
numerous waters, “ Father of the Gods in Senem,”441 appeared to he
the most ancient of divinities, in his capacity of progenitor of the
celestial Amun, himself “ a great. God, king of the Gods;” who,
through a mythical association with Nouf, was the “ Father of the
Fathers of the Gods, period of periods of years.” In fact, as the
benign inundations of the. river necessarily preceded, in poiut of
date, the formation of the alluvium, the N ile seemed, to the first
human wanderers on its sedgy banks, to be the physical parent of all
things good and beneficent,
“Exalted, in the sacred papyrus Book of the Bead, to the heavenly
abodes of Elysian beatitude, the Celestial N ile was supposed to regenerate,
by lustration, the souls of the departed Egyptians, and to
fertilize, by irrigation, the gardens of happiness tilled by their immortal
spirits, in Amenthi ; during the same time that, on earth, the
Terrestrial H ile, by its depositions of alluvion created, while its
waters inundated, a country so famed among Eastern Nations for its
boundless fecundity, as to be compared (in Gen. xiii, 10,) to the
It is taken for granted that L e p s i h s ’s Denkmaler, t h e only compendium of document»
coetaneons with these primitive times, is known, at least, to the doubting critic,
m B i r c h , Gallery of Antiquities, part II, pp. 25, 10, 2; and PI. XIII.
“ Garden of IeHOaaH, like the land of M itzraim:” — 14 that is, the
two Muss rrs, the two Egypts, upper and lower; or else, Mitzrites, the
Egyptians; over which the androgynous H apimoou crowned with
the Lotus and Papyrus tiaras, in his duplex character of the Southern
and the Northern N il es , annually spread out the prolific mould and
the nourishing liquid, through which he was at once the Creator and
the Nurse of Egypt.
“ Thus, renowned from immemorial ages as the gift of the N ile ,
Egypt issues from the womb of primordial time armed cap-a-pie, like
Minerva, with a civilization already perfected at -the very earliest
epoch of her history, hieroglyphed on the monuments of the IHd and
IVth dynasties, prior to the 35th fcentury before the Christian era.
But, the River itself,—origin, vital principle, and motive cause of
that wondrous civilization, has flowed on unceasingly at the foot of
the Pyramids; its Sources a marvel, an enigma, an unfathomable
mystery, to above one-hundred-and-sixty consecutive human generations,
which have ‘lived, moved, and had a being’ since the limestone
cliffs of Memphis were first quarried into tombs.”443
Hence it is legitimately to be inferred, that those geological cataclysms
and volcanic dislocations which, in Europe, filled caverns
and ossuaries with bones of extinct genera mingled with those of
man, and rolled silex-implements of human industry into French
diluvial drift (supra), occurred at an age anterior to the settled quiet-
ness of Nilotic economy; because, a few decades of feet, caused by
such convulsions, added to the historical level of Mediterranean
waters, would have left abundant marks around the Memphite pyramids
; whereas, nothing of the kind is to be seen there, or elsewhere,
throughout monumental Egypt.444
It becomes, therefore, next to positive, as a corollary to the preceding
chain of facts, that mans presence, also (judging from the
rudeness of his silex-arts) then in his childhood’s phase, must, in
Europe, antedate even human infancy on the Nile’s alluvium. What
vistas of antiquity! Archeology, having herein sufficiently blown
away the historical fogs and scud that, in nautical phrase, obstructed
his vision, now cheerfully resigns a clean spyglass into the hands of
the paleontologist.
4 0 N a s h , “ On the origin and derivation of the term Copt, and the name of Egypt
B o k k e ’s Ethnological Journal, April, 1849; pp. 490-496 -.— Types of Mankind, pp. 493-5.
4 0 G u d d o n , Handbook to the Mile, London, 8vo, Madden, 1849; pp. 34-5.
444 See L e p s i u s , Chronologie, I, p. 24—how Herodotus and Plato say the Egyptians had
never heard of the Hebrew flood.