"DEAR MORTON:

......

"This is the fourth day I have been in the land of the Pharaohs. . . . . . . Well, now for the Egyptian problem.

"Your October letter is now before me, and the left-hand drawing bears a most astonishing resemblance to my long-legged valet, Ali! (whom I intend to get daguerreotyped, if such a thing can be found at Cairo). The Robber Race has swept away everything at Alexandria; - nevertheless, by means of a specimen here and there, I had not been three hours in the 'country before I arrived at the conclusion, that the ancient Egyptians were neither Malays nor Hindoos, but

Egyptians....

Yours, truly,

"CHARLES PICKERING."

So inferred CHAMPOLLION-LE-JEUNE; 303 so pronounced MORTON, after a formal recantation of his published views; so, finally and deliberately, think the authors of this volume; viz.: that the primitive Egyptians were nothing more nor less than -EGYPTIANS.

Objectors must restrict themselves henceforward merely to cavils as to the antiquity of these Egyptian records. In Part III. their claims to reverence are superabundantly set forth. For ourselves we are content to rest the chronological case upon the authority of Baron ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT:

"The valley of the Nile, which has occupied so distinguished a place in the history of Man, yet preserves authentic portraits of kings as far back as the commencement of the IVth dynasty of Manetho. This dynasty, which embraces the constructors of the great pyramids of Ghiza, Chefren or Schafra, Cheops, Choufou, and Menkara or Menkerés, commences more than 3400 years B. C., and twenty-four centuries before the invasion of Peloponnesus by the Heraclides." 304

CHAPTER VIII.

NEGRO TYPES.

"When the prophet Jeremiah 305 exclaims, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?' he certainly means us to infer that the one was as impossible as the other."- MORTON'S MSS.

"Niger in die (quodam) exuit vestes suas, incepitque capere nivem et fricare cum ea corpus suum. Dictum autem ei fuit: quare fricas corpus tuum nive? Et dixit (ille): fortasse albescam. Venitque vir (quidam) sapiens, (qui) dixit ei: O tu, ne afflige te ipsum; fieri enim potest, ut corpus tuum nigram faciat nivem, ipsum autem non amittet nigredinem."- LOCMANI FABULA XXIII: translated from the Arabic by Rosenmüller.306

HAD every nation of antiquity emulated Egypt, and perpetuated the portraits of its own people with a chisel, it would now be evident to the reader that each type of mankind, in all zoological centres of man's creation, is by nature as indelibly permanent as the stonepages upon which Egyptians, Chinese, Assyrians, Lycians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Meroïtes, Hindoos, Peruvians, Mexicans, (to say naught of other races,) have cut their several iconographies. How instantaneously would vanish pending disputes about the Unity or the Diversity of human origins!

Contenting ourselves at present with the now-acquired fact, that the Egyptians, according to monumental and craniological evidences, no less than to all history, written or traditionary, were really autocthones of the Lower Nile, we think the question as to their "type" has been satisfactorily answered. In reply, furthermore, to our previous interrogatory, whether this ancient family obeyed the same law of "gradation" established for other African aborigines; we may now observe, that the Egyptians, astride as it were upon the narrow isthmus which unites the once-separate continents of Africa and Asia, figure, when the Aurora of human tradition first breaks, as at one and the same time, the highest among African, and (physiologically, if not perhaps intellectually) as the lowest type in West-Asiatic gradations. Were we to prosecute our imaginary journey northwards, the dark Cushite-Arabs would naturally constitute the next grade, and the ancient Canaanites probably the one immediately succeeding. The primitive group of Semitic nations would be found to have aboriginally occupied geographical levels commencing with Mount Lebanon and rising gradually in physical characters as we ascend the Tauric

chain-passing, almost insensibly, into the Japethic or whitest races (also possessing their own gradations), until the highest types of prehistoric humanity would reveal their birth-places around the Caucasus.

But, dealing mainly with the Natural History of Man, elucidated through new archæological data, the scope of our work permits no geographical digressions beyond the Caucasian mountains. We have already insisted that the term "Caucasian" is a misnomer, productive of infinite embarrassments in anthropology; because a name in itself specifically restricted, since the times of Herodotus, to one locality and to one people, has become misapplied generically to types of mankind whose origins have no more to do with the mountains of Caucasus than with those of the moon. Would it not be ridiculous to take, for example, the name "Englander" (a compound of Angl and land-"man of the land of the Angli"), and to classify under such an appellative, Hebrews, Egyptians, Hindoos, &c.? That “Caucasian" is equally fallacious, will be made clear to the reader, in Part II., under the article on MaGUG; but we anticipate a portion of the philological argument by mentioning, that the Hellenized name CAUC-ASOS means simply the "Mountain of the Asi;" being the Indo-Germanic word Khogh, signifying "mountain," prefixed to the proper name of a nation and a race: viz., the Aas, Asi, Jases, Osseth, or Osses; who, dwelling even yet at the foot of that CAUC-ASOS where, from immemorial time, their ancestors lived before them, would be astonished to learn that European geographers had bestowed their national name upon the whole continent of Asia, and that modern ethnologists actually derive a dozen groups of distinct human animals from the mountain ("Khogh") of which such Asi are aborigines!

FIG. 162.

307

Turning our backs upon the Caucasus, and retracing our steps toward Africa, let us incidentally notice the recognition by ante-Mosaic Egyptian, and by post-Mosaic Hebrew, ethnographers, of the general principle of gradation among such types of mankind as lay within the horizons of their respective geographical knowledge. The Egyptians, for instance, in their quadripartite division of races, already explained (ante, p. 85, Fig. 1), assigned the most northerly habitat to the "white race," of which we here reproduce the standard type (Fig. 162) — one of the four designed in the tomb of Seti I., about 1500 B. c. Precisely does the writer of Xth Genesis, as set forth elaborately in Part II., follow the same

system, in his tripartite division; inasmuch as he groups the "Affiliations of JAPHETH," that is, his "white races," between the Tauric chain of mountains and the Caucasian, along and within the northern coast of Asia Minor to the Black Sea.

FIG. 163.

Yellow races- -SHEM.

So, again, Egyptian ethnography chose, for the standard-type of "yellow races," four effigies which entirely correspond, in every desideratum of locality, color, and physical conformation, with those families classified, in Xth Genesis, as the "Affiliations of SHEM;" and like the Hebrew geographer, the Theban artist must have known, that the yellow, or Semitic, groups of men occupied countries immediately south of the "white races," and stretching from the Taurus to the Isthmus of Suez, including the riverlands of the Tigris and Euphrates, together with the Arabian Peninsula.

The specimen illustrative of these groups of yellow-skinned races here presented in Fig. 163, is also, like the following (Figs. 164, 165), a reproduction from the four figures before shown on page 85.

Equally parallel is the Jewish classification, in respect to the " Affiliations of HAM" (Fig. 164), with those "red races" among which the

FIG. 164.

A

Swarthy (or red) races—
НАМ.

Egyptians placed the RoT, or themselves. To the latter, KhaM was nothing but the hieroglyphical name of Egypt proper; KheMe, or KhiMe, "the dark land" of the Nile; corrupted by the Greeks into "Chemmis" and "Chemia," and by us preserved in such words as "chem-istry" and "al-chem-y," both Egyptian sciences; while, in Hebrew geography, KhaM, signifying dark, or swarthy, merely meant all those non-Shemitish families which, under the especial cognomina of Cushites, Canaanites, Mizraimites, Libyans, Berbers, and so forth, formed that group of proximate types situate, aboriginally, east and west of the Nile, and along its banks north of the first cataract at Syene. Our wood-cut illustrates the Egyptian standard-type of these populations.

But here the analogy between the earlier Egyptian and the posterior Hebrew systems ceases. Nigritian races, never domiciled nearer to Palestine than 1500 miles to the south-westward, did not enter into the social

FIG. 165.

economy of the Solomonic Jews, any more than into that of the Homeric Greeks; and, if not perhaps absolutely unknown, Negroes were then as foreign to, and remote from, either nation's geography, as the Samoïdans or the Tungousians are to our popular notions of the earth's inhabitants at the present day. In consequence, (as it is thoroughly demonstrated in Part II.), the writer of Xth Genesis omits Negro races altogether, from his tripartite classification of humanity under the symbolical appellatives of "Shem, Ham, and Japheth;" whereas the Egyptians of the XIXth dynasty, about 1500 years B. C., having become acquainted with the existence of Negroes some eight centuries previously (when Sesourtasen I., of the XIIth dynasty, about B. c. 2300, pushed his conquests into Upper Nubia), could not fail to include this fourth type of man in their ethnological system; because the river Nile was the most direct viaduct through which the Soodàn, Negro-land, could be reached, or Negro captives procured.

Black races.

With this preliminary basis, calling attention to the effigy (Fig. 165) by which they personified Negroes generally, we proceed to draw from the . ancient stone-books of Egypt such testimonies concerning the permanence of type among Nigritian races as they may be found to contain.

FIG. 166.

Our Negro (Fig. 166) is from the bas-reliefs of Ramses III. (XXth dynasty, thirteen centuries B. c.), at Medeenet-Haboo, where he is tied by the neck to an Asiatic prisoner. The head, in the original, is now uncolored; and it serves to show how perfectly Egyptian artists represented these races.308 We quote from Gliddon's Ethnographic Notes, before referred to: "This head is remarkable, furthermore, as the usual type of two-thirds of the Negroes in Egypt at the present day." And any one living in our Slave-States will see in this face a type which is frequently met with here. We thus obtain proof that the Negro has remained unchanged in Africa, above Egypt, for 3000 years; coupled