modern to be important out of towns on the seaboard, the combined influences of European captives, at Salee, Tangiers, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Bengazi, and other privateering principalities; which circumstances, in the maritime cities, have blended every type of man that could be kidnapped around the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and Eastern Atlantic, by Barbary pirates. [As an illustration - Mr. Gliddon tells us, that, in 1830, just after the French conquest of Algiers, the hold of a Syrian brig, in which he sailed from Alexandria to Sidon, was occupied by one wealthy Algerine family, fleeing from Gallic heresies to Arabian Islàm, anywhere. Exclusive of servants and slaves, there were at least fifty adults and minors, under the control of a patriarchal grand or great-grandfather. Of course, our informant saw none of the grown-up females unveiled; but, while the patriarch and some of the sons were of the purest white complexion, their various children presented every hue, and every physical diversity, from the highest Circassian to a Guinea-Negro. In this case, no Arabic interpreter being needed, it was found that each individual of the worthy corsair's family, unprejudiced in all things, save hatred towards Christendom in general and Frenchmen in particular, had merely chosen females irrespectively of color, race, or creed.-J. C. N.] HODGSON States "The Tuarycks are a white people, of the Berber race. . . . The Mozabicks are a remarkably white people, and are mixed with Bedouin Arabs. . . . The Wadreagans and Wurgelans are of a dark bronze, with woolly hair. . . are certainly not pure Caucasian, like the Berber race in general. . . . There is every probability that the Kushites, Amalekites, and Kahtanites, or Beni-Yoktàn Arabs, had, in obscure ages, sent forward tribes into Africa. But the first historic proof of emigration of the Aramean or Shemitic race into this region is that of the Canaanites of Tyre and of Palestine. This great commercial people settled Carthage, and pushed their traders to the Pillars of Hercules." 248 Upon these various branches of a supposed common stock, there have been engrafted some shoots of foreign origin; for, amidst a uniformity of language, there exist extraordinary differences of color and of physical traits at the same time, are we sure of this alleged uniformity of speech itself? Now, we repeat, history affords no wellattested example of a language outliving a clearly-defined physical type; and, in a preceding chapter, we fully instanced how the Jews, scattered for 2000 years over all climates of the earth, have adopted the language of every nation among whom they sojourn - thus affording one undeniable proof of our assertion, not to mention many others one might draw from less historical races. Mr. Hodgson is a strenuous advocate of an extreme antiquity for the Berbers, or Libyans: "Their history is yet to be investigated and written. I yet maintain the opinion advanced some years ago, that these people were the terræ geniti— the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt, prior to the historic or monumental era, and before the Mizraimites and their descendants, the Copts." 249 In our Part II., these skilful inferences are singularly reconciled with the monuments and history, and from an altogether different point of view. When we remember how, in Hebrew personifications, MIZRAIM was the grandson of NOAH, and how Lepsius traces the Egyptian Empire back nearly 4000 years before Christ, a claim of such antiquity for the Berbers is certainly a high one, although, according to our belief, not extravagant; for we regard the Berbers as a primitive type, and therefore as old as any men of our geological period. Hodgson confirms his statement, by abundant proofs, that "the grammatical structure of the Berber dialects is everywhere the same;" and, in allusion to the affinities among these languages, avers: "Yet, with all this identity of a peculiar class of words and similarity of some inflections, adjunct particles, and formations the three most ancient and historical languages, Arabic, Berber, and Coptic, are essentially distinct.” With perfect propriety, our friend might have added the Chinese speech, which is equally peculiar, and can be traced monumentally farther back than either the Arabic or the Berber-if not, certainly, so far as that ante-monumental tongue which is prototype of the Coptic. It seems to us, that no one can read PAUTHIER's several works on Chinese history, language, and literature, without coinciding in this opinion; and every one can verify that the languages of America, according to GALLATIN, DUPONCEAU, and other qualified judges, are radically distinct from every tongue, ancient or modern, of the Old Continent. Our ethnological sweep over the African Continent, from the Cape of Good Hope northwards to the Nubias on the right hand, and to Barbary on the left, incomplete as it is—wearisome, to many readers, as it may be-has brought us to the confines of Egypt. In that most ancient of historical lands we propose to halt, for a season; devoting the next chapter to its study. But, by way of succinct recapitulation of some results we think the present chapter has elicited, we would inquire of the candid reader, whether, at the present moment, the human races indigenous to Africa do not present themselves, on a map, so to say, in layers? Whether the most southern of its inhabitants, the Hottentots and Bushmen, are not the lowest types of humanity therein found? And lastly, whether, in the ratio of our progress towards the Mediterranean, passing successively through the Caffre, the Negro, and the Foolah populations, to the Abyssinian and Nubian races on the east, and to the Atalantic Berber races on the west, we have not beheld the Types of Mankind rising, almost continuously, higher and higher in the scale of physical and intellectual gradations? Such are the phenomena. Climate, most certainly, does not explain them; nor will any student of Natural History sustain that each type of man in Africa is not essentially homogeneous with the fauna and the flora of the special province wherein his species now dwells. Two questions arise:-1st, Within human record, has it not always been thus? and 2d, Do the Egyptians, northernmost inhabitants of Africa, obey the same geographical law of physical, and consequently of mental and moral, progression? Our succeeding chapters may suggest, to the reflective mind, some data through which both interrogatories can be answered. CHAPTER VII. EGYPT AND EGYPTIANS. OUR survey of African races, so far, has been rapid and imperfect, but still we hope it is sufficiently full to develop our idea of gradation in the inhabitants of that great continent. A more copious analysis would have surpassed our limits, while becoming unnecessarily tedious to the reader. Prichard has devoted a goodly octavo of his "Physical History" to these races alone; whereas we can afford but a few pages. We now approach Egypt, the last geographical link in African Ethnology. She has ever been regarded as the mother of arts and sciences; and, strange as it may seem, Science now appeals to her to settle questions in the Natural History of Man, mooted since the days of Herodotus, the father of our historians. When we cast a retrospect through the long and dreary vista of years, which leads to the unknown epoch of Man's creation, in quest of a point of departure where we can obtain the first historical glimpse of a human being on our globe, the Archæologist is compelled to turn to the monuments of the Nile. The records of India cannot any longer be traced even to the time of Moses. Hebrew chronicles, beyond Abraham, present no stand-point on which we can rely; whilst their highest pretension to antiquity falls short by 2000 years of the foundation of the Egyptian Empire. The Chinese, according to their own historians, do not carry their true historic period beyond 2637 years before Christ. Nineveh and Babylon, monumentally speaking, are still more modern. But, Egypt's proud pyramids, if we are to believe the Champollion-school, elevate us at least 1000 years above every other nationality. And, what is more remarkable, when Egypt first presents herself to our view, she stands forth not in childhood, but with the maturity of manhood's age, arrayed in the time-worn habiliments of civilization. Her tombs, her temples, her pyramids, her manners, customs, and arts, all betoken a full-grown nation. The sculptures of the IVth dynasty, the earliest extant, show that the arts at that day, some 3500 B. c., had already arrived at a perfection little inferior to that of the XVIIIth dynasty, which, until the last five years, was regarded as her Augustan age. Egyptian monuments, considered ethnologically, are not only inestimable as presenting us two types of mankind at this early period, but they display other contemporary races equally marked thus affording proof that humanity, in its infinite varieties, has existed much longer upon earth than we have been taught; and that physical causes have not, and cannot transform races from one type into another. Among former objections against the antiquity of Egyptian monuments, it has been urged, that such numerous centuries could not have elapsed with so little change in people, arts, customs, language, and other conditions. This adverse charge, however, does not in itself hold good, because the fixedness of civilization, or veneration for the customs of ancestors, seems to be an inherent characteristic of Eastern nations. Through the extensive portion of Egyptian history which is now known with sufficient certainty, we may admit a comparative adhesion to fixed formulæ, and an indisposition to change: but no Egyptologist will deny that, during nearly 6000 years, for which monuments are extant, the developing mutations in Egyptian economy obeyed the same laws as in that of other raceswith this signal advantage in the former's favor, that we possess an almost unbroken chain of coetaneous records for each progressive step. Oriental history anteceding Christian ages (when viewed through the eye-glasses of pedagogues who rank among CARLyle's "doleful creatures,") looms monstrously, like a chaotic blur, precisely where archæology, using mere naked eyes, has long espied most luminous stratifications: and human developments, requiring "chiliads of years," even yet are popularly restricted to the action of one patriarchal lifetime. For ourselves, referring to the works of the hierologists for explanation, we would readily join issue with objectors upon the following heads: 5th. ZOOLOGY-No horses, camels, or common fowls, 6th. ARTS-No chariots, Egyptian developments down to the developed, in the Coptic, to 31 letters. then, gradually, knowledge as extensive as then, every animal known to Aristotle. ....................... then, all vehicles generally used by the ancients. 7th. SCIENCES-No bitumenized mummies,. then, every form, with many kinds of foreign XIIth dynasty — Arabians, Libyans, Nubians, Negroes. XVIIIth dynasty - Canaanites, Jews, Phoenicians, Assyrians, And, thence to Oriental mankind, as known to the Greeks in ALEXANDER's day. We might extend this mnemonical list through many other departments of knowledge; but, until these positive instances of development be overthrown, let us hear no more fables about "stationary Egyptians." It was, however, only through alien rule, introduced in later times by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks, that all old habits were uprooted. Look at India and China; which countries, according to popular superstitions, seem to have been stereotyped some three or four thousand years ago: yet, what enormous changes does not the historian behold in them! Nevertheless, every type is more or less tenacious of its habits; and we might cite how the Arabs, the Turks, and, still more, the Jews, now scattered throughout all nations of the earth, cling to the customs of their several ancestries: but, as we are merely suggesting a few topics for the reader's meditation, let us inquire, what was the type of that Ancient Egyptian race which linked Africa with Asia? This interrogatory has given rise to endless discussions, nor can it, even now, be regarded as absolutely answered. For many centuries prior to the present, as readers of ROLLIN and of VOLNEY may remember, the Egyptians were reputed to be Negroes, and Egyptian civilization was believed to have descended the Nile from Ethiopia! Champollion, Rosellini, and others, while unanimous in overthrowing the former, to a great extent consecrated the latter of these errors, which could hardly be considered as fully refuted |