duced by it. The verbs and adjectives were, many of them, (probably all, for the subject is still under investigation,) the names of objects, animate or inanimate, suggesting the peculiarities of their appearance and habits; as a cameleopard, to be long, to extend; a wolf, to be cunning; a scarlet ibis, to be red. To this extent all was picture in the language as well as in the writing. It also consists of comparatively a small number of sounds; the same sound expressing many different ideas; probably because different qualities of the same animal were thus variously employed. So that it seems scarcely possible to arrive at any other conclusion than that the language and writing arose together.

But we have observed the same intimate union between the writing and the idolatrous system of this singular people, and shown the probability, we might perhaps say certainty, that it also was invented together with the writing, and therefore with the language. Yet are all the three, as we have seen, systems of great intricacy and refinement. These are also facts, resulting from the recent researches into the antiquities of Egypt. And how, we ask again, are these strange anomalies to be reconciled? A generation of men highly cultivated, possessed of great mental powers, yet without religion, writing, or even language! It is contrary to all experience that a civilized state of society should exist without religion: it is equally opposed to all analogy to assume that men may be civilized without writing; but without language, civilization is plainly impossible. There are traces, nevertheless, of much thought and reflection in the construction of the language, writing, and religion of ancient Egypt, and the three appear to have arisen together. Its inventors, therefore, must have acquired the mental culture

174 which enabled them to construct these systems by the help of some other language, at any rate. How came they then to lose this language? We leave to those who deny or lightly esteem the revelation of God, the suggestion of any theory they can devise whereby to answer the question. Those who reason rightly upon it, who follow the process of close induction by which the mode of reading hieroglyphics was discovered, will scarcely fail to perceive the conclusive and satisfactory nature of the answer which is afforded by that revelation. The language of the first settlers in Egypt had been miraculously confounded, and in that melancholy condition they had to frame for themselves a new language and system of writing.

TRACES OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF EGYPT.

CHAPTER IX.

THE MONUMENTAL HISTORY OF EGYPT.

PART I.

THUS far the absolute necessity of the inspired history to explain and reconcile the facts which our examination of the antiquities of Egypt has elicited, is sufficiently apparent. The monumental traces of the first migration of the children of Mizraim into Egypt also fully coincide with the account which is recorded in the Bible.

It is much to be regretted that upon the point which first requires attention, a conclusion entirely opposed to this account has been, nevertheless, very hastily admitted by certain authors, whose laborious researches in this intricate subject are otherwise well entitled to our praises. Some of them belong to a school of which it is not too much to say that their credulity as to every thing in the Greek authors is only equalled by their incredulity as to the Bible.

With them that which is narrated by Herodotus, or Diodorus Siculus, is a fact, unless the monuments prove it to be a falsehood; while that which has no authority but the Bible is deemed untrue, and unworthy of notice, unless the monuments, or the historians, or both, prove it to be a fact. So that on no other authority than that of Diodorus, it is assumed and reasoned upon as an admitted fact, that

Egypt was first peopled from Ethiopia Proper; that is, from the countries to the south of it: the circumstance that the land of Cush to the east of it was also named Ethiopia, and that the confusion of the two is not uncommon in the Greek writers, being entirely disregarded. It is, however, still more extraordinary, that these authors should also disregard the monumental facts which have been brought to light by their own researches, and which flatly contradict their strange assumption. If the testimony of the monuments is to be admitted, Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia, cannot have been the cradle of Thebes; and the powerful nation of Ethiopians, living under a civil and religious system identical with that of Egypt long before this latter country was inhabited, and afterwards colonizing it, must be a fable: for no very early monuments exist in Ethiopia ; the most ancient of them having been erected by monarchs, of the 18th dynasty of the kings of Egypt, who reigned long after it had become a settled kingdom. The inscriptions on them also plainly intimate that Ethiopia was then a province or dependency of Egypt; and that it continued to be so apparently until the reign of Psammetichus, about 500 B. C. This is all the support that the monuments of Ethiopia afford to this assumption. If we consider those of Egypt, also, with a view to the same subject, the first fact that occurs to us is equally opposed to it. The pyramids which, by the unanimous tradition of the Egyptian priests, as recorded by all the Greek authors, were the oldest of their monuments, are not in the neighbourhood of Thebes, but of Memphis, just on the crown of the Delta, on the east bank of the Nile; that is, on the first spot of habitable ground at which travellers migrating

across the isthmus of Suez would arrive when the Delta was a marsh.

The history of Egypt is by no means exempt from the chronological difficulties that beset the early records of all other nations. As this subject is still under investigation, and as new facts are continually produced respecting it, we content ourselves with a general indication of the various sources, both in the ancient authors, and on the existing monuments, whence the materials for a more accurate arrangement have been derived, and the very satisfactory results which have already been obtained from the examination of them.

Two ancient authorities have given lists of the dynasties or races of the kings of Egypt. One list is preserved by George Syncellus, a chronological writer of the eighth century, under the name of the Old Chronicle: the other is the work of Manetho, a priest of Sebennytus, a city of Egypt, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about 180 B. C. By the command of that monarch, he translated into Greek the annals of the ancient kings his predecessors as they then existed on the walls of temples and other monumental records of their actions. His work was divided into three volumes, or parts. It is now lost; but extracts from it have been preserved in the writings of Josephus and Eusebius.

Several extracts from the history of Egypt are also preserved by Herodotus and Diodorus: but as they have merely noted the circumstances which they conceived to be interesting, not even following the chronological order of the succession, the facts they have recorded can only be made available as history by the help of the lists of Manetho. Many extraordinary and unexpected confirmations of the

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