Volume I Part 5 (1/2)

The Delta had, in fact, existed long before the appearance of Menes, and perhaps it yptian race first appeared in the valley of the Nile[45]

[44] HERODOTUS, ii 4

[45] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, pp 6 and 7 In such general explanations as are unavoidable we shall content ourselves with paraphrasing M Maspero

As to the origin of that race, we need not enter at length into a question so purely ethnographical It is now generally allowed that they were connected with the white races of Europe and Western Asia; the anatomical examination of the bodies recovered from the most ancient tombs, and the study of their statues, bas-reliefs, and pictures, all point to this conclusion If we take away individual peculiarities thesecommon type of the race even in the yptian was tall, thin, active He had large and powerful shoulders,[46] aand nervous hands, narrow hips, and thin s His knees and calves were nervous and enerally the case with a pedestrian race; his feet were long, thin, and flattened, by his habit of going barefoot The head, often too large and powerful for the body, was mild, and even sad in its expression His forehead was square and perhaps a little low, his nose short and round; his eyes were large and well opened, his cheeks full and round, his lips thick but not turned out like a negro's; his rather large mouth bore an habitually soft and sorrowful expression These features are to be found in most of the statues of the ancient and middle empires, and in all the later epochs Even to the present day the peasants, or _fellahs_, have alnoh the upper classes have lost it by repeated interers”[47]

[46] Their exceptional breadth of shoulder has been confirmed by an examination of the skeletons in the mummies See on this subject a curious note in BONOMI's _Soyptian Muy_, vol iv pp 251-253)

[47] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p 16

When Mariette discovered in the necropolis at Me in his hand the baton of authority, the peasants of Sakkarah recognised at once the feature and attitude of one of theed the _corvees_ and apportioned the taxation An astonished fellah cried out: ”The Sheikh-el-Beled!” His companions took up the cry, and the statue has been known by that name ever since[48]

[48] _Notice des principaux Monuments exposes dans les Galeries provisoires du Musee d' Antiquites egyptiennes de S A le Vice-Roi, a Boulaq_ (1876), No 492 The actual statue holds the _baton_ in its left hand

Increased knowledge of the Egyptian language has enabled us to carry our researches much farther than Champollion and his successors By many of its roots, by its system of pronouns, by its nouns of nuations, it seees Soyptian in a rudiyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated frorammatical system was still in course of formation Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common

There would thus seeyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the tiinal physiogno to the proto-Semitic races

[Illustration: FIG 6--Statue from the Ancient Empire, in calcareous stone (Boulak[49]) Drawn by G Benedite]

[49] _Notice des principaux Monuments exposes dans les Galeries provisoires du Musee d' Antiquites egyptiennes de S A le Vice-Roi, a Boulaq_ (1876), p 582 With the exception of a feoodcuts froraphs the contents of the s by M J Bourgoin

The Boulak Museum will be referred to by the simple word Boulak

The reproductions of objects in the Louvre are all from the pencil of M Saint-Elme Gautier

This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM

Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by M Maspero[50] But other critics of equal authority are more impressed by the differences than by the resemblances, which, however, they neither deny nor explain M Renan prefers to rank the Copts, the Tuaregs, and the Berbers in a family which he would call Chamitic, and to which he would refer most of the idioes is, then, insufficient to decide the question of origin

[50] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p 17

[51] _Histoire des Langues semitiques_, Book i ch ii -- 4

[Illustration: FIG 7--The _Sheikh-el-Beled_ (Boulak) Drawn by J

Bourgoin]

The people whose physical characteristics we have described and whose idiom we have defined, came from Asia, to all appearance, by the Isthmus of Suez Perhaps they found established on the banks of the Nile another race, probably black, and indigenous to the African continent[52] If this were so the new comers forced the earlier occupants of the country southwards withoutwith them, and set theypt ht from its richness and fertility of to-day The river when left to itself, was perpetually changing its bed, and even in its highest floods it failed to reach certain parts of the valley, which re that it changed the soil into swamp The Delta, half of it drowned in the waters of the Nile, the other half under those of the Mediterranean, was siewith papyrus, reeds, and lotus, across which the river worked its sluggish and uncertain way; upon both banks the desert sed up all the soil left untouched by the yearly inundations Froetation of a tropical marsh to the most absolute aridity was but a step Little by little the new comers learnt to control the course of the floods, to bank them in and to carry theradually arose out of the waters and became in the hand of man one of the best adapted countries in the world for the developreat civilization[53]

[52] See LEPSIUS, _Ueber die Annahypten_ (in the _Zeitschrift fur aegyptische Sprache_, 1870, p 113, et seq)

[53] MASPERO, p 18

How enerations did it require to create the country and the nation? We cannot tell But we may affirm that a commencement was made by the simultaneous establishment at several different points of small independent states, each of which had its os and its own fored in number and in their respective boundaries almost up to the end of the ancient world Their union under one sceptre fordom of the Pharaohs, the country of Khemi, but their primitive divisions did not therefore disappear; the small independent states became provinces and were the foundation of those local administrative districts which the Greeks called _no in the Marshes; from a bas-relief in the toyptians had one other, and only one--the division into Lower Egypt, or the North Country (_Toypt, or the South Country (_To-res_) Lower Egypt consisted of the Delta; Upper Egypt stretched from the southernmost point of the Delta to the first cataract This division has the advantage of corresponding exactly to the configuration of the country; moreover, it preserves the ypt was divided into two separate kingdoms--that of the North and that of the South, a division which in later times had often a decisive influence upon the course of events This state of things was of sufficiently long duration to leave an ineffaceable trace upon the official language of Egypt, and upon that which we ns who united the whole territory under one sceptre are always called, in the royal protocols, the lords of Upper and Lower Egypt; they carry on their heads two crowns, each appropriate to one of the two great divisions of their united kingdoists as the White crown, because of the colour which it bears upon painted monuments; that of the North is called the red crown, for a similar reason Coal head-dress ordinarily called the pschent In the hieroglyphics Northern Egypt is indicated by the papyrus; Southern by the lotus