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What were the origin and affinities of the ancient Egyptians? To what race, or races, of mankind did they belong? At what time, whence, and by what route did they enter Egypt? The answer to these questions, if attainable, would not be barren.

We have just been looking at the physical characteristics of the country, and noting some of the effects they must have had on the character and history of the people. The inquiry now indicated, if carried to a successful issue, will enable us, furthermore, to understand, to some extent, what were the aboriginal aptitudes the people themselves brought with them. These were the moral and intellectual elements on which the influences of nature had to act. The result was the old Egyptian. He was afterwards modified by events and circumstances, by increasing knowledge, and by the laws and customs all these led to; but the two conditions we are now speaking of were the starting-points, and which never ceased to have much influence in making this people feel as they felt, and enabling them to do what they did. To have acquired, therefore, some knowledge about them will be to have got possession of some of the materials that are indispensable for reconstructing the idea of old Egypt. We feel with respect to these old historical peoples as we do about a machine: we are not satisfied at being told that it has done such or such a piece of work; we also want to know what it is within it, which enabled it to do the work--what is its construction, and what its motive power.

Six thousand years before our own time may be taken as the starting-point of the monumental and traditional history of the old monarchy. This inquiry, however, will carry us back to a far more remote past.

There is but one way of treating this question: that is, to apply to it the method we apply to any question of science--to that, for instance, of gravitation, or to any other: precisely the same method applied in precisely the same way. We must collect the phenomena; and the hypothesis which explains and accounts for them all is the true one. This will act exclusively: in establishing itself it will render all others impossible.

Other hypotheses, however, which have been, or may be, entertained must not be passed by unnoticed, in order that it may be understood that they do not account for the phenomena; or, to put it reversely, that the phenomena contradict them.

When history begins to dawn, the first object the light strikes upon, and which for a long time alone rears its form above the general gloom, is the civilization of Egypt. It stands in isolation, like a solitary palm by the side of a desert spring. It is also like that palm in being a complete organism, and in producing abundance of good fruit. All around is absolute desert, or the desert sparsely marked with the useless forms of desert life. On inquiry we find that this thoroughly-organized civilization, fully supplied with all the necessaries, and many of the embellishments of life, and which is alone visible in the dawning light, must have existed through ages long prior to the dawn. It recedes into unfathomable depths of time far beyond the monuments and traditions.

We cannot ascertain precisely at what point in the valley this civilization first showed, or established itself. Of two points, however, which are of importance, we are sure. It did not descend the Nile from Ethiopia, and it did not ascend it from the coast of the Delta. It is true that Memphis was the first great centre of Egyptian life of which we have full and accurate knowledge. The founder, however, of the first historical dynasty, and who appears to have made Memphis his capital, came from This, or Abydos, in Upper Egypt. We may almost infer from this that Abydos was an earlier centre of Egyptian power than Memphis.

The idea, then, of an unmixed African origin may, I think, be at once and summarily dismissed.

Something may be alleged in support of a Semitic origin. Where, however, we may ask, is the theory on behalf of which nothing can be alleged? If it were so it would never have come into existence. What we have to consider in this, as in every doubtful or disputed matter, is not what can be said in favour of certain views, or what can be said against them, but which way the balance inclines when the arguments on each side have been fairly put into their respective scales.

To begin, then, with the language, which is the most obvious ground for forming an opinion in a matter of this kind. It happens that in this case nothing conclusive can be inferred from the language. First, because in it no very decisive Semitic affinities have been made out; and, secondly, because, had they been found to be much more important than some have supposed them to be, this would not of itself prove a preponderance of Semitic blood.

Colour is rather adverse to the Semitic theory. The Egyptian was not so swarthy as the Arab; whereas, if he had been a Semite, he ought to have been, at the least, as dark. In the wall-paintings a clear red represents the complexion of the men, and a clear pale yellow that of the women. In this clearness of tint we miss the swartness of the Arab.

It is true he was darker than the Jew. Little, however, can be inferred from this, for the Jews were an extremely mixed people. Abraham came from Haran, in Mesopotamia, and is called in Deuteronomy a Syrian. He must, in fact, have been a Chaldean. The wife of Joseph was a high-caste Egyptian. The wife of Moses was a Cushite. And when the Israelites went up out of Egypt 'a mixed multitude' went out with them. This can only mean that in the multitude of those who threw in their lot with them there was a great deal of Semitic blood, through the remnant of the Hyksos, which had been left behind when the great mass of that people had been expelled from Egypt, and also a great deal of Egyptian blood. From these sources, then, were derived no inconsiderable ingredients for the formation of what was afterwards the Jewish nation. The great-grandmother of David was a Moabitish woman. Solomon's mother was a Hittite, and one of his wives an Egyptian. And we know that a very considerable proportion of conquered Canaanites were eventually absorbed by their conquerors. No argument, therefore, can be founded upon the complexion of so mixed a people as the Jews.

In features, taking the sculptures and paintings for our authority, the Egyptian was not a Semite. His nostrils and lips were not so thin, and his nose was not so prominent. In this particular, which is important, he presents indications of a cross between the Caucasian and the Ethiopian, or modern Nubian.

Their social and political organization--that of castes, and of a well-ordered, far-extended state--was completely opposed to Semitic freedom and equality, in which the ideas of the tribe, and of the individual, preponderated over those of the state, and of classes.

Now, from the hard simplicity of nature in the Semitic region, or from the simplicity of life and thought resulting from it, or from the early apprehension by that part of the human family of the idea of a Creator, or from other causes not yet made out , there has always been a disposition in the Semitic mind to think of God as one. In the earliest indications we possess of their religious thought each tribe, each city, almost each family, appears to have had its own God. They never could have created, or accepted, a Pantheon. The idea of Polytheism was unnatural, illogical, repulsive to them. The inference, therefore, is that in the large hierarchy of heaven, which approved itself to the Egyptian mind, there could be nothing Semitic. The religion, the religious thought of Egypt, which so stirred the whole heart, and swayed the whole being of the people as to impel them to raise to the glory of their gods the grandest temples the world has ever seen, was, in its whole cast and character, an abomination to the Semite.

Next after Religion, the most important effort of the human mind is Law. Law is distinguishable from Religion. It is not an effort to embrace and interpret the whole, but a general and enforced application of some of the conclusions of that interpretation to the regulation of the conduct of men towards each other. Its principles are those of justice and expediency, but with very considerable limitations--not absolute justice, but justice as then and there understood; and not in every point and particular, but in those matters only in which evidence is possible, and the observance also of which can be enforced by penalties; nor absolute expediency, but again, as it is then and there understood, and limited to such matters as admit of being carried out, and enforced, by public authority.

This, it is plain, may be regarded--and as a matter of observation and history is still, and has in all times been, regarded--either as something distinct from, or as a department of, religion.

If treated as a part of religion, then either the very letter itself of the law, or else the principles on which it is founded, and of which it is an application, must be accepted as from God. In the former case God is regarded as the actual legislator, and sometimes going a step further, as the actual executor of His own law. In the latter case He is regarded, because He is the primary source, at all events, of its principles, as ultimately their guardian, and the avenger of their violation.

The Semitic sentiment, looked upon law in the former of these two lights. It formed this conception of it, because the people held in their minds the two ideas, that God was One, and that He was the Creator. A people who have come to regard God as one will necessarily concentrate on the idea of God all moral and intellectual attributes. Out of this will arise a tendency to exclude all merely animal attributes, and, to a great extent, such phenomena as present themselves to the thought as merely human--such, for instance, as were the attributes of Mars, Venus, and Mercury. God then, being the perfection of wisdom, justice, and goodness, is the only source of law. He is, also, the actual Lawgiver in right of His being the Creator. The world, and all that it contains, is His. His will is the law of His creation. The gods of Egypt, however, like those of Greece, were not anterior to Nature, were not the creators of Nature, but came in subsequently to it, and were in some sort emanations from it; the highest conception of them, in this relation, was that they were the powers of Nature.

Now, in this important and governing matter of law, the Egyptian mind did not take the Semitic view. God appeared to the Egyptian, not so much in the character of the direct originator, as in that of the ultimate guardian of the law, in our sense of these words. They had had kings who had been wise legislators, and the complete punishment for violations of the law would be in the life to come.

A review, then, of the whole field makes it appear highly improbable that the Egyptians were Semites.

But if they were neither African nor Semitic, what were they? There are not many alternatives to choose from. The process soon arrives at a complete exhaustion. They must have been--there is no other possible race left--mainly Aryan: that is, of the same race as ourselves.

There is no antecedent improbability in this. That an Aryan wave should have reached the Nile was, indeed, less improbable than that others, as was the case, should have reached the Ganges and the Thames. That one had not, would almost have needed explanation.

That the Egyptians themselves had not the faintest trace, either of a tradition, or of a suspicion, that it had been so, is only what we might have been sure of. No other branch of the race, from the Ganges to the Thames, had preserved any record of their ancestors' migrations, or any tradition of their old home, or of their parentage. This only shows--which will explain much--that the migration took place at so remote a period, so long before the invention of letters, that we feel as if it might have resulted from some displacement, or variation, of the axis of our earth in the glacial epoch.

That the complexion of the Egyptians is not so fair as that of Europeans, is a remark of no weight. Europeans may have become fairer by the operation of causes analogous to those which made the Egyptians darker. Among the Hindoos, the Brahman, who is indubitably Aryan, is generally as dark as the Egyptian was. The colour of the Egyptian may have been heightened in precisely the same way as that of the Brahman; first, by intermixture with the previous possessors of the soil, and afterwards by exposure through a long series of generations, with but little clothing, to the floods of light and heat of a perennially cloudless and all but tropical sun.

They might, on their arrival, have found an Ethiopic race in possession of the valley of the Nile, and having come from a distance with but few women, may have largely intermarried with the conquered, and displaced aborigines.

That there had been some intermixture may be inferred from the complexion of the Egyptians, and from the thickening of their features.

There is also a moral argument in favour of this supposition in the fact that the Egyptians never, even in their best days, showed repugnance to intermarriage with the Ethiopians, or even to being ruled by Ethiopian sovereigns. They followed Tirhakah and Sabaco into Syria just as readily as they had followed Sethos and Rameses. We see on the sculptures the Ethiopian Queen of Amenophis.

Had the language been manifestly Aryan in its roots and structure, this, under the circumstances, would have been conclusively in favour of our supposition. Its not being so is, however, not conclusive against it. The Northmen, who invaded, and settled in Normandy, abandoned their own language, and adopted that of France. Again, the Norman invasion led to a great modification of the language of England, but the new tongue was not that of the invaders. Indeed, it seems only in accordance with what might have been expected--that the non-Aryan element in the people having been so potent as, to a great extent, to cloud the Aryan complexion, and coarsen the Aryan features, the language which was ultimately formed, should not have been, to any great extent, Aryan.

We find caste existing in Egypt from the earliest times. This becomes intelligible on the supposition of an Aryan origin. It is a parallelism to what took place on the ground occupied in India by another, but later, offset of this race. Caste could not develop itself spontaneously in the bosom of an indigenous, and homogeneous people. It is impossible to conceive such a phenomenon under such circumstances. It must be the result of two causes: foreign conquest, and pride of blood. As to the former, we are sure that there could have been no other means by which the Egyptians could have been introduced into the valley of the Nile, as they were not indigenous Africans; and as to pride of blood, we know that this feeling exists so strongly among Aryan peoples, that it may almost be regarded as one of the characteristics of the race. It was natural, therefore, that, wherever they came to dwell on the same ground with a conquered and subject population of a colour different from their own, they should introduce this, or some equivalent, organization of society. If they had found a dark race in Europe we should have had caste in Europe; but here the hardness of the struggle for existence in old times, aided by the absence of difference in colour between the conquerors and the conquered, made it impossible. In all European aristocracies, whatever may have been their origin, we can detect traces of this old Aryan disposition towards exclusiveness founded on pride of blood.

In religion, which is for those times one of the surest criteria of race, there was so close an approximation of the gods, and of the whole system of Egypt, to those of Greece, that, as has been observed already, the Greeks supposed that the two were identical. They were in the habit of speaking of the deities of Egypt as the same as their own, only that in Egypt they had Egyptian names. Of course, it is impossible for any people to suppose that the religion of another people is identical with its own, unless the fundamental ideas of the two systems are the same. This similarity, then, indicates that they were both offsets from the same stock, and that they parted from the old home after the fundamental and governing ideas of the mythology they carried with them had been elaborated there.

But in this matter we may go much further than Greece. If we view all the Aryan religions collectively, we shall find that the one idea that was the life-giving principle in every one of the whole family was the belief in a future life. The Hindoo and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the Teuton, all alike, as if by a common instinct, agreed in this. This, therefore, is distinctly Aryan, and no religion from which it is absent could belong to that race. How, then, and this is almost a crucial test, does the religion of old Egypt stand in this matter? Exactly as it ought to do, on the supposition that it had an Aryan origin. This was its central, its formative, its vital idea. It was this that built the thousand mighty temples in which the living might learn those virtues, and practise that piety, which would be their passport to the better world to come. It was this that embalmed the bodies of the dead, whose souls were still alive. Without it the religion of old Egypt could never have been a living force, nor anything but the merest mummy of a religion. At all events, without it, it could have had no origin in Aryan thought.

Another point to be considered is that of artistic tastes and aptitudes. These are shown most conspicuously in the architecture of a people, and the subsidiary architectonic arts of sculpture and painting; they may be followed also into the arts which minister to the conveniences and embellishments of everyday life, and which are chiefly exhibited in the style of the dress of a people, and of the furniture of their houses. Here, again, I think the working of the Aryan mind is seen in old Egypt. Their ideas and tastes in these matters were singularly in harmony with the ideas and tastes that have in all ages developed themselves in the bosom of Aryan communities wherever settled. On the whole, our taste approves of what they did in these applications of man's creative power, the necessary deductions having been made for the trammels which the fixity of their religious ideas imposed upon them; and for the fact that all that they did were but first unaided essays, uncorrected by comparisons with the arts of other people. When we consider what great disadvantages in this respect they worked under, we must come to the conclusion that no nation ever showed so much invention, or more native capacity for art. We cannot suppose that they borrowed from any other people the idea of the pillar with its ornamented capital; the arch; the ornamentation of buildings with the sculptured and painted forms of man, of animals, and of plants; the use of metallic colours; the art of making glass; the forms of their furniture; the art of embalming the dead; the art of writing; and a multitude of other arts which were in common practice among them in very remote times.

The same may be said of their aptitude for science, which has ever been a distinct characteristic of Aryans, and never of Semites. Science is a natural growth among the former, and has appeared among the latter only occasionally, and then evidently as an exotic. The mechanics, the hydraulics, the geometry, the astronomy, of the old Egyptians were all their own.

We also find among them evidences of a genius for organization in a high degree, and of a singular power of realizing to their thoughts, and of working for the attainment of, very distant objects, both of which are valuable peculiarities of the Aryan mind, and in both of which the Semitic mind is markedly deficient.

One point more. Herodotus observes that the Egyptians resembled the Greeks in being content each of them with a single wife. On our supposition, this is just what might have been expected. There are no practices among mankind so inveterate as those connected with marriage; and the ancient Egyptians, having been an offset from the race of mankind which had originally been monogamic, could not, although they had long been settled in the polygamic region, bring themselves to adopt polygamy. The primaeval custom of the race could not be unlearnt. We see, too, from the sculptures that the affectionate relation between husband and wife was rather of the European than of the Asiatic pattern. The wife places her hand on the shoulder, or round the arm of the husband, to symbolize unitedness, attachment, and dependence. This is done in a manner one feels is not quite in harmony with oriental sentiment.

There is no reason which should lead us peremptorily to decide against their having come by sea. There is no antecedent improbability. The distant voyages and settlements both of the Phoenicians, and of the Normans, show what can be achieved in very small vessels. Evidence to the same point was again supplied by the insignificant capacity of many of the vessels employed by some of our early trans-Atlantic explorers, and circumnavigators. And in the spirit-stirring and invigorating era of the Aryan migrations we may believe that some enterprises of this kind were undertaken. At all events, there is nothing to preclude our believing that, in the prehistoric period, Indian and Arabian vessels were wafted by the reciprocating monsoons, to and fro, across the Indian Ocean. Nor, indeed, are we at all obliged to suppose that those vessels were of insignificant capacity.

But this entrance into Egypt must have taken place at so remote a date that the physical features of that part of the world might then have been somewhat different from what they are now. The Dead Sea might not then have been thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and the isthmus we have just seen canalized might then have been navigable water.

But it will make the point in question more distinct if I endeavour to speak more precisely about it. The immigration into Egypt could not possibly have been an offset of the Aryan immigration into India, which resulted in the formation of the Hindoo, or of its westward outflow, which resulted in the formation of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. These dispersions must, we know, speaking broadly, have been contemporaneous. Their date, however, as has been already observed, was so remote that no one branch of the race retained the slightest trace of a tradition of its original seat, or of the way in which they themselves came to their new home, or of any particulars of the occurrence. We will suppose, then, that the event to which they all belong, and of which each is a part, occurred 10,000 years ago. I merely use these figures to make myself intelligible. But the Aryan immigration into Egypt belongs to a still more remote epoch, and to another order of events. In the stratifications of history its place is far lower down. It is a part of what forms a distinct and more primitive stratum. Again, for the purpose of making my meaning distinct, I will say that it belonged to a series of events which took place 15,000 years ago. The peoples and civilization of Europe, as they now exist, are to be traced back to the first-mentioned of these two world-movements. To that which preceded it may possibly be referred some fragments of a previous condition of things in Europe which have been enigmas to historians and ethnologists, as the Etruscans, the Finns, the Laps, and the Basques. The Egyptians may have been a part of that first original wave coming down freely of their own accord into Egypt. Or they may have been driven out of Persia, or from the banks of the Indus, at the epoch of the rise and outflow of the second wave. At all events, this is clear, that they were no part of the second wave itself; because their language was older than the Aryan tongue of that epoch. And if, as appears probable, it was also older than that of the Semitic peoples, they, too, must have come into being after the Egyptians.

EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD.

Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt.--VIRGIL.

Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While nature had separated it from other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on the hint. Their general policy was to seclude themselves, to which, however, their history contains some conspicuous exceptions; and to exclude foreigners; which policy, however, they, ultimately, completely reversed in the reign of Psammetichus, as the Japanese have done in our own day; and from the same motives. They carried the mechanical arts, and all that ministers to material well-being, to a high degree of perfection. Like the Japanese, they did this with what they could win from nature within the boundaries of their own country, and under what we are disposed to regard as very crippling disadvantages. Though, indeed, in respect of absolute independence in the origination of characteristic trains of thought, and of inventions, Japan, on account of the connexion of its early civilization with that of China, is estopped from entering the lists against Egypt. The moral sentiments of the Egyptians, and their social and domestic life, were entirely their own: the results of the working of their own ideas. It is this originality that makes them so interesting and instructive a study of human development. All their customs, and all that they did, were devised by themselves to meet their own especial wants. They were self-contained, and confident in themselves that they would always be able to find out both what would be best for them to do, and what would be the best way of doing it.

Their success justified this self-reliance. All the ordinary, and many of the more refined wants of man, were supplied so abundantly, and in so regular and well-ordered a fashion among them, that a modern traveller would find no discomfort, and much to wonder at and admire, in a year or two spent in such a country as was the Egypt of Rameses the Great. He would, indeed, be a very great gainer if he could find the Egypt of to-day just what Egypt was three thousand years ago.

There are no other moderately-sized countries in the world so well prepared by nature for a system of isolation, and self-dependence, as Japan and Egypt. On a large scale China and the United States possess the same advantage.

The action of free trade is to place all countries--even those that may be able to produce but one commodity the world wants, be it wool or labour, gold or iron, or even the power of becoming carriers for others--on the same footing of abundance as the most bountifully supplied, but at the cost of self-dependence, which, in its highest degree, means complete isolation. Free trade equalizes advantages, making the advantage of each the advantage of all. It does for the world on a large scale what the free interchange of no inconsiderable variety of domestic products did on a small scale for old Japan of the modern, and for old Egypt of the ancient, world.

With respect to the common arts of everyday life, I think general opinion is somewhat in error, in the direction of being unduly disparaging, as to the state in which they were throughout the East, and on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, at the period which precedes the first glimmerings of history. I believe that the knowledge of these arts was throughout that large area spread very generally. Man has no real tradition of the discovery of these arts any more than he has of the acquisition of the domestic animals, and of the most useful of the kinds of grain and of fruits he cultivates. What is to the credit of the Egyptians is, that they carried the practice of them to a high degree of perfection, and rendered them singularly fruitful, and that they added to them much which circumstances made it impossible they could have borrowed from any other people. Everything done in Egypt was invested with an Egyptian, just as everything done in Japan has been with a Japanese, character.

BACKSHEESH.--THE GIRL OF BETHANY.

And who will say 'tis wrong?--J. BAILLIE.

One meets few travellers in Egypt who do not speak of the incessant demands for backsheesh as an annoyance, and a nuisance. The word has become as irritating to their temper as a mosquito-bite is to their skin; and it is quite as inevitable. You engage a boat, a porter, a donkey: in each case you pay two, or three times as much as you ought; and in each case the hand that has received your overpayment is again instantly held out for backsheesh. While on the Nile I gave one morning a cigar to the reis of the boat. On walking away I heard his step behind me. I turned back, and found that he was following me to ask for backsheesh. I suppose what passed in his mind was, either that I had discovered in him some merit that entitled him to backsheesh, or that one who was rich enough, and weak enough, to give a cigar, without any provocation, would give even money to one who asked for it. A friend of mine rode over a little boy. The urchin, as he lay upon the ground writhing with pain, and incapable of rising, held up his hand, crying out, "I die now, give backsheesh!" An English surgeon sees a man fall, and break his arm. He goes to his assistance, and sets the broken limb. The man asks for backsheesh. If the wayfarer who, as he was journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho, had fallen among thieves, had been an Egyptian, he would, while the good Samaritan was taking leave of him, have addressed to him the same request. An Arab helps you up to the top of the Pyramid. You pay him handsomely, and he is satisfied. You enter into conversation with him, and he tells you that he is the Hakem of his village; that he possesses so many sheep, so many goats, so many asses, so many camels; that the wife he married last, now two years ago, is thirteen years old. You look upon him as a rich man, but, while the thought is forming itself in your mind, he holds out his hand, and asks for backsheesh.

There is, however, nothing in such requests that need cause annoyance, or irritation. These children--whether, or not, grown up, for they never arrive at mental manhood--have nothing in their minds corresponding to our ideas of pride, whether aristocratic, or republican, of a kind that might dispose them to regard such petitions as humiliating. What pride they have is that of race and of religion, which suggests to them the thought that to get money in this way is only a justifiable spoiling of the unbelieving stranger. They look, too, upon you as quite inexhaustibly rich, while they are themselves, generally, very poor. And if you are satisfied with their services--and they certainly always endeavour to do their best; or if you have any good-will towards them, with which they credit you; how is this satisfaction, or good-will, to be shown? It is ridiculous to suppose that words will suffice. There is but one thing to do, that is to give a little backsheesh. This rational way of settling the matter is the way of the East. And of old, too, we know that "the little present" figured largely in the manners and customs of that part of the world.

In Egypt, then, to blaze up with indignation at the sight of a hand held out towards you, is to misunderstand the people you are among. Moreover, indignation, whatever may be the prompting cause, is very un-Egyptian. I never met with one who had seen a native lose his temper, under any circumstances, or under any amount of provocation. You may abuse him; you may even beat him; but he still smiles, and is still ready to serve you. In this way he soon makes you feel that you are in the wrong. One cannot be angry with such people.

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