This name reads "Snefura," which is the name of the king of the third dynasty who reigned about 4000 b.c., or before the building of the Great Pyramids, which inscription is the earliest contemporary one of an Egyptian king as yet discovered. It was found at the copper mines of Wady Magerah, in the peninsula of Sinai, and represents the victory of the king over an Arabian or Asiatic enemy. The first step towards the decipherment of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone was made in 1819 by Dr. Young, who was one of the most ingenious and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, and is also famous as the first discoverer of the undulatory theory of light. But in both cases he merely indicated the right path and laid down the correct principles. The development of his theories was reserved for two Frenchmen; Fresnel in the case of Light, and Champollion in that of Hieroglyphics. The task was one which required immense patience and ingenuity, for the hieroglyphic alphabet turned out to be one of great complexity. Not only were many of the signs not phonetic, but ideographic or determinative; and some of them standing for syllables and not letters; but the letters themselves were not represented, as in modern languages, each by a single sign or at most by two signs, as A and a, but by several different signs. The Egyptian alphabet was in fact constructed very much as young children often learn theirs, by— - A was an apple-pie,
- B bit it,
- C cut it;
with this difference, that several objects, whose names begin with A and other letters, might be used to represent them. Thus some of the hieroglyphic letters had as many as twenty-five different signs or homophones. It is as if we could write for 'a,' the picture either of an apple, or of an ass, archer, arrow, anchor, or any word beginning with 'a.' However, Champollion with infinite difficulty, and aided by the constant discovery of fresh inscriptions, solved the problem, and succeeded in producing a complete alphabet of hieroglyphics comprising all the various signs, thus enabling us to translate every hieroglyphic sign into its corresponding sound or spoken word. The next question was, what did these words mean, and could they be recognized in any known language? The answer to this was easy; the Egyptians spoke Egyptic, or as it is abbreviated Coptic, a modern form of which is almost a living language, and is preserved in translations of the Bible still in use and studied by the aid of Coptic dictionaries and grammars. This enabled Champollion to construct a hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar, which have been so completed by the labours of subsequent Egyptologists, that it is not too much to say that any inscription or manuscript in hieroglyphics can be read with nearly as much certainty as if it had been written in Greek or in Hebrew.
SPECIMEN OF HIEROGLYPHIC ALPHABET. (From Champollion's Egypt.) The above illustrations from English characters are only given as the simplest way of conveying to the minds of those who have had no previous acquaintance with the subject, an idea of the nature of the process and force of the evidence, upon which the decipherment of hieroglyphic inscriptions is based. In reality the process was far from being so simple. Though many of the hieroglyphics are phonetics, like our letters of the alphabet, they are not all so, and many of them are purely ideographic, as when we write 1, 2, 3, for one, two, and three. All writing has begun with picture-writing, and each character was originally a likeness of the object which it was wished to represent. The next stage was to use the character not only for the material object, but as a symbol for some abstract idea associated with it. Thus the picture of a lion might stand either for an actual lion, or for fierceness, courage, majesty, or other attribute of the king of animals. In this way it became possible to convey meanings to the mind through the eye, but it involved both an enormous number of characters, and the use of homophones, i.e. of single characters standing for a number of separate ideas. To obviate this, what are called "determinatives" were invented, i.e. special signs affixed to characters or groups of characters to determine the sense in which they were to be taken. For instance, the picture of a star (*) affixed to a group of hieroglyphics may be used to denote that they represent the name of a god, or some divine or heavenly attribute; and the picture of rippling water ~~~~~~~~ to show that the group means something connected with water, as a sea or river. Beyond this the Chinese have hardly gone, and it is reckoned that it requires some 1358 separate characters, or conventionalized pictures, taken in distinct groups, to be able to read and write correctly the 40,000 words in the Chinese language. Even for the ordinary purposes of life a Chinaman instead of committing to memory twenty-six letters of the alphabet, like an English child, has to learn by heart some 6000 or 7000 groups of characters often distinguished only by slight dots and dashes. Such a system is cumbrous in the extreme, and involves spending many of the best years of life in acquiring the first rudiments of knowledge. Indeed it is only possible when not only writing but speech has been arrested at the first stage of its development, and a nation speaks a language of monosyllables. In the case of Egypt and other ancient nations the standpoint of writing went further, and the symbolic pictures came to represent phonograms, i.e. sounds or spoken words instead of ideas or objects; and these again were further analyzed into syllabaries, or the component articulate sounds which make up words; and these finally into their ultimate elements of a few simple sounds, or letters of an alphabet, the various combinations of which will express all the complex sounds or words of a spoken language. Now in the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, along with those pure phonetics or letters of an alphabet, are found numerous survivals of the older systems from which they sprung, and Champollion, who first attempted the task of forming a hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar, had to contend with all the difficulties of ideograms, polyphones, determinatives, and other obstacles. Those who wish to pursue this interesting subject further will do well to read Dr. Isaac Taylor's book on the Alphabet, and Sayce on the Science of Writing; but for my present purpose it is sufficient to establish the scientific certainty of the process by which hieroglyphic texts are read. With this key a vast mass of constantly accumulating evidence has been brought to light, illustrating not only the chronology and history of ancient Egypt, but also its social and political condition, its literature and religion, science and art. The first question naturally was how far the monuments confirmed or disproved the lists of Manetho. Manetho was a learned priest of a celebrated temple, who must have had access to all the temple and royal records and other literature of Egypt, and who must have been also conversant with foreign literature, to have been selected as the best man to write a complete history of his native country for the royal library in Greek. Manetho's lists of the reigns of dynasties and kings when summed up show a date of 5867 b.c. for the foundation of the united Egyptian Empire by Menes, a date which is of course absolutely inconsistent with those given by Genesis, not only for the Deluge, but for the original Creation. It is evident that the monuments alone could confirm or contradict these lists, and give a solid basis for Egyptian chronology and history. This has now been done to such an extent that it may fairly be said that Manetho has been confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that successively and not simultaneously, so that the margin of uncertainty as to the date of Menes is reduced to one of a few hundred years on one side or other of 5000 b.c. Mariette, who is the best and latest authority, and who has done so much to discover monuments of the earlier dynasties, concludes, as the result of a careful revision of Manetho's lists, and of the authentic records from temples, tombs, and papyri, that 5004 b.c. is the most probable date for the accession of Menes, and this date is generally adopted by modern Egyptologists. Some make it rather longer, as Boeck 5702 b.c., and Unger 5613 b.c.; while others make it a little shorter, as Maspero 4500 b.c., and Brugsch[1] 4455; but it is to be observed that the date has always lengthened with the progress of discovery. Thus the earlier Egyptologists such as Wilkinson, Birch, and Poole assigned a date not exceeding 3000 b.c. for the accession of Menes; twenty years later Bunsen and Lepsius gave respectively 3623 and 3892 b.c.; and since the latest discoveries, no competent scholar assigns a lower date than 4500 b.c., while some go up to 5702 b.c., and that most generally accepted is 5004 b.c. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that about 5000 b.c., or very nearly 7000 years before the present time, may be taken provisionally as the date of the commencement of authentic Egyptian history, and that if this date be corrected by future discoveries it is more likely to be increased than diminished. This immensely long period of Egyptian history is divided into three stages—the Old, the Middle, and the New Empires. The Old Empire began with Menes, and lasted without interruption for about 1500 years, under six dynasties of kings, who ruled over the whole of Egypt. It was a period of peace, prosperity, and progress, during which the pyramids, the greatest of all human works, were built, literature flourished, and the industrial and fine arts attained a high degree of perfection. At the very commencement of this period we find the first King Menes carrying out a great work of hydraulic engineering, by which the course of the Nile was diverted, and a site obtained on its western banks for the new capital of Memphis. His immediate successor is said to have written a celebrated treatise on Medicine, and the extremely life-like portrait-statues and wooden statuettes, which were never equalled in any subsequent stage of Egyptian art, date back to the fourth dynasty.
PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH AND SPHYNX. (From Champollion's Egypt.) It is singular that this extremely ancient period is the one of which, although the oldest, we know most, for the monuments, the papyri, and especially the tombs in the great cemeteries of Sakkarah and Ghizeh, give us the fullest details of the political and social life of Egypt during the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, with sufficient information as to the three first dynasties to check and confirm the lists of Manetho. We really know the life of Memphis 6000 years ago better than we do that of London under the Saxon kings, or of Paris under the descendants of Clovis. The sixth dynasty was succeeded by a period which seems to have been one of civil war and anarchy, during which there was a complete cessation of monuments; or, if they existed, they have not yet been discovered. The probable duration of this eclipse of Egyptian records is somewhat uncertain, as we cannot be sure, in the absence of monuments, that the four dynasties of short reigns assigned to the interval between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties by Manetho, and the numerous names of unknown kings on the tablets, were successive sovereigns who reigned over united Egypt, or local chiefs who got possession of power in different parts of the Empire. All we can see is that the supremacy of Memphis declined, and that its last great dynasty was replaced, either in whole or in part, by a rebellion in Upper Egypt which introduced two dynasties whose seat was at Heracleopolis on the Middle Nile, In any case the duration of this period must have been very long, for the eclipse was very complete, and when we once more find ourselves in the presence of records in the eleventh dynasty, the seat of empire is established at Thebes, and the state of the arts, religion, and civilization are different and much ruder than they were at the close of the great Memphite Empire with the sixth dynasty. Mariette says, "When Egypt, with the eleventh dynasty, awoke from its long sleep, the ancient traditions were forgotten. The proper names of the kings and ancient nobility, the titles of the high functionaries, the style of the hieroglyphic writing, and even the religion, all seemed new. The monuments are rude, primitive, and sometimes even barbarous, and to see them one would be inclined to think that Egypt under the eleventh dynasty was beginning again the period of infancy which it had already passed through 1500 years earlier under the third." The tomb of one of these kings of the eleventh dynasty, Entef I., is remarkable as showing on a funeral pillar the sportsman-king surrounded by his four favourite dogs, whose names are given, and which are of different breeds, from a large greyhound to a small turnspit. However, the chronology of this eleventh dynasty is well attested, its kings are known, and under them Upper and Lower Egypt were once more consolidated into a single state, forming what is known as the Middle Empire. Under the twelfth dynasty, which succeeded it, this Empire bloomed rapidly into one of the greatest and most glorious periods of Egyptian history. The dynasty only lasted for 213 years, under seven kings, whose names were all either Amenemes or Osirtasen; but during their reigns the frontiers of Egypt were extended far to the south, Nubia was incorporated with the Empire, and Egyptian influence extended over the whole Soudan, and perhaps nearly to the equator on the one hand, and over Southern Syria on the other. But the dynasty was still more famous for the arts of peace. One of the greatest works of hydraulic engineering which the world has seen was carried out by Amenemes III., who took advantage of a depression in the desert limestone near the basin of Fayoum, to form a large artificial lake connected with the Nile by canals, tunnelled through rocky ridges and provided with sluices, so as to admit the water when the river rose too high, and let it out when it fell too low, and thus regulate the inundation of a great part of Middle and Lower Egypt, independently of the seasons. Connected with this Lake Moeris was the famous Labyrinth, which Herodotus pronounced to be a greater wonder than even the great Pyramid. It was a vast square building erected on a small plateau on the east side of the lake, constructed of blocks of granite which must have been brought from Syene, with a faÇade of white limestone; and containing in the interior a vast number of small square chambers and vaults—Herodotus says 3000—each roofed with a single large slab of stone, and connected by narrow passages, so intricate that a stranger entering without a clue would be infallibly lost. The object seems to have been to provide a safe repository for statues of gods and kings and other precious objects. In the centre was a court containing twelve hypostyle chapels, six facing the south and six the north, and at the north angle of the square was a pyramid of brick faced with stone forming the tomb of Amenemes III. In addition to this colossal work, the kings of this dynasty built and restored many of the most famous temples and erected statues and obelisks, among the latter the one now standing at Heliopolis. It was also an age of great literary activity, and the biographies of many of the priests, nobles, and high officers, inscribed on their tombs and recorded in papyri, give us the most minute knowledge of the history and social life of this remote period. The prosperity of Egypt during the Middle Empire was continued under the thirteenth dynasty of sixty Theban kings, to whom Manetho assigns the period of 453 years. Less is known of this period than of the great twelfth dynasty which preceded it, but a sufficient number of monuments have been preserved to confirm the general accuracy of Manetho's statements. A colossal statue of the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth king, Sevckhotef VI., found on the island of Argo near Dongola, shows that the frontier fixed by the conquests of Amenemes at Semneh, had not only been maintained, but extended nearly fifty leagues to the south into the heart of Ethiopia; and another statue found at Tanis shows that the rule of this dynasty was firmly established in Lower Egypt. But the scarcity of the monuments, and the inferior execution of the works of art, show that this long dynasty was one of gradual decline, and the rise of the next or fourteenth dynasty at Xois, transferring the seat of power from Thebes to the Delta, points to civil wars and revolutions.
FELLAH WOMAN AND HEAD OF SECOND HYKSOS STATUE. (From photograph by Naville in Harper's Magazine.)
HYKSOS SPHYNX. (From photograph by Naville in Harper's Magazine.) Manetho assigns seventy-five kings and 484 years to the fourteenth dynasty, and it is to this period that a good deal of uncertainty attaches, for there are no monuments, and nothing to confirm Manetho's lists, except a number of unknown names of kings of the dynasty enumerated among the royal ancestors in the Papyrus of Turin. If Manetho's figures are correct, the period must have been one of anarchy and civil war, for the average duration of each reign is less than six and a half years, while that of the twelfth and other well-known historical dynasties exceeds thirty years. The same remark applies to the thirteenth dynasty, the reigns of whose sixty kings average only seven and a half years each, and it is probable that the end of this dynasty and the whole of the fourteenth was a period of anarchy, during which so-called kings rose and fell in rapid succession, as in the case of our own dynasties of Lancaster and York, and the annals are so confused that the dates are unreliable. What is certain is that the great Middle Empire sank rapidly into a state of anarchy and impotence, which prepared the way for a great catastrophe. This catastrophe came in the form of an invasion of foreigners, who, about the year 2000 b.c., broke through the eastern frontier of the Delta, and apparently without much resistance, conquered the whole of Lower Egypt up to Memphis, and reduced the princes of the Upper Provinces to a state of vassalage. the princes of the Upper Provinces to a state of vassalage. There is considerable doubt who these invaders were, who were known as Hyksos or Shepherd Kings. They consisted probably, mainly of nomad tribes of Canaanites, Arabians, and other Semitic races, but the Turanian Hittites seem to have been associated with them, and the leaders to have been Turanian, judging from the portrait-statues of two of the later kings of the Hyksos dynasty which have been recently discovered by Naville at Bubastis, and which are unmistakably Turanian and even Chinese in type. Our information as to this Hyksos conquest is derived mainly from fragments of Manetho quoted by Josephus, and from traditions repeated by Herodotus, and is very vague and imperfect. But this much seems certain, that at first the Hyksos acted as savage barbarians, burning cities, demolishing temples, and massacring part of the population and reducing the rest to slavery. But, as in the parallel case of the Tartar conquest of China, as time went on they adopted the superior civilization of their subjects, and the later kings were transformed into genuine Pharaohs, differing but little from those of the old national dynasties. This is conclusively proved by the discoveries recently made at Tanis and Bubastis, which have revealed important monuments of this dynasty. At Tanis an avenue of sphynxes was discovered, copied evidently from those at Thebes and from the Great Sphynx at Gizeh, with lion bodies and human heads, the latter with a different head-dress from the Egyptian, and a different type of feature. At Bubastis two colossal statues of Hyksos kings, with their heads broken off, but one of them nearly perfect, were unexpectedly discovered by Naville in 1887, and it was proved that they had stood on each side of the entrance to an addition made by those kings to the ancient and celebrated temple of the Egyptian goddess Bast, thus proving that the Hyksos had adopted not only the civilization but also the religion of the Egyptian nation. There are but few inscriptions known of the Hyksos dynasty, for their cartouches have generally been effaced, and those of later kings chiselled over them; but enough remains to show that they were in the hieroglyphic character, and the names of two or three of their kings can still be deciphered, among which are two Apepis, the second probably the last of the dynasty. It was probably under one of these Hyksos kings that Joseph came to Egypt, and the tribes of Israel settled on its eastern frontier. The duration of the Hyksos rule is thus left in some uncertainty. Manetho, if correctly quoted by Josephus, says they ruled over Egypt for 511 years, though his lists only show one dynasty of 259 years, and then the Theban dynasty, who reigned over Upper Egypt for 260 years contemporaneously with Hyksos kings in Lower Egypt. We regain, however, firm historical ground with the rise of the eighteenth Theban dynasty of native Egyptian kings, who finally expelled the Hyksos, after a long war, and founded what is known as the New Empire. The date of this event is fixed by the best authorities at about 1750 b.c., and from this time downwards we have an uninterrupted succession of undoubted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments and by the annals of other nations, down to the Christian era. The reaction which followed the expulsion of the Hyksos led to campaigns in Asia on a great scale, in which Egypt came into collision with powerful nations, and for a long time was the dominant power in Western Asia, extending its conquests from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and receiving tribute from Babylon and Nineveh. Then followed wars, waged on more equal terms, with the Hittites, who had founded a great empire in Asia Minor and Syria; and as their power declined and that of Assyria rose, with the long series of warlike Assyrian monarchs, who gradually obtained the ascendency, and not only stripped Egypt of its foreign conquests, but on more than one occasion invaded its territory and captured its principal cities. It is during this period that we find the first of the certain synchronisms between Egyptian history and the Old Testament, beginning with the capture of Jerusalem by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam, and ending with the captivity of the Jews and temporary conquest of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar. Then came the Persian conquest by Cambyses and alternate periods of national independence and of Persian rule, until the conquest of Alexander and the establishment of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, which lasted until the reign of Cleopatra, and ended finally by the annexation of Egypt as a province of the Roman Empire. The history of this long period is extremely interesting, as showing what may be called the commencement of the modern era of great wars, and of the rise and fall of civilized empires; but for the present purpose I only refer to it as helping to establish the chronological standard which I am in search of as a measuring-rod to gauge the duration of historical time. We may sum up the conclusions derived from Manetho's lists and the monuments as follows:— Manetho's lists, as they have come down to us, show a date of 5867 years b.c. for the accession of Menes. Of this period, we may say that we know 1750 years for the New Empire and the period of the Persians and the Ptolemies, from contemporary monuments and records, with such certainty that any possible error cannot exceed fifty or one hundred years. The Hyksos period is less certain, but there is no sufficient reason for doubting that it may have lasted for about 511 years. Manetho could have had no object in overstating the duration of the rule of hated foreigners, and a long time must have elapsed before the rude invaders could have so completely adopted the civilization of the subject race. The dates of the Middle Empire, to which Manetho assigns 1241 years, are more uncertain, and we can only check them by monuments for the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties. The length of the fourteenth Xoite dynasty seems to be exaggerated, and the later obscure Theban dynasties may have been contemporary with the rule of the Hyksos in Lower Egypt. Of the 2105 years assigned to the Ancient Empire, the first 1645 from Menes to the end of the sixth dynasty are well authenticated by monuments and inscriptions, and the 460 for the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth are obscure, though a considerable time must have elapsed for such a complete eclipse of the monuments and arts as appears to have occurred between the nourishing period of the sixth dynasty and the revival of the Middle Empire under the eleventh. We may say, therefore, that we have about 4000 years of undoubted history between the accession of Menes and the Christian era, and 1600 more years for which we have only the authority of Manetho's lists, and the names of unknown kings in genealogical records, with a few scattered monuments, and to which it is difficult to assign specific dates. This may enable us to appreciate the nature of the evidence upon which Mariette and so many of the best and oldest authorities base their estimates in assigning a date of about 5000 b.c. for the accession of Menes. The glimpses of light into the prehistoric stages of Egyptian civilization prior to Menes are few and far between. We are told that before the consolidation of the Empire by Menes, Egypt was divided into a number of separate nomes or provinces, each gathered about its own independent city and temple, and ruled by the Horsheshu or servants of Horus, who were apparently the chief priests of the respective temples, combining with the character of priest that of king, or local ruler. Parts of the Todtenbuch or Sacred Book of the Dead certainly date from this period, and the great Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis had been founded, for we are told that certain prehistoric Heliopolitan hymns formed the basis of the sacred books of a later age. At Edfu the later temple occupies the site of a very ancient structure, traditionally said to date back to the mythic reign of the gods, and to have been built according to a plan designed by Nuhotef the son of Pthah. At Denderah an inscription found by Mariette in one of the crypts of the great temple, expressly identifies the earliest sanctuary built upon the spot with the time of the Horsheshu. It reads, "There was found the great fundamental ordinance of Denderah, written upon goatskin in ancient writing of the time of the Horsheshu. It was found in the inside of a brick wall during the reign of King Pepi (i.e. Pepi-Merira of the sixth dynasty). The name of Chufu, the king of the fourth dynasty, who built the great pyramid, was found by Naville in a restoration of part of the famous temple of Bubastis, and its foundation doubtless dates back to the same prehistoric period. But the most important prehistoric monuments are those connected with the great Sphynx. An inscription of Chufu (Cheops) preserved in the museum of Boulak, says that a temple adjoining the Sphynx was discovered by chance in his reign, which had been buried under the sand of the desert, and forgotten for many generations. This temple was uncovered by Mariette, and found to be constructed of enormous blocks of granite of Syene and of alabaster, supported by square pillars, each of a single block of stone, without any mouldings or ornaments, and no trace of hieroglyphics. It is, in fact, a sort of transition from the rude dolmen to scientific architecture. But the masonry, and still more the transport of such enormous blocks from Syene to the plateau of the desert at Gizeh, show a great advance already attained in the resources of the country and the state of the industrial arts. The Sphynx itself probably dates from the same period, for it is mentioned on the same inscription as being much older than the great Pyramids, and requiring repairs in the time of Chufu. It is a gigantic work consisting of a natural rock sculptured into the form of a lion's body, to which a human head has been added, built up of huge blocks of hewn stone. It is directed accurately towards the east so as to face the rising sun at the equinox, and was an image of Hormachen, the Sun of the Lower World, which traverses the abode of the dead. In addition to the direct evidence for its prehistoric antiquity, it is certain that if such a monument had been erected by any of the historical kings, it would have been inscribed with hieroglyphics, and the fact recorded in Manetho's lists and contemporary records, whereas all tradition of its origin seems to have been lost in the night of ages. Although there are no monuments of the Stone Age in Egypt like those of the Swiss lake villages and Danish kitchen-middens, to enable us to trace in detail the progress of arts and civilization from rude commencements through the neolithic and prehistoric ages, yet there is abundant evidence to show that the same stages had been traversed in the valley of the Nile long prior to the time of Menes. Borings have been made on various occasions and at various localities through the alluvial deposits of the Nile valley, from which fragments of pottery have been brought up from depths which show a high antiquity. Horner sunk ninety-six shafts in four rows at intervals of eight miles, across the valley of the Nile, at right angles to the river near Memphis, and brought up pottery from various depths, which, at the known rate of deposit of the Nile mud of about three inches per century, indicate an antiquity of at least 11,000 years. In another boring a copper knife was brought up from a depth of twenty-four feet, and pottery, from sixty feet below the surface. This is specially interesting, as making it probable that here, as in many other countries, an age of copper preceded that of bronze, while a depth of sixty feet at the normal rate of deposit would imply an antiquity of 26,000 years. Borings, however, are not very conclusive, as it is always open to contend that they may have been made at spots where, owing to some local circumstances, the deposit was much more rapid than the average. These objections, however, cannot apply to the evidence which has been afforded by the discovery of flint implements, both of the neolithic and palÆolithic type, in many localities and by various skilled observers. Professor Haynes found, a few miles east of Cairo, not only a number of flint implements of the types usual in Europe, but an actual workshop or manufactory where they had been made, showing that they had not been imported, but produced in the country in the course of its native development. He also found multitudes of worked flints of the ordinary neolithic and palÆolithic types scattered on the hills near Thebes. Lenormant and Hamy saw the same workshop and remains of the stone period, and various other finds have been reported by other observers. Finally, General Pitt-Rivers and Professor Haynes found well-developed palÆolithic implements of the. St. Acheul type, not only on the surface and in superficial deposits, but from six and a half to ten feet deep in hard stratified gravel at Djebel-Assas, near Thebes, in a terrace on the side of one of the ravines falling from the Libyan desert into the Nile valley, which was certainly deposited in early quaternary ages by a torrent pouring down from a plateau where, under existing geographical and climatic conditions, rain seldom or never falls. These relics, as Mr. Campbell says, who was associated with General Pitt-Rivers in the discovery, are "beyond calculation older than the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs," and they certainly go far to prove that the high civilization of Egypt at the earliest dawn of history or tradition had been a plant of extremely slow growth from a state of provincial savagery.
STATUE OF PRINCE RAHOTEP'S WIFE. (Refined type.) (Gizeh Museum.—Discovered in 1870 in a tomb near Meydoon.—According to the chronological table of Mariette, it is 5800 years old.—From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo.) It is remarkable that all the traditions of the Egyptians represent them as being autochthonous. There is no legend of any immigration, no Oannes who comes out of the sea and teaches the arts of civilization. On the contrary, Thoth and Osiris are native Egyptian gods or kings, who reigned long ago in Egyptian cities. There are no legends of an inferior race who were exterminated or driven up the Nile; though it would seem from the portraits on early monuments that there were two types in the very early ages one coarse and approximating to the African, the other a refined and aristocratic type, more resembling that of the highest Asiatic or Arabian races.
KHUFU-ANKH AND HIS SERVANTS—EARLY EGYPTIANS. (Coarse type.) It has been conjectured that this latter race may have come from Punt, that is, from Southern Arabia, and the opposite African coast of Soumali land, where there are races of a high, civilization at a very early period. This conjecture is based on the fact that Punt is constantly referred to in the Egyptian monuments as a divine or sacred land, while other surrounding nations are loaded with opprobrious epithets. Also the earliest traditions refer the origin of Egyptian civilization not to Lower Egypt, where the Isthmus of Suez affords a land route from Asia, nor to Upper Egypt, as if it had descended the Nile from Africa, but to Abydos and This in Middle Egypt, where the gods were feigned to have reigned, which are comparatively close to Coptos, the port on the Red Sea by which intercourse was most easily kept up between the valley of the Nile and the land of Punt. This conjecture, however, is very vague, and when we come to positive facts we find that the language and system of writing, when we first meet with them, are fully formed and apparently of native growth, not derived from any Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian speech of any historical nation. It is certainly an agglutinative language originally, but far advanced beyond the simpler forms of that mode of speech as spoken by Mongolians. It shows some distant affinities with Semitic, or rather with what may have been a proto-Semitic, before it had been fully formed, and is perhaps nearer to what may have been the primitive language of the Libyans of North Africa. But there is nothing in the language from which we can infer origin, and the pictures from which hieroglyphics are derived are those of animals and objects proper to the Nile valley, and not like those of the Accadians and Chinese, such as point to a prehistoric nomad existence on elevated plains. The only positive fact tending to confirm the existence of two races in Egypt, one rude and aboriginal, the other of high type, is the difference of type shown by the early portraits and the discovery by Mr. Flinders Petrie, in the very old cemetery of Meydoon, of two distinct modes of interment, one of the ordinary mummy extended at full length, the other in a crouching attitude as is common in neolithic graves. For any further inquiries as to the origin and antiquity of Egyptian civilization, we have to fall back on the state of religion, science, literature, and art, which we find prevailing in the earliest records which have come down to us, and which I will proceed to examine in subsequent chapters. But before doing so, I will endeavour to exhaust the field of positive history, and inquire how far the annals of other ancient nations contradict or confirm the date of about 5000 years b.c., which has been shown to be approximately that of the accession of Menes. Chronology—Berosus—His Dates mythical—Dates in Genesis—Synchronisms with Egypt and Assyria—Monuments—Cuneiform Inscriptions—How deciphered—Behistan Inscription—Grotefend and Rawlinson—Layard—Library of Koyunjik—How preserved—Accadian Translations and Grammars—Historical Dates—Elamite Conquest—Commencement of Modern History—Ur-Ea and Dungi—Nabonidus—Sargon I., 3800 b.c.—Ur of the Chaldees—Sharrukin's Cylinder—His Library—His son Naram-Sin—Semites and Accadians—Accadians and Chinese—Period before Sargon I.—Patesi—De Sarzec's find at Sirgalla—Gud-Ea, 4000 to 4500 b.c.—Advance of Delta—Astronomical Records—ChaldÆa and Egypt give similar results—Historic Period 6000 or 7000 years—and no trace of a beginning. ChaldÆan chronology has within the last few years been brought into the domain of history, and carried back to a date almost, if not quite, as remote as that of Egypt. And this has been effected by a process identical in the two cases, the decipherment of an unknown language in inscriptions on ancient monuments. Until this discovery the little that was known of the early history of ChaldÆa was derived almost entirely from two sources: the Bible, and the fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus. Berosus was a learned priest of Babylon, who lived about 300 b.c., shortly after the conquest of Alexander, and wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples, and from the oldest traditions. He began with a Cosmogony, fragments of which only are preserved, from which little could be inferred, except that it bore some general resemblance to that of Genesis, until the complete ChaldÆan Cosmogony was deciphered by Mr. George Smith from tablets in the British Museum. Then followed a mythical period of the reigns of ten gods or demi-gods, reigning for 432,000 years, in the middle of which period the divine fish-man, Ea-Han or Oannes, was said to have come up out of the Persian Gulf, and taught mankind letters, sciences, laws, and all the arts of civilization; 259,000 years after Oannes, under Xisuthros (the Greek translation of Hasisastra), the last of the ten kings, a Deluge is said to have occurred; which is described in terms so similar to the narrative of Noah's deluge in Genesis, as to leave no doubt that they are different versions of the same legend. Prior to the appearance of Oannes, Berosus relates, "that ChaldÆa had been colonized by a mixed multitude of men of foreign race, who lived without order like animals," thus carrying back the existence of mankind in large numbers, to some date anterior to 259,000 years before the Deluge. There is also a legend resembling that of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages, recorded in another fragment of Berosus. These accounts are all so obviously mythical that no historical value can be attached to them, and they have only been preserved because early Christian writers saw in them some sort of distorted confirmation of the corresponding narratives in the Old Testament. For anything like historical dates therefore the Bible remained the principal authority, until the recent discoveries made from the monuments of ChaldÆa and Assyria. This authority does not carry us very far back. The first event which can advance any claim to be considered as historical, is that of the migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, and the further migration of his son Abraham from Haran to Palestine. This is said to have taken place in the ninth generation after Noah, about 290 years after the Deluge, and it presupposes the existence of a dense population and a number of large cities both in Upper and Lower Mesopotamia. It mentions also an event, apparently historical, as occurring in Abraham's time, viz. a campaign by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, with four allies, one of whom is a King of Shinar, against five petty kings in Southern Syria. Chedorlaomer has been identified from inscriptions with Khuder-lagomer, one of the kings of the Elamite dynasty, who conquered ChaldÆa about 2300 b.c., and were expelled before 2000 b.c. A long interval then occurs during which the scattered notices in the Bible relate mainly to the intercourse of the Hebrews with Egypt, with the races of Canaan, with the Philistines, with the Phoenicians of Tyre, and with the Syrians of Damascus. Mesopotamia first appears after the rise of the Assyrian Empire had united nearly the whole of Western Asia under the warlike kings who reigned at Nineveh, and when Palestine had become the battle-field between them and the declining power of Egypt, which under the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties had extended to the Euphrates. The capture of Jerusalem in the reign of Rehoboam by Shishak, the first king of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty, affords the first certain synchronism between sacred and profane history. The date may be fixed within a few years at 970 b.c. Assyria first appears on the scene two hundred years later in the reign of Menahem King of Israel, when Pul, better known as Tiglath-Pileser II., came against the land, and exacted a large ransom from Menahem, whom he confirmed as a tributary vassal. From this time forward the succession of Assyrian kings is recorded more or less accurately in the Bible. Tiglath-Pileser accepted vassalage and a large tribute from Ahaz to come to his assistance against Rezin King of Syria, and Pekah King of Israel, who were besieging Jerusalem, and Tiglath-Pileser came to his aid and captured and sacked Damascus. Shalmaneser came up against Hoshea King of Judah, who submitted, but was deposed for intriguing with Egypt, and Shalmaneser then took Samaria and carried the ten tribes of Israel away into Assyria, placing them in the cities of the Medes. Sennacherib, in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, took all the fenced cities of Judah, and his general, Rab-shakeh, besieged Jerusalem, which was saved by the repulse of the main army under the king when marching to invade Egypt. The murder of Sennacherib by his two sons and the succession of Esarhaddon are next mentioned. Nineveh then disappears from the scene, and the great Babylonian conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, puts an end to the kingdom of JudÆa, by taking Jerusalem and carrying the people captive to Babylon. This historical retrospect carries us back a very short distance, and little can be gathered in the way of accurate chronology from the few vague references prior to this date. So stood the question until the date of ChaldÆan history and civilization was unexpectedly carried back at least 3000 years by the discovery of its monuments. When the first Assyrian sculptures were found by Botta and Layard not fifty years ago in the mounds of rubbish which covered the ruins of Nineveh, and brought home to Europe, it was seen that they were covered with inscriptions in an unknown character. It was called the cuneiform, because it was made up of combinations of a single sign, resembling a thin wedge or arrow-head. This sign was made in three fundamental ways, i.e. either horizontal [symbol], vertical[symbol], or angular [symbol], and all the characters were made up of combinations of these primary forms, which were obviously produced by impressing a style with a triangular head on moist clay. They resembled, in fact, very much the strokes and dashes used in spelling out the words conveyed by the electric telegraph, in which letters are formed by oscillations of the needle.
This mode of writing had apparently been developed from picture-writing, for several, of the groups of characters bore an unmistakable resemblance to natural objects. In the very oldest inscriptions which have been discovered the writing, is hardly yet cuneiform, and the primitive pictorial character of the signs is apparent. But the bulk of the cuneiform inscriptions not being pictorial, there could be little doubt that they were phonetic, or represented sounds. The question was, what sounds these characters signified, and when translated into sounds, what words and what language did the groups of signs represent? The first clue to these questions was, as in the parallel case of Egypt, afforded by a trilingual inscription. The kings of the Persian Empire reigned over subjects of various races and languages. The three principal were the Persians, an Aryan race who spoke an inflectional language which has been preserved in old Persian and Zend; Semites, who spoke Aramaic, a language closely allied to Hebrew; and descendants of the older Accadian races, whose language was Turanian, or agglutinative. It is almost the same at the present day in the same region, where edicts or inscriptions, to be readily intelligible to all classes of subjects, would require to be made in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Accordingly, the pompous inscriptions and royal edicts of these ancient monarchs were frequently made in the three languages, and specimens of these were brought to Europe. The difficulty of deciphering them was, however, great, for the inscriptions were all written, though in different languages, in the same cuneiform characters, so that the aid afforded in the case of the Rosetta stone by a Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription was not forthcoming. The ingenuity of a German scholar, Grotefend, furnished the first clue by discovering that certain groups of signs represented the names of known Persian kings, and thus identifying the component signs in the Persian inscription as letters of an alphabet. A few years later Sir Henry Rawlinson copied, and succeeded in deciphering, a famous inscription engraved by the great Persian monarch, Darius the first, high up in the face of a precipice forming the wall of a narrow defile at Behistan, and giving an historical record of the exploits of his reign. The clue thus afforded was rapidly followed up by a host of scholars, among whom the names of Rawlinson, Burnouf, Lassen, and Oppert were most conspicuous, and before long the text of inscriptions in Persian and Semitic could be read with great certainty. The task was one which required a vast amount of patience and ingenuity, for the cuneiform writing turned out to be one of great complexity, Though phonetic in the main, the characters did not always represent the simple elements of sounds, or letters of an alphabet, but frequently syllables containing one or more consonants united by vowels, and a considerable number were ideographic or conventional representations of ideas, like our numerals 1, 2, 3, which have no relation to spoken sounds. Thus the simple vertical wedge [symbol] represented "man," and was prefixed to proper names of kings so as to show that the signs which followed denoted the name of a man; the sign [symbol] denoted country, and so on. The difficulties were, however, surmounted, and inscriptions in the two known languages could be read with considerable certainty. The third language, however, remained unknown until the finishing stroke to its decipherment was given by the discovery by Layard under the great mound of Koyunjik near Mosul on the Tigris, the site of the ancient Nineveh, of the royal palace of Asshurbanipal, or Sardanapalus, the grandson of Sennacherib, and one of the greatest Assyrian monarchs, who lived about 650 b.c. This palace contained a royal library like that of Alexandria or the British Museum, the contents of which had been carefully collected from the oldest records of previous libraries and temples, and almost miraculously preserved. The secret of the preservation of these Assyrian and ChaldÆan remains, is that the district contains no stone, and all the great buildings were constructed mainly of sun-dried bricks, and built on mounds or platforms of the same material to raise them above the alluvial plain. These, when the cities were deserted, crumbled rapidly under the action of the air and rains, which are torrential at certain seasons, into shapeless rubbish heaps of fine dry dust and sand, under which everything of more durable material was securely buried. So rapid was the process, that when Xenophon on the famous retreat of the ten thousand traversed the site of Nineveh only two hundred years after its destruction, he found nothing but the ruins of a deserted city, the very name and memory of which had been lost. As regards the contents of the library the explanation of their perfect preservation is equally simple. The books were written, not on perishable paper or parchment, but on cylinders of clay. It is evident that the cuneiform characters were exceedingly well adapted for this description of writing, and probably originated from the nature of the material. A fine tenacious clay cost nothing, was readily moulded into cylinders, and when slightly moist was easily engraved by a tool or style stamping on it those wedge-like characters, so that when hardened by a slow fire the book was practically indestructible. So much so, indeed, that though the palace, including the library with its shelves and upper stories, had all fallen to the ground, and the book-cylinders lay scattered on the floor, they were mostly in a state of perfect preservation. Other similar finds have been made since, notably one of another great library of the priestly college at Erech, founded or enlarged as far back as 2000 b.c. by Sargon II. Among the books thus preserved there are fortunately translations of old Accadian works into the more modern Aramaic or Assyrian, either interlined or in parallel columns, and, also grammars and dictionaries of the old language to assist in its study. It appears that as far back as 2000 years b.c. this old language had already become obsolete, and was preserved as Latin or Vedic Sanscrit are at the present day, as the venerable language for religious uses, in which the earliest sacred books, historical annals, and astrological and magical formulas had been written. With these aids this ancient Accadian language can now be read with almost as much certainty as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the records written in it are accumulating rapidly with every fresh exploration. Some idea of the wealth of the materials already found may be formed from the fact that the number of tablets in the different museums of Europe from the Nineveh library alone exceeds 10,000. They present to us a most interesting picture of the religion, literature, laws, and social life of a period long antecedent to that commonly assigned for the destruction of the world by Noah's Deluge, or even to that of the creation of Adam. To some of these we shall have occasion subsequently to refer, but for the present I confine myself to the immediate object in view, that of verifying the earliest historical dates. The first certain date is fixed by the annals of the Assyrian King Asshurbanipal, grandson of Sennacherib, who conquered Elam and destroyed its capital, Susa, in the year 645 b.c. The king says that he took away all the statues from the great temple of Susa, and among others, one of the ChaldÆan goddess Nana, which had been carried away from her own temple in the city of Erech, by a king of Elam who conquered the land of Accad 1635 years before. This conquest, and the accession of an Elamite dynasty which lasted for nearly 300 years, is confirmed from a variety of other sources, and its date is thus fixed, beyond the possibility of a doubt, at 2280 b.c. A king of this dynasty, Khudur-Lagamar, synchronizes with Abraham, assuming Abraham and the narrative in the Old Testament respecting his defeat of that monarch to be historical. This Elamite conquest of ChaldÆa is a memorable historical era, for it inaugurates the period of great wars and of the rise and fall of empires, which play such a conspicuous part in the subsequent annals of nations. Elam was a small province between the Kurdish mountains and the Tigris, extending to the Persian Gulf, and its capital, Susa, was an ancient and famous city; which afterwards became one of the principal seats of the Persian monarchs. The Elamites were originally a Turanian race like the Accads, and spoke a language which was a dialect of Accadian, but, as in ChaldÆa and Assyria, the kings and aristocracy appear to have been Semites from an early period. It was apparently an organized and civilized State, and the conquest was not a passing irruption of barbarians, but the result of a campaign by regular troops, who founded a dynasty which lasted for more than 200 years. It evidently disturbed the equilibrium of Western Asia, and led to a succession of wars. The invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos followed closely on it. Then came the reaction which drove the Elamites from ChaldÆa and the Hyksos from Egypt. Then the great wars of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, which carried the arms of Ahmes and Thotmes to the Euphrates and Black Sea, and established for a time the supremacy of Egypt over Western Asia. Then the rise of the Hittite Empire, which extended over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms with Ramses II. in Syria. Then the rise of the Assyrian Empire, which crushed the Hittites and all surrounding nations, and twice conquered and overran Egypt. Finally, the rise of the Medes, the fall of Nineveh, the short supremacy of Babylon, and the establishment of the great Persian Empire. From the Persian we pass to the Greek, and then to the Roman Empire, and find ourselves in full modern history. It may be fairly said, therefore, that modern history, with its series of great wars and revolutions, commences with this record of the Elamite conquest of ChaldÆa in 2280 b.c. The next tolerably certain date is that of Ur-ea, and his son Dungi, two kings of the old Accadian race, who reigned at Ur over the united kingdoms of Sumir and Accad. They were great builders and restorers of temples, and have left numerous traces of their existence in the monuments both at Ur, and at Larsam, Sirgalla, Erech, and other ancient cities. Among other relics of these kings there is in the British Museum the signet-cylinder of Ur-ea himself, on which is engraved the Moon-God, the patron deity of Ur, with the king and priests worshipping him. The date of Ur-ea is ascertained as follows—Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, 550 b.c., was a great restorer of the old temples, and, as Professor Sayce says, "a zealous antiquarian who busied himself much with the disinterment of the memorial cylinders which their founders and restorers had buried beneath their foundations." The results of his discoveries he recorded on special cylinders for the information of posterity, which have fortunately been preserved. Among others he restored the Sun-temple at Larsam, in which he found intact in its chamber under the corner-stone, a cylinder of King Hummurabi or Khammuragas, stating that the temple was commenced by Ur-ea and finished by his son Dungi, 700 years before his time. Hummurabi was a well-known historical king who expelled the Elamites, and made Babylon for the first time the capital of ChaldÆa, about 2000 b.c. The date of Ur-ea cannot therefore be far from 2700 b.c. The same fortunate circumstance of the habit, by kings who built or restored famous temples, of laying the foundation-stone, such as our royal personages often do at the present day, and depositing under it, in a secure chamber, a cylinder recording the fact, has given us a still more ancient date, that of Sharrukin or Sargon I. of Agade. The same Nabonidus repaired the great Sun-temple of Sippar, and he says "that having dug deep in its foundations for the cylinders of the founder, the Sun-god suffered him to behold the foundation cylinder of Naram-Sin, son of Sharrukin or (Sargon I.), which for three thousand and two hundred years none of the kings who lived before him had seen." This gives 3750 b.c. as the date of Naram-Sin, or, allowing for the long reign of Sargon I., about 3800 b.c. as the date of that monarch. This discovery revolutionized the accepted ideas of ChaldÆan chronology, and carried it back at one stroke 1000 years before the date of Ur-ea, making it contemporary with the fourth Egyptian dynasty who built the great Pyramids. The evidence is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho give us the whole series of successive kings and dynasties, a great majority of which are confirmed by contemporary records and monuments. The date of Sargon I. rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than 3000 years later, and may have been mistaken, but he was in the best position to consult the oldest records, and had apparently no motive to make a wilful mis-statement. Moreover, other documents have been found in different places confirming the statement on the cylinder of Nabonidus, and the opinion of the best and latest authorities has come round to accept the date of about 3800 b.c. as authentic. Professor Sayce, in his Hibbert Lecture in 1888, gives a detailed account of the evidence which had overcome his original scepticism, and forced him to admit the accuracy of this very distant date. Since the discovery of the cylinder of Nabonidus, several tablets have been found and deciphered, containing lists of kings and dynasties of the same character as the Egyptian lists of Manetho. One tablet of the kings who reigned at Babylon takes us back, reign by reign, to about 2400 b.c. Other tablets, though incomplete, give the names of at least sixty kings which are not found in this record of the Babylonian era, and who presumedly reigned during the interval of about 1400 years between Khammuragas and Sargon I. The names are mostly Accadian, and if they did not reign during this interval they must have preceded the foundation of a Semite dynasty by Sargon I., and thus extend the date of ChaldÆan history still further back. The probability of such a remote date is enhanced by the certainty that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 b.c., and there is no apparent reason why it should not have existed in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates as soon as in that of the Nile. Boscawen, in a paper read at the Victoria Institute in 1886, says that inscriptions found at Larsa, a neighbouring city to Ur of the Chaldees, show that from as early a period as 3750 b.c. a Semitic population existed in the latter city, speaking a language akin to Hebrew, carrying on trade and commerce, and with a religion which, although not Monotheist, had at the head of its pantheon a supreme god, Ilu or El, from whose name that of Elohim and Allah has been inherited as the name of God by the Hebrews and Arabs. The latest discoveries all point to the earliest dates, and some authorities think that genuine traces of the earliest Accadian civilization can be found as far back as 6000 b.c. There can be no doubt, moreover, that this Sharrukin or Sargon I. is a perfect historical personage. A statue of him has been found at Agade or Accad, and also his cylinder with an inscription on it giving his name and exploits. It begins, "Sharrukin the mighty king am I," and goes on to say, "that he knew not his father, but his mother was a royal princess, who to conceal his birth placed him in a basket of rushes closed with bitumen, and cast him into the river, from which he was saved by Akki the water-carrier, who brought him up as his own child." It is singular how the same or a very similar story is told of Moses, Cyrus, and other heroes of antiquity. It is probable from this that he was a military adventurer who rose to the throne; but there can be no doubt that he was a great monarch, who united the two provinces of Shumir and Accad, or of Lower and Upper Mesopotamia, into one kingdom, as Menes did the Upper and Lower Egypts, and extended his rule over some of the adjoining countries. He says "that he had reigned for forty-five years, and governed the black-headed (Accadian) race. In multitudes of bronze chariots I rode over rugged lands. I governed the upper countries. Three times to the coast of the sea I advanced." If there is any truth in this inscription it would be very interesting as showing the existence in Western Asia of nations to be conquered in great campaigns, with a force of horse-chariots, at this remote period, 2000 years earlier than the campaigns of Ahmes and Thotmes recorded in the Egyptian monuments of the eighteenth dynasty.
CYLINDER SEAL OF SARGON I., FROM AGADE. (Hommel, "Gesch. Babyloniens u. Assyriens.") The reality of these campaigns is moreover confirmed by inscriptions and images of this Sargon having been found in Cyprus and on the opposite coast of Syria, and by a Babylonian cylinder of his son Naram-Sin, found by Cesnola in the Cyprian temple of Kurion. In another direction he and his son carried their arms into the peninsula of Sinai, attracted doubtless by the copper and turquoise mines of Wady Maghera, which were worked by the Egyptians under the third dynasty. Sargon I. is also known to have been a great patron of literature, and to have founded the library of Agade, which was long one of the most famous in Babylonia. A work on Astronomy and Astrology, in seventy-two books, which was so well known in the time of Berosus as to be translated by him into Greek, was also compiled for him. Another king of the same name, known as Sargon II., who reigned about 2000 b.c., either founded or enlarged the library of the priestly college at Erech, which was one of the oldest and most famous cities of Lower ChaldÆa, and known as the "City of Books." It was also considered to be a sacred city, and its necropolis extends over a great part of the adjoining desert, and contains innumerable tombs and graves ranging over all periods of ChaldÆan and Assyrian history, up to an unknown antiquity. The exact historical date of Sargon I. may be a little uncertain; but whatever its antiquity may be, it is evident that it is already far removed from the beginnings of ChaldÆan civilization. Sargon II. is perfectly historical, and his library and the state of the arts and literature in his reign prove this conclusively. He states in his tablets that 350 kings had reigned before him, and in such a literary age he could hardly have made such a statement without some foundation. If anything like this number of kings had reigned before 2000 b.c., the date of Sargon II.'s ChaldÆan chronology would have to be extended to a date preceding that of Egypt. Moreover, Sargon was a Semite, who founded a powerful monarchy over a mixed population, consisting mainly of a primitive Accadian race, who had already built large cities and famous temples, written sacred books, and made considerable progress in literature, science, agriculture, and industrial arts. This primitive race was neither Semitic nor Aryan, but Turanian. They spoke an agglutinative language, and resembled the Chinese very much both in physical type and in character. They were a short, thick-set people, with yellow skins, coarse black hair, and, judging from the ancient statues recently discovered, of decidedly Tartar or Mongolian features. They were, like the Chinese, a peaceable, patient, and industrious people, addicted to agriculture, and specially skilled in irrigation. They were educated and literary, but very superstitious in regard to ghosts, omens, and evil spirits. This resemblance to the Chinese has been remarkably confirmed by the discovery made within the last few years, that the Accadian and Chinese languages are closely allied, and that a great many words are identical. The early prehistoric and astronomical legends were almost similar, and in some instances, as in the division of the year, the names and order of the planets, and the number and duration of the fabulous reigns of gods, so identical as to leave no doubt of their having had a common origin. But as the Chinese annals do not extend farther back than about 2700 b.c., the priority of invention must be assigned to the Accadians. This Turanian population had been long settled in Mesopotamia before the accession of Sargon I., and before the supremacy of the Semitic races began to assert itself. Though called Accadian, which is said to mean "Highlanders," their principal seat was in Shumir or Lower Mesopotamia, in the alluvial delta formed in the course of ages by the Euphrates, Tigris, and other rivers which flow into the Persian Gulf; and their traditions point to their civilization having come from the shores of this Gulf, and having gradually spread northwards. Their most ancient cities and temples were in the Lower Province of Shumir, and the bulk of the population continued for ages to be Turanian, while in Accad or Upper Mesopotamia, where the land rises from the alluvial plain up to the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia, the Semitic element preponderated from an early period, though the civilization and religion long remained those of Shumir or ChaldÆa proper. When the Semite Sargon I. founded the united monarchy, the capital of which was Agade in the upper province, he made no change in the established state of things, maintained the old temples, and built new ones to the same gods. Before his reign we have, as in the parallel case of Egypt before Menes, little definite information from monuments or historical records. We only know that the country was divided into a number of small states, each grouped about a city with a temple dedicated to some god; as Eridhu, the sanctuary of Ea, one of the trinity of supreme gods; Larsam, with its Temple of the Sun; Ur, the city of the Moon-god; Sirgalla, with another famous temple. These small states were ruled by patesi, or priest-kings, a term corresponding to the Horsheshu of Egypt; and a fortunate discovery by M. de Sarzec in 1881 at Tell-loh, the site of the ancient Sirgalla, has given us valuable information respecting its patesi. To the surprise of the scientific world, with whom it had been a settled belief that no statues were ever found in Assyrian art, M. de Sarzec discovered and brought home nine large statues of diorite, a very hard black basalt of the same material as that of the statue of Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid, and in the same sitting attitude. The heads had been broken off, but one head was discovered which was of unmistakably Turanian type, beardless, shaved, and with a turban for head-dress. With these statues a number of small works of art were found, representing men and animals of a highly artistic design and exquisite finish, and also several cylinders. Both these and the backs of the statues are covered with cuneiform inscriptions in the old Accadian characters, which furnish valuable historical information. The name of one of the patesi whose statues were found was Gud-Ea, and his date is computed by some of the best authorities at from 4000 to 4500 b.c., probably earlier, and certainly not later than 4000 b.c. This makes the patesi of Sirgalla contemporary with the earliest Egyptian kings, or even earlier, and it shows a state of the arts and civilization then prevailing in ChaldÆa very similar to those of the fourth dynasty in Egypt, and in both cases as advanced as those of 2000 or 3000 years later date.
HEAD OF ANCIENT CHALDÆAN. FROM TELL-LOH (SIRGALLA). SARZEC COLLECTION. (Perrot and Chipiez.) Before such a temple as that of Sirgalla could have been built and such statues and works of art made, there must have been older and smaller temples and ruder works, just as in Egypt the brick pyramids of Sakkarah and the oldest temples of Heliopolis and Denderah preceded the great pyramids of Gizeh, the temple of Pthah at Memphis, and the diorite statues, wooden statuettes, and other finished works of art of the fourth dynasty.
STATUE OF GUD-EA, WITH INSCRIPTION; FROM TELL-LOH (SIRBURLA OR SIRGALLA) SARZEC COLLECTION. (Hommel.) It is important to remark that in those earliest monuments both the language and art are primitive Accadian, with no trace of Semitic influences, which must have long prevailed before Sargon I. could have established a Semitic dynasty over an united population of Accads and Semites living together on friendly terms. The normal Semites must have settled gradually in ChaldÆa, and adopted to a great extent the higher civilization of the Accadians, much as the Tartars in later times did that of the Chinese. It is remarkable also that this pre-Semitic Accadian people must have had extensive intercourse with foreign regions, for the diorite of which the statues of Sirgalla are formed is exactly similar to that of the statue of the Egyptian Chephren, and in both cases is only found in the peninsula of Sinai. In fact, an inscription on one of the statues tells us that the stone was brought from the land of Magan, which was the Accadian name for that peninsula. This implies a trade by sea, between Eridhu, the sea-port of ChaldÆa in early times, and the Red Sea, as such blocks of diorite could hardly have been transported such a distance over such mountains and deserts by land; and this is confirmed by references in old geographical tablets to Magan as the land of bronze from the copper mines of Wady-Maghera, and to "ships of Magan" trading from Eridhu. In any case, it is certain that a very long period of purely Accadian civilization must have existed prior to the introduction of Semitic influences, and long before the foundation of a Semitic dynasty by Sargon I. With these facts it will no longer seem surprising that some high authorities assign as early a date as 6000 b.c. for the dawn of ChaldÆan civilization, and consider that it may be quite as old or even older than that of Egypt. The great antiquity assigned to these dates from books and monuments is confirmed by other deductions. The city of Eridhu, which was generally considered to be the oldest in ChaldÆa, and was the sanctuary of the principal god, EÂ, appears to have been a sea-port in those early days, situated where the Euphrates flowed into the Persian Gulf. The ruins now stand far inland, and Sayce computes that about 6000 years must have elapsed since the sea reached up to them. Astronomy affords a still more definite confirmation. The earliest records and traditions show that before the commencement of any historic period the year had been divided into twelve months, the course of the sun mapped out among the stars, and a zodiac established of the twelve constellations, which has continued in use to the present day. The year began with the vernal equinox, and the first month was named after the "propitious Bull," whose figure constantly appears on the monuments as opening the year. The sun, therefore, was in Taurus at the vernal equinox when this calendar was formed, which could only be after long centuries of astronomical observation; but it has been in Aries since about 2500 b.c., and first entered in Taurus about 4700 b.c. Records of eclipses were also kept in the time of Sargon I., which imply a long preceding period of accurate observation; and the Ziggurat, or temple observatory, built up in successive stages above the alluvial plain, which gave rise to the legend of the Tower of Babel, is found in connection with the earliest temples. The diorite statues also and engraved gems found at Sirgalla testify to a thorough knowledge of the arts of metallurgy at this remote period, and to a commercial intercourse with foreign countries from which the copper and tin must have been derived for making bronze tools capable of cutting such hard materials. The existence of such a commercial intercourse in remote times is confirmed by the example of Egypt, where bronze implements must have been in use long before the date of Menes; and although copper might have been obtained from Sinai or Cyprus, tin or bronze must have been imported from distant foreign countries alike in Egypt and in ChaldÆa. ChaldÆan chronology therefore leads to almost exactly the same results as that of Egypt. In each case we have a standard or measuring-rod of authentic historical record, of certainly not less than 6000, and more probably 7000 years from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date, in presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilization already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organized priesthood, an advanced state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts; writing and books so long known that their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this prehistoric age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilization, from the primitive beginnings of neolithic and palÆolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. Bunsen thinks it may have taken 10,000 years, but there are no dates from which we can infer the time that may be required for civilization to grow up by spontaneous evolution, among nations where it is not aided by contact with more advanced civilizations from without. All we can infer is, that it must have required an immense time, probably much longer than that embraced by the subsequent period of historical record. And we can say with certainty that during the whole of this historical period of 6000 or 7000 years there has been no change in the established order of Nature. The earth has revolved round its axis and round the sun, the moon and planets have pursued their courses, the duration of human life has not varied, and there have been no destructions and renovations of life or other traces of miraculous interference. And more than this, we can affirm with absolute certainty that 6000 years have not been enough to alter in any perceptible degree the existing physical types of the different races of men and animals, or the primary linguistic types of their forms of speech. The Negro, the Turanian, the Semite, and the Aryan, all stand out as clearly distinguished in the paintings on Egyptian monuments as they do at the present day; and the agglutinative languages are as distinct from the inflectional, and the Semite from the Aryan forms of inflections, in the old ChaldÆan cylinders as they are in the nineteenth century. China—Oldest existing Civilization—but Records much later than those of Egypt and ChaldÆa—Language and Traditions Accadian—Communication how effected. Elam—Very Early Civilization—Susa, an old City in First ChaldÆan Records—Conquered ChaldÆa in 2280 b.c.—Conquered by Assyrians 645 b.c.—Statue of Nana—Cyrus an Elamite King—His Cylinder—Teaches Untrustworthiness of Legendary History. Phoenicia—Great Influence on Western Civilization—but Date comparatively late—Traditions of Origin—First distinct Mention in Egyptian Monuments 1600 b.c.—Great Movements of Maritime Nations—Invasions of Egypt by Sea and Land, under Menepthah, 1330 b.c., and Ramses III., 1250 b.c.—Lists of Nations—Show Advanced Civilization and Intercourse—but nothing beyond 2000 or 2500 b.c. Hittites—Great Empire in Asia Minor and Syria—Turanian Race—Origin Cappadocia—Great Wars with Egypt—Battle of Kadesh—Treaty with Ramses II.—Power rapidly declined—but only finally destroyed 717 b.c. by Sargon II.—Capital Carchemish—Great Commercial Emporium—Hittite Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Monuments—Only recently and partially deciphered—Results. Arabia—Recent Discoveries—Inscriptions—SabÆa—MinÆans—Thirty-two Kings known—Ancient Commerce and Trade-routes—Incense and Spices—Literature—Old Traditions—Oannes—Punt—Seat of Semites—Arabian Alphabet—Older than Phoenician—- Bearing on Old Testament Histories. Troy and MycenÆ—Dr. Schliemann's Excavations—Hissarlik—Buried Fortifications, Palaces, and Treasures of Ancient Troy—MycenÆ and Tiryns—Proof of Civilization and Commerce—Tombs—Absence of Inscriptions and Religious Symbols—Date of MycenÆan Civilization—School of Art—Pictures on Vases—Type of Race. The first country to which we might naturally look for independent annals approaching in antiquity those of Egypt and ChaldÆa is China. Chinese civilization is in one respect the oldest in the world; that is, it is the one which has come down to the present day from a remote antiquity with the fewest changes. What China is to-day it was more than 4000 years ago; a populous empire with a peaceful and industrial population devoted to agriculture and skilled in the arts of irrigation; a literary people acquainted with reading and writing; orderly and obedient, organized under an emperor and official hierarchy; paying divine honours to ancestors, and a religious veneration to the moral and ceremonial precepts of sages and philosophers. Addicted to childish superstitions, and yet eminently prosaic, practical, and utilitarian. Unlike other nations they have no traditions attributing the origin of arts and sciences to foreign importation, as in the ChaldÆan legend of Oannes, or, as in Egypt, to native gods; that is, to development on the soil from an unknown antiquity. The Chinese annals begin with human emperors, who are only divine in the sense of being wise and virtuous ancestors, and who are represented as uttering long discourses on the whole duty of man, in a high moral and philosophical tone. But these annals do not profess to go back further than to about 2500 b.c., or to a period at least 2000 and probably 3000 years later than the commencement of historical annals, confirmed by monuments in Egypt and ChaldÆa, and any traditions prior to this period are of the vaguest and most shadowy descriptions. We only know with certainty that prior to Chinese civilization there was an aboriginal, semi-savage race, the Miou-tse, remnants of whom are still to be found in the mountainous western provinces; and it had been conjectured from the form of the hieroglyphics to which the Chinese written characters can be traced back, that they were invented by a pastoral people who roamed with flocks and herds over the steppes of Central Asia. Thus the sheep plays a very prominent part, the idea of "beauty" being conveyed by an ideogram meaning "a large sheep"; that of "right" or "property" by one which means "my sheep," and so on in many other instances. There is a tradition also of a clan of 100 families who came down from the West and descended the valley of the Yang-tse-Kiang, expelling the aboriginal Miou-tse. But for any real information as to Chinese origins we are indebted to recent discoveries of Accadian records. It has been proved by Lacouperie, Bell, and other experts in the oldest forms of the Chinese and Accadian languages, that they are not only closely allied, as both forming part of the Ugrian or Turkish branch of the Turanian family, but almost identical. Thus, by following the well-known philological law by which an initial 'g' is often softened in course of time into a 'y,' it was found that by writing 'g' for 'y' in many Chinese words beginning with the latter letter, pure Accadian words were obtained. Thus "to speak" is in Accadian gu, in the Mandarin Chinese yu, and in the old form of Chinese spoken in Japan go; night is ye in Chinese, ge in Accadian. The very close connection between Accadian and Chinese civilization is still more conclusively shown by the identity in many matters which could not have been invented independently. Thus the prehistoric period of ChaldÆa before the Deluge is divided, according to Berosus and the tablets, into ten periods of ten kings, whose reigns lasted for 120 Sari or 432,000 years, a myth which is purely astronomical. The early Chinese writers had a myth of precisely the same number of ten kings and the same period of 432,000 years for their united reigns. Chinese astronomy also, said by their annals to have been invented by the Emperor Yao about 2000 b.c., was an almost exact counterpart of that of the earliest Accadian records. They recognized the same planets, and gave them names with the same meanings; they divided the year into the ChaldÆan period of twelve months of thirty days each, making the new year begin, as in ChaldÆa, in the third month after the winter solstice; and counting the calendar for the surplus days by the same cycle of intercalary days. The oldest Chinese dictionaries give names of the months, which had become obsolete, since the usage of mentioning the months by their numbers, as second, third, and fourth months, had become general, and the meaning of which had been lost. It turns out that several of these names correspond with those of the Accadian calendar. Such coincidences as these cannot be accidental, and it is obvious that one nation must have derived its civilization from the other, or both from a common source. There can be little doubt in this case that ChaldÆa taught China, for its astronomy, knowledge of the arts, and general culture are proved by its records to have existed at least 4000, and probably 5000 years b.c., and then to be attributed to mythical gods and to a fabulous antiquity; while in China they are said to have been taught ready-made by human emperors, at a date from 2000 to 3000 years later. The inference is irresistible that somehow the elements of Accadian civilization must have been imported into China from ChaldÆa, at what is a comparatively modern date in the history of the latter country. The only approach to a clue to this date is that the great Chinese historian Szema-Tsien says that the first of their emperors was Nai-kwangti, who built an observatory, and by the aid of astronomy "ruled the varied year." The name is singularly like that of Kuder-Na-hangti, who was the Elamite king who conquered Babylonia about 2280 b.c. It is difficult to see how such an intercourse between ChaldÆa and China could have been established across such an enormous intervening distance of mountains and deserts, or by such a long sea-voyage; but it is still more difficult to conceive how not only language, physical characteristics, and civilization should have been so similar, but myths and calendars should have been almost verbatim the same in the two countries, unless a communication really existed between them. Nor will the theory of a common origin apply, for it is impossible to suppose that any common ancestors of the Chinese and Accadians could have attained to such a knowledge of astronomy, and of the industrial arts and agriculture, while wandering as nomad shepherds over the steppes of Central Asia. We must remember also the fact that caravans actually do travel, and have travelled for time immemorial, over enormous distances, across the steppes of Central and Northern Asia, and that within quite recent historical times, a whole nation of Calmucks migrated under every conceivable difficulty from hostile tribes, pursuing armies, and the extremes of winter cold and summer heat, first from China to the Volga, and then back again from the Volga to China. Nor must we overlook the fact that Ur and Eridhu were great sea-ports at a very remote period, and that the facilities for pushing their commerce far to the east were great, owing to the regular monsoons, and the configuration of the coast. We must be content, therefore, to take the facts as we find them, and admit that China gives us no aid in carrying back authentic history for anything like the time for which we have satisfactory evidence from the monuments and records of Egypt and ChaldÆa. As regards other nations of antiquity, their own historical records are either altogether wanting or comparatively recent, and our only authentic information respecting them in very early times is derived from Egyptian or Babylonian monuments. The most important of them is Elam, which was evidently a civilized kingdom at a very remote period, contemporary probably with the earliest Accadian civilization, and which continued to play a leading part in history down to the recent date of Cyrus. Elam was a small district between the Zagros mountains and the Tigris, extending to the south along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. Its capital was Shushan or Susa, an ancient and renowned city, the name of which survives in the Persian province of Shusistan, as that of Persia proper does in the mountainous district next to the east of Elam, known as Farsistan. The original population was Turanian, speaking an agglutinative language, akin to though not identical with Accadian, and its religion and civilization were apparently the same, or closely similar. As in ChaldÆa and Assyria, a Semitic element seems to have intruded on the Turanian at an early date, and to have become the ruling race, while much later the Aryan Persians to some extent superseded the Semites. The name "Elam" is said to have the same significance as "Accad," both meaning "Highland," and indicating that both races must have had a common origin in the mountains and steppes of Central Asia. The native name was Anshad, and Susa was "the City of Anshad." Elam was always considered an ancient land and Susa an ancient city, by the Accadians, and there is every reason to believe that Elamite civilization must have been at least as old as Accadian. This much is certain, that as far back as 2280 b.c., Elam was a sufficiently organized and powerful state to conquer the larger and more populous country of Mesopotamia, and found an Elamite dynasty which lasted for nearly 300 years, and carried on campaigns in districts as far distant as Southern Syria and the Dead Sea. The dynasty was subverted and the Elamites driven back within their own frontiers, but there they retained their independence, and took a leading part in all the wars waged by ChaldÆa and other surrounding nations against the rising power of the warlike Assyrian kings of Nineveh. The statue of the goddess Nana, which had been taken by the Elamite conquerors from Erech in 2280 b.c., remained in the temple at Susa for 1635 years, until the city was at length taken by one of the latest Assyrian kings, Asshurbanipal, in the year 645 b.c. We have already pointed out the great historical importance of the Elamite conquest of Mesopotamia in 2280 b.c. as inaugurating the era of great wars between civilized states, and probably giving the impulse to Western Asia, which hurled the Hyksos on Egypt, and by its reaction first brought the Egyptians to Nineveh, and then the Assyrians to Memphis. A still more important movement at the very close of what may be called ancient history, originated from Elam. To the surprise of all students of history, it has been proved that the account we have received from Herodotus and other Greek sources, of the great Cyrus, is to a great extent fabulous. A cylinder and tablet of Cyrus himself were quite recently discovered by Mr. Rassam and brought to the British Museum, in which he commemorates his conquest of Babylon. He describes himself as "Cyrus the great King, the King of Babylon, the King of Sumir and Accad, the King of the four zones, the son of Kambyses the great King, the King of Elam; the grandson of Cyrus the great King, the King of Elam; the great-grandson of Teispes the great King, the King of Elam; of the Ancient Seed-royal, whose rule has been beloved by Bel and Nebo"; and he goes on to say how by the favour of "Merodach the great lord, the god who raises the dead to life, who benefits all men in difficulty and prayer," he had conquered the men of Kurdistan and all the barbarians, and also the black-headed race (the Accadians), and finally entered Babylon in peace and ruled there righteously, favoured by gods and men, and receiving homage and tribute from all the kings who dwelt in the high places of all regions from the Upper to the Lower Sea, including Phoenicia." And he concludes with an invocation to all the gods whom he had restored to their proper temples from which they had been taken by Nabonidus, "to intercede before Bel and Nebo to grant me length of days; may they bless my projects with prosperity; and may they say to Merodach my lord, that Cyrus the King, thy worshipper, and Kambyses his son deserve his favour." This is confirmed by a cylinder of a few years earlier date, of Nabonidus the last King of Babylon, who relates how "Cyrus the King of Elam, the young servant of Merodach," overthrew the Medes, there called "Mandan" or barbarians, captured their King Astyages, and carried the spoil of the royal city Ecbatana to the land of Elam. How many of our apparently most firmly established historical dates are annihilated by these little clay cylinders! It appears that Cyrus was not a Persian at all, or an adventurer who raised himself to power by a successful revolt, but the legitimate King of Elam, descended from its ancient royal race through an unbroken succession of several generations. He was in fact a later and greater Kudur-Na-hangti, like the early conqueror of that name who founded the first Elamite empire some 1800 years earlier. It may be doubtful whether he was even an Aryan. At any rate this much is certain, that his religion was Babylonian, and that we must dismiss all Jewish myths of him as a Zoroastrian Monotheist, the servant of the most high God, who favoured the chosen race from sympathy with their religion. On his own showing he was as devoted a worshipper of Merodach, Bel, and Nebo, and the whole pantheon of local gods, as Nebuchadnezzar or Tiglath-Pileser.[2] What a lesson does this teach us as to the untrustworthy nature of the scraps of ancient history which have come down to us from verbal traditions, and are not confirmed by contemporary monuments! Herodotus wrote within a few generations of Cyrus, and the relations of Greece to the Persian Empire had been close and uninterrupted. His account of its founder Cyrus is not in itself improbable, and is full of details which have every appearance of being historical. It is confirmed to a considerable extent by the Old Testament, and by the universal belief of early classical writers, and yet it is shown to be in essential respects legendary and fabulous, by the testimony of Cyrus himself. Phoenicia is another country which exercised a great influence on the civilization and commerce of the ancient world, though its history does not go back to the extreme antiquity of the early dynasties of Egypt and of ChaldÆa. The Phoenicians spoke a language which was almost identical with that of the Hebrews and Canaanites, and closely resembled that of Assyria and Babylonia, after the Semite language had superseded that of the ancient Accadians. According to their own tradition, they came from the Persian Gulf, and the island of Tyros, now Bahrein, in that Gulf, is quoted as a proof that it was the original seat of the people who founded Tyre. There is no certain date for the period when they migrated from the East, and settled in the narrow strip of land along the coast of the Mediterranean between the mountain range of Lebanon and the sea, stretching from the promontory of Carmel on the south to the Gulf of Antioch on the north. This little strip of about 150 miles in length, and ten to fifteen in breadth, afforded many advantages for a maritime people, owing to the number of islands close to the coast and small indented bays, which afforded excellent harbours and protection from enemies, which was further secured by the precipitous range of the Lebanon sending down steep spurs into the Mediterranean, and thus isolating Phoenicia from the military route of the great Valley of Coelo-Syria, between the parallel ranges of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, which was taken by armies in the wars between Egypt and Asia. Here the Phoenicians founded nine cities, of which Byblos or Gebal was reputed to be the most ancient, and first Sidon and then Tyre became the most important. They became fishermen, manufacturers of purple from the dye procured from the shell-fish on their shores, and above all mariners and merchants. Before the growth of other naval powers in the Mediterranean they had established factories along the coasts of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, and in all the islands of the EgÆan and the Cyclades. They had founded colonies in Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, and on the mainland of Greece at Boeotian Thebes. They had mined extensively wherever metals were to be found, and, as Herodotus states, had overturned a whole mountain at Thasos by tunnelling it for gold. They had even extended their settlements into the Black Sea, along the northern coast of Africa, and somewhat later to Spain, passed the Straits of Gibraltar, and finally reached the British Isles in pursuit of tin. There can be no question that this Phoenician commerce was a principal element in introducing not only their alphabet, but many of the early arts of civilization, among the comparatively rude races of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Britain. The date however of this earliest Phoenician commerce is very uncertain. All we can discern is that, after having enjoyed an undisputed supremacy, the progress of civilization among the Mediterranean races enabled them to develop a maritime power of their own, superior to that of Phoenicia, and to drive the Phoenicians from most of their settlements on the mainland and islands, confining them to a few trading posts and factories, and directing their more important enterprises towards the Western Mediterranean, where they encountered less formidable rivals. But although Phoenicia contributed thus largely to the civilization of the ancient world, its antiquity cannot be compared to that of Egypt and ChaldÆa. The first reference to the country is found in the cylinder of Sargon I., b.c. 3800, who marched to the coast of the Mediterranean, and crossed over to Cyprus, where a cylinder of his son Dungi has been found, but there is nothing to show that the district was then occupied by the Phoenicians of later times. Kopt, or the land of palms, of which Phoenicia is the Greek translation, is first mentioned in the Egyptian annals of the Middle Empire, and during the rule of the Hyksos the mouth of the Nile had become so thickly populated by Phoenician emigrants as to be known as Kopt-ur, Caphtor, or greater Phoenicia. The priests of the temple of Baal Melcart, the patron deity of Tyre, told Herodotus that it had been founded 2300 years before his time, or about 2750 b.c., and Old Tyre which stood on the mainland was reputed to be more ancient than the city of New Tyre which stood on an island. But this date is negatived by the fact that in an Egyptian papyrus in which an envoy from Ramses II. or Menepthah to the Court of Babylon about 1320 b.c. records his journey, he mentions Byblos, Beryta, and Sidon as important cities, while Tyre is only an insignificant fishing town. The first distinct mention of Phoenician cities in Egyptian annals is in the enumeration of towns captured by Thotmes III., b.c. 1600, in his victorious campaigns in Syria, among which are to be found the names of Beyrut and Acco, and two centuries later Seti I., the father of Ramses II., records the capture of Zor or Tyre, probably the old city on the mainland. The first authentic information, however, as to the movements of the Mediterranean maritime races is afforded by the Egyptian annals, which describe two formidable invasions by combined land armies and fleets, which were with difficulty repulsed. The first took place in the reign of Menepthah, son of the great Ramses II. of the eighteenth dynasty, about 1330 b.c.; the second under Ramses III. of the nineteenth dynasty, about 1250 b.c. The first invasion came from the West, and was headed by the King of the Lybians, a white race, who have been identified with the Numidians and modern Kabyles, but were reinforced to a confederacy of nearly all the Mediterranean races who sent auxiliary contingents both of sea and land forces. Among these appear, along with Dardanians, Teucri and Lycians of Asia Minor, who were already known as allies of the Hittites in their wars against Ramses II., a new class of auxiliaries from Greece, Italy, and the islands, whose names have been identified by some Egyptologists as AchÆans, Tuscans, Sicilians, and Sardinians. SEA-FIGHT IN THE TIME OF RAMSES III. (From temple of Ammon at Medinet-Abou.) The second and more formidable attack came from the East, and was made by a combined fleet and land army, the latter composed of Hittites and Philistines, with the same auxiliaries from Asia Minor, and the fleet of the same confederation of Maritime States as in the first invasion, except that the AchÆans have disappeared as leaders of the Greek powers, and their place is taken by the Danaoi, confirming the Greek tradition of the substitution of the dynasty of Danaus for that of Inachus, on the throne of Argos and MycenÆ. The Phoenicians alone of the Maritime States do not seem to have taken any part in these invasions, and, on the contrary, to have lived on terms of friendly vassalage and close commercial relations with Egypt ever since the expulsion of the Hyksos, and the great conquests of Ahmes and Thotmes III. in Syria and Asia. It is probably during this period that the early commerce and navigation of Jebail and Sidon took such a wide extension. The details of these two great invasions, which are fully given in the Egyptian monuments, together with a picture of the naval combat, in which the invading fleet was finally defeated by Ramses III., after having forced an entrance into the eastern branch of the Nile, are extremely interesting. They show an advanced state of civilization already prevailing among nations whose very names were unknown or legendary. More than 300 years before the siege of Troy it appears that Asia Minor and the Greek mainland and islands were already inhabited by nations sufficiently advanced in civilization to fit out fleets which commanded the seas, and to form political confederations, to undertake distant expeditions, and to wage war on equal terms with the predominant powers of Asia and of Egypt. But though ancient as regards classical history, these beginnings of Greek civilization are comparatively modern, and cannot be carried back further than about 1500 b.c., while there is no evidence to carry the preceding period of Phoenician supremacy and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean, with the existence of the great trading cities of its earliest period, Byblos and Sidon, beyond 2000, or, at the very outside, 2500 b.c. The history of another great Empire has been partially brought to light, which was destroyed in 717 b.c. by the progress of Assyrian conquest, after having lasted more than 1000 years, and long exercised a predominant influence over Western Asia, viz. that of the Hittites. The first mention of them in the Old Testament appears in the time of Abraham, when we find them in Southern Syria, mixed with tribes of the Canaanites and Amorites, and grouped principally about Hebron. They are represented as on friendly terms with Abraham, selling him a piece of land for a sepulchre, and intermarrying with his family—Rebecca's soul being vexed by the contumacious behaviour of her daughters-in-law, "the daughters of Heth." This, however, was only an outlying branch of the nation, whose capital cities, when they appear clearly in history, were further north at Kadesh on the Orontes, and Carchemish on the Upper Euphrates, commanding the fords on that river on the great commercial route between Babylonia and the Mediterranean. They were a Turanian race, whose original seat was in Cappadocia, and the high plateaux and mountainous region extending from the Taurus range to the Black Sea. They are easily recognized on the Egyptian monuments by their yellow colour, peculiar features which are of Ugro-Turkish type, and their dress, which is that of highlanders inhabiting a snowy district, with close-fitting tunics, mittens, and boots resembling snowshoes with turned-up toes. They have also the Mongolian characters of beardless faces, and coarse black hair, which is sometimes trained into a pigtail.
KING OF THE HITTITES. (From photograph by Flinders Petrie, from Egyptian Temple at Luxor.) The earliest mention of them is found in the tablets which were compiled for the library of Sargon I. of Accad, in which reference is made to the Khatti, which probably means Hittites, showing that at this remote period, about 3800 b.c., they had already moved down from their northern home into the valley of the Euphrates and Upper Syria. Their affinity with the Accadians of ChaldÆa is clearly proved by their language, which the recent discovery of papyri at Tell-el-Amara, containing despatches from the tributary King of the Hittites to Amenophus IV., written in cuneiform characters, has proved to be almost identical with Accadian. It seems probable that part of the army which fought in defence of Troy may have been Hittite, and there are many indications that the Etruscans, who were generally believed to have come from Lydia, were of the same race and spoke the same language. It is in Egyptian records, however, that we meet with the first definite historical data respecting this ancient Hittite Empire. In these they are referred to as "Kheta," and probably formed part of the great Hyksos invasion; but the first certain mention of them occurs in the reign of Thotmes I., about 1600 b.c., and they appear as a leading nation in the time of Thotmes III., who defeated a combined army of Canaanites and Hittites under the Hittite King of Kadesh, at Megiddo, and in fourteen victorious campaigns carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris. For several subsequent reigns we find the Hittites enumerated as one of the nations paying tribute to Egypt, whose extensive Empire then reckoned Mesopotamia, Assyria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Cyprus, and the Soudan among its tributary states. Gradually the power of Egypt declined, and in the troubled times which followed the attempt of the heretic King Ku-en-Aten to supersede the old religion of Egypt by the worship of the solar disc, the conquered nations threw off the yoke, and the frontiers of Egypt receded to the old limits. As Egypt declined, the power of the Hittites evidently increased, for when we next meet with them it is contending on equal terms in Palestine with the revival of the military power of Egypt under Ramses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, and his son Seti I. The contest continued for more than a century with occasional treaties of peace and various vicissitudes of fortune, and at last culminated in the great battle of Kadesh, commemorated by the Egyptian epic poem of Pentaur, and followed by the celebrated treaty of peace between Ramses II. and Kheta-Sira, "the great King of the Hittites," the Hittite text of which was engraved on a silver tablet in the characters of Carchemish, and the Egyptian copy of it was engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls of the temples of Ramses, of which we fortunately possess the entire text. The alliance was on equal terms, defining the frontier, and providing for the mutual extradition of refugees, and it was ratified by the marriage of Ramses with the daughter of the Hittite King. The peace lasted for some time; but in the reign of Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, we find the Hittites again heading the great confederacy of the nations of Asia Minor and of the islands of the Mediterranean, who attacked Egypt by sea and land. The Hittites formed the greater part of the land army, which was defeated with great slaughter after an obstinate battle at Pelusium, about 1200 b.c. From this time forward the power both of the Hittites and of Egypt seems to have steadily declined. We hear no more of them as a leading power in Palestine and Syria, where the kingdoms of Judah, Israel, and Damascus superseded them, until all were swallowed up by the Assyrian conquests of the warrior-kings of Nineveh, and finally the Hittites disappear altogether from history with the capture of their capital Carchemish by Sargon II. in 717 b.c. The wide extent, however, of the Hittite Empire when at its height is proved by the fact that at the battle of Kadesh the Hittite army was reinforced by vassals or allies from nearly the whole of Western Asia. The Dardanians from the Troad, the Mysians from their cities of Ilion, the Colchians from the Caucasus, the Syrians from the Orontes, and the Phoenicians from Arvad are enumerated as sending contingents; and in the invasion of Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., the Hittites headed the great confederacy of Hittites, Teucrians, Lycians, Philistines, and other Asiatic nations who attacked Egypt by land, in concert with the great maritime confederacy of Greeks, Pelasgians, Tuscans, Sicilians, and Sardinians who attacked it by sea. The mere fact of carrying on such campaigns and forming such political alliances is sufficient to show that the Hittites must have attained to an advanced state of civilization. But there is abundant proof that this was the case from other sources. They were a commercial people, and their capital, Carchemish, was for many centuries the great emporium of the caravan trade between the East and West. The products of the East, probably as far as Bactria and India, reached it from Babylon and Nineveh, and were forwarded by two great commercial routes, one to the south-west to Syria and Phoenicia, the other to the north-west through the pass of Karakol, to Sardis and the Mediterranean. The commercial importance of Carchemish is attested by the fact that its silver mina became the standard of value at Babylon, and throughout the whole of Western Asia. The Hittites were also great miners, working the silver mines of the Taurus on an extensive scale, and having a plentiful supply of bronze and other metals, as is shown by the large number of chariots attached to their armies from the earliest times. They were also a literary people, and had invented a system of hieroglyphic writing of their own, distinct alike from that of Egypt and from the cuneiform characters of the Accadians. Inscriptions in these peculiar characters, associated with sculptures in a style of art different from that of either Egypt or ChaldÆa, but representing figures identical in dress and features with those of Hittites in the Egyptian monuments, have been found over a wide extent of Asia Minor, at Hamath and Aleppo; Boghaz-Keni and Eyuk in Cappadocia; at the pass of Karakol near Sardis, and at various other places. Several of those attributed by the Greeks to Sesostris or to fabulous passages of their own mythology, have been proved to be Hittite, as, for instance, the figure carved on the rocks of Mount Sipylos, near Ephesus, and said to be that of Niobe, is proved to be a sitting figure of the great goddess of Carchemish. For a long time these inscriptions were an enigma to philologists, but the researches of Professor Sayce and other scholars have quite recently thrown much light on the subject, and enabled us partially to decipher some of them, and the recent discovery of papyri at Tel-el-Amara written partly in the Hittite language in cuneiform characters, removes all doubt as to its nature and affinities. It may be sufficient to state the result, that the Hittite language was Turanian or agglutinative, closely allied, and indeed almost identical, with Accadian on the one hand, and on the other so similar to the ancient Lydian and Etruscan, as to leave it doubtful whether these nations were themselves Hittites, or only very close cousins descended from a common stock. For instance, the well-known Etruscan names of Tarquin and Lar occur as parts of many names of Hittite kings, and in the same, or a slightly modified form, in Accadian, and survive to the present day in various Turkic and Mongolian dialects. This much appears to be clear, that this Hittite Empire, which vanished so completely from history more than 2500 years ago, had for nearly 1000 years previously exercised a paramount influence in Western Asia, and was one of the principal channels through which Asiatic mythology and art reached Greece in early times, and through the Etruscans formed an important element in the civilization of ancient Rome. It was itself probably an offshoot from the still older civilization of Accadia, though after a time Semitic and Egyptian influences were introduced, as appears from the fact that Sutek, Set or Seth, was the supreme god of the Hittites, as is shown by the text of the treaty of peace between their great King Khota-Sira and Ramses II. As regards chronology, therefore, Hittite history only carries us back about half-way to the earliest dates of Egypt and ChaldÆa, and only confirm these dates incidentally, by showing that other powerful and civilized states already existed in Asia at a remote period. The best chance of finding records which may vie in antiquity with those of Egypt and ChaldÆa, has come to us quite recently from an unexpected quarter. Arabia has been from time immemorial one of the least known and least accessible regions of the earth. Especially of recent years Moslem fanaticism has made it a closed country to Christian research, and it is only quite lately that a few scientific travellers, taking their lives in their hands, have succeeded in penetrating into the interior, discovering the sites of ruined cities, and copying numerous inscriptions. Dr. Glaser especially has three times explored Southern Arabia, and brought home no less than 1031 inscriptions, many of them of the highest historical interest. By the aid of these and other inscriptions we are able to reduce to some sort of certainty the vague traditions that had come down to us of ancient nations and an advanced state of civilization and commerce, existing in Arabia in very ancient times. In the words of Professor Sayce, "the dark past of the Arabian peninsula has been suddenly lighted up, and we find that long before the days of Mohammed it was a land of culture and literature, a seat of powerful kingdoms and wealthy commerce, which cannot fail to have exercised an influence upon the general history of the world."[3] The visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon affords one of the first glimpses into this past history. It is evident that she either was, or was supposed to be by the compiler of the Book of Kings not many centuries later, the queen of a well-known, civilized, and powerful country, which, from the description of her offerings, could hardly be other than Arabia Felix, the spice country of Southern Arabia, the SabÆa or Saba of the ancient world, though her kingdom, or commercial relations, may have extended over the opposite coast of Abyssinia and Somali-land, and probably far down the east coast of Africa. Assyrian inscriptions show that Saba was a great kingdom in the eighth century b.c., when its frontiers extended so far to the north as to bring it in contact with those of the Empire of Nineveh under Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon II. It was then an ancient kingdom, and, as the inscriptions show, had long since undergone the same transformation as Egypt and ChaldÆa, from the rule of priest-kings of independent cities into an unified empire. These priest-kings were called "MakÂrib," or high-priests of Saba, showing that the original state must have been a theocracy, and the name Saba like Assur that of a god. But the inscriptions reveal this unexpected fact, that old as the kingdom of Saba may be, it was not the oldest in this district, but rose to power on the decay of a still older nation, whose name of Ma'in has come down to us in dim traditions under the classical form of MinÆans. We are already acquainted with the names of thirty-two MinÆan kings, and as comparatively few inscriptions have as yet been discovered, many more will doubtless be found. Among those known, however, are some which show that the authority of the MinÆan kings was not confined to their original seat in the south, but extended over all Arabia and up to the frontiers of Syria and of Egypt. Three names of these kings have been found at Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament, on the road to Damascus and Sinai; and a votive tablet from Southern Arabia is inscribed by its authors, "in gratitude to Athtar (Istar or Astarte), for their rescue in the war between the ruler of the South and the ruler of the North, and in the conflict between Madhi and Egypt, and for their safe return to their own city of Quarnu." The authors of this inscription describe themselves as being under the MinÆan King "Abi-yadÁ Yathi," and being "governors of Tsar and Ashur and the further bank of the river." Tsar is often mentioned in the Egyptian monuments as a frontier fortress on the Arabian side of what is now the Suez Canal, while another inscription mentions Gaza, and shows that the authority of the MinÆan rulers extended to Edom, and came into close contact with Palestine and the surrounding tribes. Doubtless the protection of trade-routes was a main cause of this extension of fortified posts and wealthy cities, over such a wide extent of territory. From the most ancient times there has always been a stream of traffic between East and West, flowing partly by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and from the ends of these Eastern seas to the Mediterranean, and partly by caravan routes across Asia. The possession of one of these routes by Solomon in alliance with Tyre, led to the ephemeral prosperity of the Jewish kingdom at a much later period; and the wars waged between Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hittites were doubtless influenced to a considerable extent by the desire to command these great lines of commerce. Arabia stood in a position of great advantage as regards this international commerce, being a half-way house between East and West, protected from enemies by impassable deserts, and with inland and sheltered seas in every direction. Its southern provinces also had the advantage of being the great, and in some cases the sole, producers of commodities of great value and in constant request. Frankincense and other spices were indispensable in temples where bloody sacrifices formed part of the religion. The atmosphere of Solomon's temple must have been that of a sickening slaughterhouse, and the fumes of incense could alone enable the priests and worshippers to support it. This would apply to thousands of other temples through Asia, and doubtless the palaces of kings and nobles suffered from uncleanliness and insanitary arrangements, and required an antidote to evil smells to make them endurable. The consumption of incense must therefore have been immense in the ancient world, and it is not easy to see where it could have been derived from except from the regions which exhaled. "SabÆan odours from the shores of Araby the blest." The next interesting result, however, of these Arabian discoveries is, that they disclose not only a civilized and commercial kingdom at a remote antiquity, but that they show us a literary people, who had their own alphabet and system of writing at a date comparable to that of Egyptian hieroglyphics and ChaldÆan cuneiforms, and long prior to the oldest known inscription in Phoenician characters. The first Arabian inscriptions were discovered and copied by Seetzen in 1810, and were classed together as Himyaritic, from Himyar, the country of the classical Homerites. It was soon discovered that the language was Semitic, and that the alphabet resembled that of the Ethiopic or Gheez, and was a modification of the Phoenician written vertically instead of horizontally. Further discoveries and researches have led to the result, which is principally due to Dr. Glaser, that the so-called Himyaritic inscriptions fell into two groups, one of which is distinctly older than the other, containing fuller and more primitive grammatical forms. These are MinÆan, while the inscriptions in the later dialect are SabÆan. It is apparent, therefore, that the MinÆan rule and literature must have preceded those of SabÆa by a time sufficiently long to have allowed for considerable changes both in words and grammar to have grown up, not by foreign conquest, but by evolution among the tribes of the same race within Arabia itself. Now the SabÆan kingdom can be traced back with considerable certainty to the time of Solomon, 1000 years b.c., and had in all probability existed many centuries before; while we have already a list of thirty-three MinÆan kings, which number will doubtless be enlarged by further discoveries; and the oldest inscriptions point, as in Egypt, to an antecedent state of commerce and civilization. It is evident therefore that Arabia must be classed with Egypt and ChaldÆa as one of the countries which point to the existence of highly civilized communities in an extreme antiquity; and that it is by no means impossible that the records of Southern Arabia may ultimately be carried back as far as those of Sargon I., or even of Menes. This is the more probable as several ancient traditions point to Southern Arabia, and possibly to the adjoining coast of North-eastern Africa, as the source of the earliest civilizations. Thus Oannes is said to have come up from the Persian Gulf and taught the ChaldÆans the first arts of civilization. The Phoenicians traced their origin to the Bahrein Islands in the same Gulf. The Egyptians looked with reverence and respect to Punt, which is generally believed to have meant Arabia Felix and Somali-land; and they placed the origin of their letters and civilization, not in Upper or Lower, but in Middle Egypt, at Abydos where Thoth and Osiris were said to have reigned, where the Nile is only separated from the Red Sea by a narrow land pass which was long one of the principal commercial routes between Arabia and Egypt. The close connection between Egypt and Punt in early times is confirmed by the terms of respect in which Punt is spoken of in Egyptian inscriptions, contrasting with the epithets of "barbarian" and "vile," which are applied to other surrounding nations such as the Hittites, Libyans, and Negroes. And the celebrated equipment of a fleet by the great queen Hatasu of the nineteenth dynasty, to make a commercial voyage to Punt, and its return with a rich freight, and the king and queen of the country with offerings, on a visit to the Pharaoh, reminding one of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, shows that the two nations were on friendly terms, and that the Red Sea and opposite coast of Africa had been navigated from a very early period. The physical type also of the chiefs of Punt as depicted on the Egyptian monuments is very like that of the aristocratic type of the earliest known Egyptian portraits.
CHIEF OF PUNT AND TWO MEN. One point seems sufficiently clear; that wherever may have been the original seat of the Aryans, that of the Semites must be placed in Arabia. Everywhere else we can trace them as an immigrating or invading people, who found prior populations of different race, but in Arabia they seem to have been aboriginal. Thus in ChaldÆa and Assyria, the Semites are represented in the earliest history and traditions as coming from the South, partly by the Persian Gulf and partly across the Arabian and Syrian deserts, and by degrees amalgamating with and superseding the previous Accadian population. In Egypt the Semitic element was a late importation which never permanently affected the old Egyptian civilization. In Syria and Palestine, the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and Hebrews were all immigrants from the Persian Gulf or Arabian frontier, either directly or through the medium of Egypt and Assyria, who did not even pretend to be the earliest inhabitants, but found other races, as the Amorites and Hittites, in possession, whose traditions again went back to barbarous aborigines of Zammumim, who seemed to them to stammer their unintelligible language. The position of Semites in the Moslem world in Asia and Africa is distinctly due to the conquests of the Arab Mohammed and the spread of his religion. In Arabia alone we find Semites and Semites only, from the very beginning, and the peculiar language and character of the race must have been first developed in the growing civilization which preceded the ancient MinÆan Empire, probably as the later stone age was passing into that of metal, and the primitive state of hunters and fishers into the higher social level of agriculturists and traders. To return from these remote speculations to a subject of more immediate interest, the discovery of these MinÆan inscriptions shows the existence of an alphabet older than that of the earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician letters. The alphabets of Greece, Rome, and all modern nations are beyond all doubt derived from that of Phoenicia, and it has been generally supposed that this was formed from an abridgment of the hieroglyphics or hieratics of Egypt. But the MinÆan inscriptions raise the question whether the Phoenician alphabet itself and the kindred alphabets of Palestine, Syria, and other countries near the Arabian frontier were not derived from Arabia rather than from Egypt. The MinÆan language and letters are certainly older forms of Semitic speech and writing, and it seems more likely that they should have been adopted, with dialectic variations, by other Semitic races, with whom Arabia had a long coterminous position and constant intercourse by caravans, than that these races should have remained totally ignorant of letters, until Phoenicia borrowed them from Egypt. Moreover, as Professor Sayce shows, this theory gives a better explanation of the names of the Phoenician letters, which in many cases have no resemblance to the symbols which denote them. Thus the first letter Aleph, "an ox," really resembles the head of that animal in the MinÆan inscriptions, while no likeness can be traced to any Egyptian hieroglyph used for 'a.' Should these speculations be confirmed, they will considerably modify our conceptions as to the early history of the Old Testament. It would seem that Canaan, before the Israelite invasion, was already a settled and civilized country, with a distinct alphabet and literature of its own, older than those of Phoenicia; and it may be hoped that further researches in Arabia and Palestine may disclose records, buried under the ruins of ancient cities, which may vie in antiquity with those of Egypt and ChaldÆa. But in the meantime we must be content to rely on the records and monuments of these two countries, and especially those of Egypt, as giving us the longest standard of genuine historical time, extending backwards about 7000 years from the present century. The existence of civilization and commerce among other ancient nations which have disappeared from history, have received a remarkable confirmation from the excavations of Dr. Schliemann at Troy and MycenÆ. The site of Troy has been identified with the mound of Hissarlik which formed its citadel, and the accuracy of the descriptions in Homer's Iliad has been wonderfully verified. The ruins of seven successive towns, superimposed one on the other, have been found in excavating the mass of dÉbris down to the bed rock. The lowest of these was a settlement apparently of the later neolithic or earliest bronze ages, while the next, built on the ruins of the first at a level of eleven to twenty feet above it, was a strongly fortified city, which had been destroyed by fire, and which answers almost exactly to the description of Homer's Troy. The citadel hill had been inclosed by massive walls, and was surmounted by a stately palace and other buildings, the foundations of which still remain. It was protected on one side by the river Scamander, and on the other the city extended over the plain at the foot of the citadel, and was itself also surrounded by a strong wall, of which a small fragment remains. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth settlements consisted of mean huts or dwelling-houses built of quarry stones and clay, and the seventh, or uppermost, was the GrÆco-Roman Ilion of classical writers. The main interest therefore centres in the second city, which, from the articles found in it and the many repairs and alterations of the walls and buildings, must have been for a long time the seat of a nourishing and powerful people, enriched by commerce, and far advanced in the industrial and fine arts. Notwithstanding the destruction and probable plunder of the city, the quantity of gold and silver found was very considerable, chiefly in the vaults or casemates built into the foundations of the walls, which were covered up with dÉbris when the citadel was burnt, and the roofs and upper buildings fell in. In one place alone Dr. Schliemann found the celebrated treasure containing sixty articles of gold and silver, which had evidently been packed together in a square wooden box, which had disappeared with the intense heat. The nature of these citadels shows a high degree not only of civilization but of wealth and luxury, as proved by the skill and taste of jeweller's work displayed in the female ornaments, which comprise three sumptuous diadems, ear-rings, hairpins, and bracelets. There are also numerous vases and cups of terra-cotta, and a few of gold and silver, and bars of silver which have every appearance of being used for money, being of the same form and weight. The fragments of ordinary pottery are innumerable, the finer and more perfect vases are often of a graceful form, and moulded into shapes of animals or human heads, and decorated with spirals, rosettes, and other ornaments of the type which is more fully illustrated as that of the pre-Hellenic civilization of MycenÆ. For Schliemann has not only restored the historic reality of Priam and the city of Troy, but also that of Agamemnon "King of men," and his capital of MycenÆ. The result of his explorations on this site has been to show that a still larger and more wealthy city existed here for a longer period than Troy, and which affected a more extensive area, for its peculiar art and civilization were widely diffused over the whole of the eastern coast of Greece and the adjoining islands, and specimens of it have been found on the opposite coasts of Asia Minor, as we have seen at Troy, and as far off as Cyprus and Egypt, where they were doubtless carried by commerce. The existence of an extensive commerce is proved by the profusion of gold which has been found in the vaults and tombs buried under the dÉbris of the ruined city, for gold is not a native product, but must have been obtained from abroad, as also the bronze, copper, and tin required for the manufacture of weapons. The city also evidently owed its importance to its situation on the Isthmus of Corinth, commanding the trade route between the Gulfs of Argos and of Corinth, and thus connecting the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia with the Western Sea and Europe. The still older city of Tiryns, of which MycenÆ was probably an offshoot, stood nearly on the shore of the eastern gulf, while MycenÆ was in the middle of the isthmus about eight miles from either gulf. Tiryns was also explored by Schliemann, and showed the same plans of buildings and fortifications as Troy and MycenÆ, and the same class of relics, only less extensive and more archaic than those of MycenÆ, which was evidently the more important city during the golden period of this great MycenÆan civilization. Those who wish to pursue this interesting subject further will find an admirable account of it in the English translation of Schliemann's works and essays, with a full description of each exploration, and numerous illustrations of the buildings and articles found. For my present object I only refer to it as an illustration of the position that Egypt and ChaldÆa do not stand alone in presenting proofs of high antiquity, but that other nations, such as the Chinese, the Hittites, the MinÆans of Southern Arabia, the MycenÆans, Trojans, Lydians, Phrygians, Cretans, and doubtless many others, also existed as populous, powerful, and civilized states, at a time long antecedent to the dawn of classical history. If these ancient empires and civilization became so completely forgotten, or survived only in dim traditions of myths and poetical legends, the reason seems to be that they kept no written records, or at any rate none in the form of enduring inscriptions. We know ancient Egypt from its hieroglyphics, and from Manetho's history; ChaldÆa and Assyria from the cuneiform writing on clay tablets; China, up to about 2500 b.c., from its written histories; but it is singular that the other ancient civilizations have left few or no inscriptions. This is the more remarkable in the case of the MycenÆan cities explored by Dr. Schliemann, for their date is not so very remote, their jewellery, vases, and signet-rings are profusely decorated, their dead interred in stately tombs with large quantities of gold and silver, and yet not a single instance has been found of anything resembling alphabetical or symbolical writing, or of any form of inscription. Atreus, Agamemnon, and a long line of kings lie in their stately tombs, with their gold masks and breastplates, and their arms and treasures about them, without a word or sign to distinguish father from son, ancestor from successor. Their queens are buried in their robes of cloth of gold, their tiaras, necklaces, bracelets, rings and jewels, equally without a word to say which was Clytemnestra and which Electra. How different is this from the Egyptian royal tombs and palaces, where pompous inscriptions record the genealogies of kings for fifty or more generations, and the first care of every Pharaoh is to carve the annals of his exploits on imperishable granite! Another strange peculiarity of this MycenÆan civilization is the absence of religious subjects. Images and pictures of their gods abound on all the monuments of Egypt and ChaldÆa. Every frieze and tablet, every seal and scarabÆus, is full of representations of Osiris and Isis, of Thoth and Ammon; or in ChaldÆa of Bel, Merodach, and Istar, and their other pantheon of gods, each under its own symbolical form, and innumerable little idols or figurines attested their hold on the population. But at Troy, Tiryns, and MycenÆ there is nothing of the sort. Animals and mortal men are freely depicted on the vases, and moulded as ornaments for domestic utensils, but religious subjects are so scarce that it is even doubtful whether a few scanty specimens bear this character or not. There is a pit in the central court of the palace at MycenÆ which has been thought to be a sacrificial pit under an altar, but this rather because such an altar is described in Homer, than for any positive evidence. There are also a very few figurines of terra-cotta, which have been thought to be idols, because they are too clumsy to be taken for representations of the human figure by such skilled artists, and because they bear some sort of resemblance to the rude Phoenician idols of the goddess Astarte. But, with this exception, there is nothing at Troy or MycenÆ to indicate a belief in the Homeric or any other mythology. As a question of dates, we know that the supremacy of MycenÆ and its civilization came to an end with the invasion of the Dorians, which is generally placed about 1000 b.c. We know also that it must have had a long existence, but for anything approaching to a date we must refer to the few traces which connect it with Egypt. A scarabÆus was found at MycenÆ with the name of Queen Ti engraved on it who lived in the thirteenth century b.c. MycenÆan vases have been found of the older type with lines and spirals, in Egyptian tombs of about 1400 b.c., and of the later type with animals in tombs of about 1100 b.c., and Mr. Flinders Petrie, by whom they were discovered, says that any error in these dates cannot exceed 100 years. MycenÆan pottery has also been found at Thera under volcanic ashes which geologists say were thrown up about 1500 b.c. We are pretty safe, therefore, in supposing this MycenÆan civilization to have flourished between the limits of 1600 and 1000 b.c. In this case it must have been contemporary with the great events of the New Empire in Egypt which followed on the expulsion of the Hyksos; with the victorious campaigns of Ahmes and Thotmes which carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and to the Black Sea; with the rise of the Hittite power which extended far and wide over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms in Syria with Ramses II.; and with the coalition of naval powers which on two occasions, in the reigns of Menepthah and Ramses III., commanded the sea and invaded Egypt. The mention of AchÆans among the allies whose fleet was defeated in the sea-fight on the Pelusian mouth of the Nile, depicted on the triumphal tablet of Ramses III., becomes an historical reality, and some of the hostile galleys may well have been those of a predecessor of Agamemnon. It is doubtful, however, whether these MycenÆans or AchÆans can be properly called Greek. Both their civilization and art are Asiatic rather than Hellenic; they have left no clue to their language in any writing or inscription; and the type of the race, as far as we can judge of it from paintings on the vases, was totally unlike that of classical Greece.
QUEEN SENDING WARRIOR TO BATTLE. (From "Warrior Vase," MycenÆ. Schliemann.) In one instance alone the human form is represented on the vases found at MycenÆ, viz. on that known as the great "warrior vase." This is a large amphora, with a broad band of figures round it, representing on one side attacking warriors hurling spears, and on the other a queen, or female figure, sending out warriors to repel them. The vase is broken, but there are in all eight figures with their heads nearly perfect, and all of the same type, which is such an extraordinary one, that I annex a copy of the woman and one of the warriors. One asks oneself in amazement, can this swine-snouted caricature of humanity be the divine Helen, whose beauty set contending nations in arms, and even as a shade made Faust immortal with a kiss; and this other, Agamemnon, king of men, or the god-like Achilles? And yet certainly they must be faces which the dwellers in MycenÆ either copied from nature, or introduced as conventional ideals. They cannot be taken as first childish attempts at drawing the human face, like those of the palÆolithic savages of the grottos of the Vezere, for they are the work of advanced artists who, in other cases, drew beautiful decorations and life-like animals; and in these figures the attitudes, dress, and armour show that they could draw with spirit and accuracy, and give a faithful representation of details when they chose to do so.
ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT. (From a Babylonian cylinder.) The only approach to a clue I can find for an explanation of these extraordinary MycenÆan faces is afforded by the picture of Adam and Eve, with the Serpent and Tree of Life, on an old Babylonian cylinder in the British Museum. It will be seen at once that there is a considerable resemblance between the two types of countenance, and it strikes me as possible that, as MycenÆan art was so largely derived from Babylonian, this may have become a conventional type for the first human ancestors, in which it was thought by the MycenÆan copyists that heroes and kings ought to be represented. This, however, is a mere conjecture, and all we can infer with any certainty from Troy and MycenÆ is, that a considerable civilization and commerce must have prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean at a date long prior to the commencement of classical history, though much later than that of the older records of Egypt and ChaldÆa. Egypt—Book of the Dead—Its Morality—Metaphysical Character—Origins of Religions—Ghosts—Animism—Astronomy and Astrology—Morality—Pantheism and Polytheism—Egyptian Ideas of Future Life and Judgment—Egyptian Genesis—Divine Emanations—Plurality of Gods and Animal Worship—Sun Worship and Solar Myths—Knowledge of Astronomy—Orientation of Pyramids—Theory of Future Life—the Ka—the Soul—Confession of Faith before Osiris. ChaldÆan Religion—Oldest Form Accadian—Shamanism—Growth of Philosophical Religion—Astronomy and Astrology—Accadian Trinities—Anu, Mull-il, Ea—Twelve great Gods—Bel-Ishtar—Merodach—Assur—Pantheism—Wordsworth—Magic and Omens—Penitential Psalms—Conclusions from. The religious ideas of a nation afford a pretty good test of the antiquity of its civilization. Thus, if 5000 years hence all traces of England being lost except a copy of the Athanasian Creed, it would be a legitimate inference that the race who retained such a creed as part of their ritual, had long passed the primitive period of fetichism or animism, had schools of priests and philosophers, and that their religion had developed into a stage of subtle and profound metaphysical speculations. If this would be true in the hypothetical case of England, it is equally true in the actual case of Egypt. In its sacred book, the Todtenbuch, or Book of the Dead, which we meet with at the earliest periods of Egyptian history, we find conceptions of the Great First Cause of the Universe, which are in many respects identical with those of Athanasius. In fact, with some slight alterations of expression, his creed might be a chapter of the Todtenbuch, and it is clear that in his controversy with Arius he got his inspiration from his native Alexandria, and from the old Egyptian religion stripped of its polytheistic and idolatrous elements, and adapted to the modern ideas of the Neo-Platonic philosophy and of Christianity. The Egyptian religion, as disclosed to us in the earliest records, is one which of itself proves its great antiquity. There is an extensive literature of a religious character; the Book of the Dead, which contains many of the principal prayers and hymns, and descriptions of the Last Judgment, is already a sacred book. Portions of it are certainly older than the time of Menes, and it had already acquired such an authority in the times of Pepi, Teta, and Unas, of the sixth dynasty, about 3800 b.c., that the inner walls of their pyramids are covered with hieroglyphics of chapters taken from it. From this time forward, almost every tomb and mummy-case contains quotations from it, just as passages of the Bible are quoted on our own gravestones. The Book of Isis, and hymns to various gods, are of the same nature and early date; and in addition to these, there are ethical treatises, ascribed to kings of the oldest dynasties, as well as works on medicine, geometry, mensuration, and arithmetic. Education was very general, as is proved by the fact that the workmen at the mines of Wady Magarah could scrawl hieroglyphic inscriptions on the walls of their tunnels, and on their blocks of dressed stone. Birch, in his Ancient History of Egypt from the Monuments, which I prefer to quote from as, being published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, it cannot be suspected of any bias to discredit orthodoxy, says that, "In their moral law the Egyptians followed the same precepts as the Decalogue (ascribed to Moses 2500 years later), and enumerated treason, murder, adultery, theft, and the practice of magic as crimes of the deepest dye." The position of women is one of the surest tests of an advanced civilization; for in rude times, and among savage races, force reigns supreme, and the weaker sex is always the slave or drudge of the stronger one. It is only when intellectual and moral considerations are firmly established that the claims of women to an equality begin to be recognized. Now in the earliest records of domestic and political life in Egypt, we find this equality more fully recognized than it is perhaps among ourselves in the nineteenth century. Quoting again from Birch, "The Egyptian woman appears always as the equal and companion of her father, brethren, and husband. She was never secluded in a harem, sat at meals with them, had equal rights before the law, served in the priesthood, and even mounted the throne." In fact the state of civilization in Egypt 6000 years ago appears to have been higher in all essential respects than it has ever been since, or is now, in any Asiatic and in many European countries. And it has every appearance of being indigenous, and having grown up on the soil. There are no traces in the oldest traditions of any foreign importation, such as we find in the early traditions of other countries. There is no fish-man who comes up out of the Persian Gulf and teaches the ChaldÆans the first elements of civilization; no Cadmus who teaches the Greeks their first letters; no Manco-Capac who lands on the shore of Peru. On the contrary, all the Egyptian traditions are of Egyptian gods, like Osiris and Thoth, who reigned in the valley of the Nile, and invented hieroglyphics and other arts. These are lost in a fabulous antiquity, and the only trace of a link to connect the historical Egyptians with the neolithic races whose remains are found in abundance in the form of flint knives and arrows, and are brought up by borings through thick deposits of Nile mud, or the still older palÆolithic savages, whose rude implements were found by General Pitt-Rivers and other explorers in quaternary gravels near Thebes of geological antiquity, is furnished by the use of a stone knife to make the first incision on the corpse in turning it into a mummy, and by the animal worship, which may have been a relic of primitive fetichism and totemism. The highly metaphysical nature of the Egyptian creed is another conclusive proof of the antiquity of the religion. Among existing races we find similar religions corresponding to similar stages of civilization. With the very rudest races, religion consists mainly of ghost worship and animism. Herbert Spencer has shown how dreams lead to the belief that man consists of two elements, a body and a spirit, or shadowy self, which wanders forth in sleep, meets with strange adventures, and returns when the body awakes. In the longer sleep of death, this shadowy self becomes a ghost which haunts its old abodes and former associates, mostly with an evil intent, and which has to be deceived or propitiated, to prevent it from doing mischief. Hence the sacrifices and offerings, and the many devices for cheating the ghost by carrying the dead body by devious paths to some safe locality. Hence also the superstitious dread of evil spirits, and the interment with the corpse of food and implements to induce the ghost to remain tranquilly in the grave, or to set out comfortably on its journey to another world. Animism is another tap-root of savage superstition. As the child sees life in the doll, so the savage sees life in every object, animate or inanimate, which comes in contact with him, and affects his existence. Animals, and even stocks and stones, are supposed to have souls, and who knows that these may not be the souls of departed ancestors, and have some mysterious power of helping or of hurting him? In any case the safer plan is to propitiate them by worship and sacrifice. From these rude beginnings we see nations as they advance in civilization rising to higher conceptions, developing their ghosts into gods, and confining their operations to the greater phenomena of Nature, such as the sky, the earth, the sea, the sun, the stars, storms, seasons, thunder, and the like. And by degrees the unity of Nature begins to be felt by the higher minds; priestly castes are established who have leisure for meditation; ideas are transmitted from generation to generation; and the vague and primitive Nature worship passes into the phase of philosophical and scientific religion. The popular rites and superstitions linger on with the mass of the population, but an inner circle of hereditary priests refines and elevates them, and begins to ask for a solution of the great problems of the universe; what it means, and how it was created; the mystery of good and evil; man's origin, future life and destiny; and all the questions which, down to the present day, are asked though never answered by the higher minds of the higher races of civilized man. In this stage of religious development metaphysical speculations occupy a foremost place. Priests of Heliopolis, Magi of Eridhu and of Ur, reasoned like Christian fathers and Milton's devils of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," and like them "Found no end, in wandering mazes lost." Theories of theism and pantheism, of creations and incarnations, of Trinities and atonements, of polarities between good and evil, free-will and necessity, were argued and answered, now in one direction and now in another. Science contributed its share, sometimes in the form of crude cosmogonies and first attempts at ethnology, but principally through the medium of astronomy. An important function of the priests was to form a calendar, predict the seasons, and regulate the holding of religious rites at the proper times. Hence the course of the heavens was carefully watched, the stars were mapped out into constellations, through which the progress of the sun and planets was recorded; and myths sprang into existence based on the sun's daily rising and setting, and its annual journey through the seasons and the signs of the zodiac. Mixed up with astronomy was astrology, which, watching the sun, moon, and five planets, inferred life from motion, and recognized Gods exerting a divine influence on human events. The sacred character of the priests was confirmed by the popular conviction that they were at the same time prophets and magicians, and that they alone were able to interpret the will of personified powers of Nature, and influence them for good or evil. The element of morality is one of the latest to appear. It is only after a long progress in civilization that ideas of personal sin and righteousness, of an overruling justice and goodness, of future rewards and punishments, are developed from the cruder conceptions and superstitious observances of earlier times. It was a long road from the jealous and savage local god of the Hebrew tribes, who smelt the sweet savour of burnt sacrifices and was pleased, and who commanded the extermination of enemies, and the slaughter of women and children, to the Supreme Jehovah, who loved justice and mercy better than the blood of bulls and rams. It is one great merit of the Bible, intelligently read, that it records so clearly the growth and evolution of moral ideas, from a plane almost identical with that of the Red Indians, to the supreme height of the Sermon on the Mount and St. Paul's definition of charity. There is one phenomenon which appears very commonly in these ancient religions, that of degeneration. After having risen to a certain height of pure and lofty conception they cease to advance, branch out into fanciful fables accompanied by cruel and immoral rites, and finally decay and perish. This is an inevitable consequence of the law of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death, which underlies all existence. "The old order changes, giving place to new." Environment changes, and religions, laws, and social institutions change with it. Empires rise and fall, old civilizations disappear, old creeds become incredible, and often, for a time, the course of humanity seems to be retrograde. But as the flowing tide rises, though the successive waves on the shore advance and recede, evolution, or the law of progress, in the long run prevails, and amidst the many oscillations of temporary conditions, carries the human race ever upwards towards higher things. In the case of ancient religions it is easy to see how this process of degeneration is carried out. Priests who were the pioneers of progress, and leaders of advanced thought, became first conservatives, and then obscurantists. Pantheistic conceptions, and personifications of divine attributes, lead to polytheism. As religions become popular, and pass from the learned few to the ignorant many, they become vulgarized, and the real meaning of myths and symbols is either lost or confined to a select inner circle. But for my present purpose, which is mainly chronological, these vicissitudes in religious beliefs are not important. If, at the earliest date to which authentic history extends, we find a national religion which has already passed from the primitive into the metaphysical stage, and which embodies abstract ideas, astronomical observations, and a high and pure code of morals, it is a legitimate inference that it is the outcome of a long antecedent era of civilization. This is eminently the case with regard to the ancient religions of Egypt and ChaldÆa. The ancient Egyptians were the most religious people ever known. Their thoughts were so fixed on a future life that, as Herodotus says, they looked upon their houses as mere temporary inns, and their tombs as their true permanent homes. The idea of an immediate day of judgment for each individual soul after death was so fixed in their minds that it exercised a constant practical influence on their life and conduct. Piety to the gods, loyalty to the throne, obedience to superiors, justice and mercy to inferiors, and observance of all the principal moral laws, and especially that of truthfulness, were enforced by the conviction that no sooner had the breath departed from the body, and it had been deposited as a mummy, with its Ka or second shadowy self, in the tomb, than the soul would have to appear before the supreme judge Osiris, and the forty-two heavenly jurors, where it would have to confess the naked truth, and be tried and rewarded or punished according to its merits. It is very interesting, therefore, to learn what the religion was which had taken such a firm hold of the minds of an entire nation, and which maintained that hold for the best part of 5000 years. JUDGMENT OF THE SOUL BY OSIRIS.—WEIGHING GOOD AND BAD DEEDS. (From Champollion's Egypt.) Our authority for the nature of this religion is derived mainly from the Todtenbuch or Book of the Dead, which was the Egyptian bible. This sacred Book was of immense antiquity, and much of it was certainly in existence before the time of Menes. We know it from the multiplied copies which were frequently deposited in tombs, and from the innumerable extracts and quotations which appear on almost every mummy-case and sarcophagus, as well as from the many manuscripts of works on religious subjects which have been preserved in papyri. The fundamental idea was that of a primitive ocean, or, if you like to call it chaos, of nebulous matter without form and void, and of a one infinite and eternal God who evolved himself and the Universe from his own essence. He is called in the Todtenbuch "the one only being, the sole Creator, unchangeable in his infinite perfection, present in all time, past and future, everywhere and yet nowhere." But although one in essence, God is not one in person. He exists as Father, but reproduces himself under another aspect as Mother, and under a third as Son. This Trinity is three and yet one, and has all the attributes of the one—infinity, eternity, and omnipotence. Thus far the Athanasian Creed might be a chapter of the Todtenbuch, and it is very evident where the Alexandrian saint got those subtle metaphysical ideas, which are so opposed to the rigid monotheistic creeds of Judaism and Mahometanism. But the Egyptian religion was more logical, and carried these ideas much further than an original Trinity. It is evident that if we admit the two fundamental ideas, 1st, that God is the only real existence, author of and identical with the universe; 2nd, that this incomprehensible essence or First Cause can be made more comprehensible by personifying his various qualities and manifestations, there is no reason why we should stop at three. If we admit a Trinity of Father, Mother, and Son, why not admit a daughter and other descendants; or if you personify the Power to make a universe, the Knowledge how to make it, and the Will to do it, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, why not the Benevolence to do it well, the Malevolence to do it badly, and a hundred other attributes which metaphysical ingenuity can devise to account for the complication of the known, and the mysteries of the unknown facts of existence? The Egyptian priests accepted this view, and admitted a whole Pantheon of secondary gods who were either personifications of different attributes of the Supreme God, or separate portions of the one Divine Essence. Thus Ammon was God considered in his attribute of the first Generative power; Pthah the supreme Artist who fashioned all things wisely; Osiris the good and benevolent aspect of the Deity; Set or Typhon his opposite or the Author of Evil, and so on. And once personified, these attributes soon came to be considered as separate beings; to have a female principle or wives added to them, and to be worshipped as the patron gods of separate temples and provinces. Finally, the pantheistic idea became so prevalent, and that of separate personifications of the Deity was carried so far, that portions of the Divine essence were supposed to be incarnated in the sun and heavenly bodies, in the Pharaoh and his family, and even in bulls, cats, and other sacred animals. In the latter case it may be a question whether we do not see a survival of the old superstitious fetiches and totems of semi-savage times, adopted by the priests into their theology, as so many pagan superstitions were by the early Christian missionaries. At any rate such was the result, a mixture of the most childish and absurd forms of popular superstition, with a highly philosophical and moral creed, held by the educated classes and stamped upon the mass of the nation by the firmly established belief in a future life and day of judgment. Among the more philosophical articles of this creed, astronomy assumed a prominent place from a very early date. The sun, it is true, was described in the original Cosmogony as having been called into existence by the word of the Supreme God, but it came to be taken as his visible representative, and finally worshipped as a god itself. Its different phases were studied and received different names, as Horus when on the horizon rising or setting, Ra in its midday splendour, Osiris during its journey in the night through the underground world of darkness. Of these Ra naturally had the pre-eminence; the title of Pharaoh, or Pi-ra, was that given to kings, who were assumed to be semi-divine beings descended from the Sun. The Osiris myth which was the basis of the national belief in a future life and day of judgment was clearly solar. Egyptian astronomy, like that of the Chaldees and all early nations, assumed that the sky was a crystal dome or firmament which separated the waters of the upper world from the earth and waters below, and corresponded with a similar nether world of darkness below the earth. The Sun was born or rose into the upper world every morning, waxed in strength and glory as his bark navigated the upper waters until noon, then declined and finally sank into the nether world or died, slain by an envious Typhon, but to be born again next morning after traversing the perils and encountering the demons of the realm of darkness. The same idea was repeated by the annual course of the sun through Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, and it translated itself as applied to man into the ideas of birth, growth, manhood, decline, and death, to be followed by a sojourn in Hades, a day of judgment, and a resurrection. The Egyptian religion, however, seems never to have been so largely astronomical as that of ChaldÆa, and to have concentrated itself mainly on the Sun. The planets and signs of the zodiac did not, as with the Chaldees, afford a principal element of their sacred books and mythologies. The Egyptian priests had doubtless long studied astronomy; they had watched the stars, traced the annual course of the sun, divided the year into months and the circle into 360°, and constructed calendars for bringing the civil into correspondence with the sidereal year. They not only had intercalated the five supplemental days, bringing the duration of the year from 360 to 365, but they had invented a sothic cycle for the odd quarter of a day, by which at the end of every 1460 years a year was added, and the sun brought back to rise on the first day of the first month of Thoth in the same place in the heavens, determined by the heliacal risings of the brightest of the stars, Sothis or Sirius. But they applied this knowledge, which must have been gathered from long observations, mainly to practical purposes, such as the reform of the calendar and the orientation of the pyramids, temples, and tombs, rather than to mythology. The idea of a future life, which took such a firm hold of all classes of ancient Egypt, is that to which we are indebted for the preservation of these wonderful records of the remote past. The theory was that man consisted of three parts; the body or ordinary living man; the Ka or Double, which was a sort of shadowy self which came out of the body and returned to it as in dreams; and the soul, a still more subtle essence, which at death went to the gods, was judged, and either rewarded for its merits by living with them in heaven, or punished for its sins by being sent to the nether world of torment. But this soul still retained such a connection with its former body as to come down from time to time to visit it; while the Ka or Double retained the old connection so closely as to live habitually in it, only coming out to eat, drink, and repeat the acts of its former life, but incapable of existing without a physical basis in the old body or some likeness of it. The same doctrine of the Double was applied to all animated and even to inanimate objects, so that the shadowy man could come out of his mummy, live in his own shadowy house, feed on shadowy food, be surrounded by shadowy geese, oxen, and other objects of his former possessions. Hence arose the extraordinary care in providing a fitting tomb and preserving the mummy, or, failing the mummy, which in course of time might decay, providing a portrait-statue or painted likeness, which might give a point d'appui for the Ka, and a receptacle for the occasional visits of the soul. While these were preserved, conscious personal life was continued beyond the grave, and the good man who went to heaven was immortal. But if these were destroyed and the physical basis perished, the Ka and soul were left without a home, and either perished also, or were left to flit like gibbering ghosts through the world of shadows without a local habitation or a name. The origin of this theory as regards the Ka is easily explained. It is, as Herbert Spencer has conclusively shown, a natural inference from dreams, and is found everywhere, from interments of the stone period down to the crude beliefs of existing savages. It even survives among many civilized races in the belief in ghosts, and the precautions taken to prevent the Ka's of dead men from returning to haunt their former homes and annoy their posterity. The origin of the third element or soul is not so clear. It may either be a relic of the animism, which among savage races attributes life to every object in nature, or a philosophical deduction of more advanced periods, which sees an universal spirit underlying all creation, and recognizing in man a spark of this spirit which is indestructible, and either migrates into fresh forms, or into fresh spheres of celestial or infernal regions, and is finally absorbed in the great ocean from which it sprang. It is singular that we find almost the precise form of this Egyptian belief among many existing savage or semi-civilized men separated by wide distances in different quarters of the world. The Negroes of the Gold Coast believe in the same three entities, and they call the soul which exists independently of the man, before his birth and after his death, the Kra, a name which is almost identical with the Egyptian Ka. The Navajos and other tribes of Red Indians have precisely the same belief. It seems probable that as we find it in the earliest Egyptian records, it was a development, evolved through ages of growing civilization by a succession of learned priests, from the primitive fetichism and fear of ghosts of rude ancestors; and in the animal worship and other superstitions of later times we find traces of these primitive beliefs still surviving among the mass of the population. Be this as it may, this theory of a future life was firmly rooted at the dawn of Egyptian history, and we are indebted to it, and to the dryness of the climate, for the marvellous preservation of records which give us such an intimate acquaintance with the history, the religion, the literature, and the details of a domestic and social life which is distant from our own by an interval of more than 6000 years. No other nation ever attained to such a vivid and practical belief in a future existence as these ancient Egyptians. Taking merely the material test of money, what an enormous capital must have been expended in pyramids, tombs, and mummies; what a large proportion of his income must every Egyptian of the upper classes have spent in the preparations for a future life; how shadowy and dim does the idea of immortality appear in comparison among the foremost races of the present day! The elevated moral code of the Todtenbuch is another proof of the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Morality is a plant of slow growth which has hardly an existence among rude and primitive tribes, and is only slowly evolved either by contact with superior races or by long ages of settled social order. How many centuries did it take before the crude and ferocious ideas of the Hebrew tribes wandering in the desert or warring with the Canaanites, were transformed into the lofty and humane conceptions of the later prophets, of Hillel and of Jesus! And yet we find all the best maxims of this later morality already existing 5000 years before the Sermon on the Mount, in the Sacred Book of ancient Egypt. The prayer of the soul pleading in the day of judgment before Osiris and the Celestial Jury, which embodies the idea of moral perfection entertained by the contemporaries of Menes, contains the following articles— "I have told no lies; committed no frauds; been good to widows; not overtasked servants; not lazy or negligent; done nothing hateful to the gods; been kind to slaves; promoted no strife; caused no one to weep; committed no murder; stolen no offerings to the dead; made no fraudulent gains; seized no lands wrongfully; not tampered with weights and measures; not taken the milk from sucklings; not molested sacred beasts or birds; not cut off or monopolized watercourses; have sown joy and not sorrow; have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothed the naked: "I am pure, I am pure." It is evident that such an ideal of life, not imported from foreign sources, but the growth of an internal civilization, must be removed by an enormous time from the cannibal feasts and human sacrifices of the first glimpses of ideas of a future life in the stone ages. It is to be observed also that the religion of ancient Egypt seems to be of native growth. No trace is to be found, either in record or tradition, of any importation from a foreign source, such as may be seen in the ChaldÆan legend of Oannes and other religions of antiquity. On the contrary, all the Egyptian myths and traditions ascribe the invention of religion, arts, and literature, to Thoth, Osiris, Horus, and other native Egyptian gods. The invention of the art of writing by hieroglyphics affords strong confirmation of this view. It is evidently a development on Egyptian soil, in prehistoric times, of the picture-writing of a primitive period. The symbols are taken from Egypt and not from foreign objects, and are essentially different from those of the ChaldÆan cuneiform, which is the only other form of writing which might possibly compare in point of antiquity with the Egyptian hieroglyphics and hieratic. These were certainly known prior to the time of Menes, and they are the parents of the Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, and all more modern alphabets. In all other ancient systems of writing, such as ChaldÆan and Chinese, we see the development from the original picture-writing into conventional signs, syllabaries, and finally into ideographs and phonetics; but in the case of Egyptian, when we first get sight of it in the earliest dynasties, it is already fully formed, and undergoes no essential changes during the next 5000 years. Even the hieratic, or cursive hieroglyphic for ordinary purposes, was current in the Old Empire, as is proved by the celebrated Prisse papyrus. The ChaldÆan religion is not so easily described as that of Egypt, for it started from a lower level, and went through more changes in the course of its evolution. In the case of Egypt, the earliest records show us a highly intellectual and moral religion, with only a few traces remaining of primitive barbarism in the form of animal worship, and this religion remained substantially unchanged until the conversion of the country to Christianity. The influences of Semitic and other foreign conquests and intercourse left few traces, and the only serious attempt at a radical religious revolution by the heretic king who endeavoured to dethrone the old Egyptian gods, and substitute a system more nearly monotheistic under the emblem of the winged solar-disc, produced no permanent effect, and disappeared in one or two generations. But in ChaldÆa, Semitic influences prevailed from a very early period, and when we reach the historical periods of the great Babylonian and Assyrian empires, the kings, priests, and nobles were Semite, and the Accadian had become a dead language, which could only be read as we read Latin or Hebrew, by the aid of translations and of grammars and dictionaries. Still its records remained, as the Hebrew Bible does to us, and the sacred books of the old religion and its fundamental ideas were only developed and not changed. In the background of this Accadian religion we seem to see a much nearer approach than we do in that of Egypt to the primitive superstitions peculiar to the Turanian race. To this day the religion of the semi-barbarous races of that stock is essentially what is called "Shamanism"; a fear of ghosts and goblins, a belief that the universe swarms with myriads of spirits, mostly evil, and that the only escape from them is by the aid of conjuror-priests, who know magical rites and formulas which can baffle their malevolent designs. These incantations, and the interpretation of omens and auguries, occupy a great part of the oldest sacred books, and more than 100 tablets have been already recovered from the great work on Astronomy and Astrology, compiled from them by the priests of Agade, for the royal library of Sargon I. They are for the most part of the most absurd and puerile character; as, for instance, "if a sheep give birth to a lion there will be war "; "if a mare give birth to a dog there will be disaster and famine"; "if a white dog enter a temple its foundation will subsist; if a gray dog, the temple will lose its possessions," and so on. This character of magicians and soothsayers clung to the ChaldÆan priests even down to a later period, and under the Roman Empire ChaldÆan rites were identified with sorcery and divination. But out of this jungle of silly superstitions the elements of an enlightened and philosophical religion had evolved themselves in early Accadian times, and were continually developed as Semitic influences gradually fused themselves with Accadian, and formed the composite races and religions which came to be known in later times as Babylonian and Assyrian. The fundamental principle of this religion was the same as that of Egypt, and of most of the great religions of the East, viz. Pantheism. The great underlying First Cause, or Spirit of the universe, was considered as identical with his manifestations. The subtle metaphysical conceptions which still survive in the Creed of St. Athanasius, were invoked to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, by emanations, incarnations, and personified attributes. These again were attached to the striking phenomena of the universe, the sun, moon, and planets, the earth and sky, the winds, rains, and thunder. And ever as more phenomena were observed more gods were invented, who were thought to be symbols, or partial personifications, of the one great Spirit, and not more inconsistent with his unity than the "and yet there are not three Gods, but one God" of Athanasius. But the ChaldÆan, like the Egyptian priests, did not stop at one Trinity, but invented a whole hierarchy of Trinities, rising one above the other to form the twelve great gods, while below them were an indefinite number of minor gods and goddesses personifying different aspects of natural phenomena, and taken for the most part from astronomical myths of the sun, moon, planets, and seasons. For the religion of the Chaldees was, even more than that of the Egyptians, based on astronomy and astrology, as may be seen in their national epic of Izdubar, which is simply a solar myth of the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac, the last chapter but one being a representation of the passage through the sign of Aquarius, in the fable of a universal deluge. The first Accadian triad was composed of Anu, Mull-il, and Ea. Anu, or Ana, is the word for heaven, and the god is described as the "Lord of the starry heavens," and "the first-born, the oldest, the Father of the gods." It is the same idea in fact as that expressed by the Sanscrit Varuna, the Greek Ouranus. Mull-il, the next member of this triad, is the god of the abyss and nether world, while Ea is the god of the earth, seas, and rivers, "the Lord of the Deep," and personifies the wise and beneficent side of the Divine Intelligence, the maintainer of order and harmony, the friend of man. Very early with the introduction of Semitic influences Mull-il dropped out of his place in the Trinity, and was superseded by Bel, who was conceived as being the son of Ea, the personification of the active and combative energy which carries out the wise designs of Ea by reducing the chaos to order, creating the sun and heavenly bodies, and directing them in their courses, subduing evil spirits and slaying monsters. His name simply signifies "the Lord," and is applied to other inferior deities as a title of honour, as Bel-Marduk, the Lord Marduk or Merodach, the patron god of Babylon. In this capacity Bel is clearly associated with the midday sun, as the emblem of a terrible yet beneficent power, the enemy of evil spirits and dragons of darkness. The next triad is more distinctly astronomical. It consists of Uruk the moon, Ud the sun, and Mermer the god of the air, of rain and tempest. These are the old Accadian names, but they are better known by the Semitic translations of Sin, Shamash, and Raman. The next group of gods is purely astronomical, consisting of the five planets, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, personified as Nergal, Nebo, Marduk, Ishtar, and Nindar. The number of gods was further increased by introducing the primary polarity of sex, and assigning a wife to each male deity. Thus Belit, or "the Lady," was the wife of Bel, he representing the masculine element of Nature, strength and courage; she the feminine principle of tenderness and maternity. So also Nana the earth was the wife of Anu, the god of the strong heavens; Annunit the moon the wife of Shamash the sun; and Ishtar (Astarte, Astoreth, or Aphrodite), the planet Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, though a great goddess in her own right, was fabled to have had Tammuz or Thammuz, one of the names of the sun, as a husband, whence in later times came the myth of Nature mourning for the sun-god, slain by the envious boar, winter. But of these only Belit and Istar were admitted into the circle of the twelve great gods, consisting of the two triads and the planets, who held the foremost place in the ChaldÆan and Assyrian mythology. Of the minor gods, Meri-dug or Marduk, the Merodach of the Bible, is the most remarkable, for he represents the idea which, some 5000 years later, became the fundamental one of the Christian religion; that of a Son of God, "being of one substance with the Father," who acts the part of Mediator and friend of man. He is the son of Ea and Damkina, i.e. of heaven and earth, and an emanation from the Supreme Spirit considered in its attribute of benevolence. The tablets are full of inscriptions on which he is represented as applying to his father Ea for aid and advice to assist suffering humanity, most commonly by teaching the spells which will drive away the demons who are supposed to be the cause of all misfortunes and illness. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that he and Istar, the lovely goddess, were the favourite deities, and occupied much the same position as Jesus and the Virgin Mary do in the Catholic religion of the present day, while the other deities were local gods attached to separate cities where their temples stood, and where they occupied a position not unlike that of the patron saints and holy relics of which almost every considerable town and cathedral boasted in mediÆval Christianity. Thus they rose and fell in rank with the ascendancy or decline of their respective cities, just as Pthah and Ammon did in Egypt according as the seat of empire was at Memphis or Thebes. In one instance only in later times, in Assyria, which had become exclusively Semitic, do we find the idea of one supreme god, who was national and not local, and who overshadowed all other gods, as Jahve in the later days of the Jewish monarchy, and in the conception of the Hebrew prophets, did the gods of the surrounding nations. Assur, the local god of the city of Assur, the first capital of Assyria, became, with the growth of the Assyrian Empire, the one supreme god, in whose name wars were undertaken, cities destroyed, and captives massacred or mutilated. In fact the resemblance is very close between Assur and the ferocious and vindictive Jahve of the Israelites during the rude times of the Judges. They are both jealous gods, delighting in the massacre and torture of prisoners, women and children, and enjoining the extermination of nations who insult their dignity by worshipping other gods. We almost seem to see, when we read the records of Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib and the Books of Judges and of Samuel, the origin of religious wars, and the spirit of cold-blooded cruelty inspired by a gloomy fanaticism, which is so characteristic of the Semitic nature, and which in later times led to the propagation of Mahometanism by the sword. With the Hebrews this conception of a cruel and vindictive Jahve was beaten out of them by persecutions and sufferings, and that of a one merciful god evolved from it, but Assyria went through no such schooling and retained its arrogant prosperity down to the era of its disappearance from history with the fall of Nineveh; but it is easy to see that the course of events might have been different, and Monotheism might have been evolved from the conception of Assur. These, however, are speculations relating to a much later period than the primitive religion with which we are principally concerned. It is remarkable how many of our modern religious conceptions find an almost exact counterpart in those of this immensely remote period. Incarnations, emanations, atonements, personifications of Divine attributes, are all there, and also the subtle metaphysical theories by which the human intellect, striving to penetrate the mysteries of the unknowable, endeavours to account for the existence of good and evil, and to reconcile multiplicity of manifestation with unity of essence. If Wordsworth sings of a "sense sublime Of something far more deeply interposed, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things," he conveys the fundamental idea which was at the bottom of these earliest religions, and which has been perpetuated in the East through their successors, Brahmanism and Buddhism—the idea of Pantheism, or of an universe which is one with its First Cause, and not a mechanical work called into existence from without by a personal Creator. An ancient priest of Egypt or ChaldÆa might have written these verses of the philosophic poet of the nineteenth century, only he would have written Horus or Bel for the "setting sun"; Ea for the "round ocean"; Anur for the "sky," and so on. Side by side with these intellectual and philosophical conceptions of these ancient religions, we find the element of personal piety occupying a place which contrasts wonderfully with the childish and superstitious idea of evil spirits, magical spells, and omens. We read in the same collections of tablets, of mares bringing forth dogs and women lions; and psalms, which in their elevation of moral tone and intensity of personal devotion might readily be mistaken for the Hebrew Psalms attributed to David. There is a large collection of what are known as "the Penitential Psalms," in which the ChaldÆan penitent confesses his sins, pleads ignorance, and sues for mercy, almost in the identical words of the sweet singer of Israel. In one of these, headed "The complaints of the repentant heart," we find such verses as these— "I eat the food of wrath, and drink the waters of anguish."
"Oh, my God, my transgressions are very great, very great my sins. "The Lord in his wrath has overwhelmed me with confusion."
"I lie on the ground, and none reaches a hand to me. I am silent and in tears, and none takes me by the hand. I cry out, and there is none who hears me."
"My God, who knowest the unknown,[4] be merciful to me. My Goddess, who knowest the unknown, be merciful."
"God, who knowest the unknown, in the midst of the stormy waters take me by the hand; my sins are seven times seven, forgive my sins!" Another hymn is remarkable for its artistic construction. It is in regular strophes, the penitent speaking in each five double lines, to which the priest adds two, supporting his prayer. The whole is in precisely the same style as the similar penitential psalms of the Hebrew Bible, as will appear from the following quotation of one of the strophes from the translation of Zimmern. Penitent. "I, thy servant, full of sighs call to thee. Whoso is beset with sin, his ardent supplication thou acceptest. If thou lookest on a man with pity, that man liveth. Ruler of all, mistress of mankind, merciful one to whom it is good to turn, who dost receive sighs." Priest. "While his god and his goddess are wroth with him he calls on thee. Thy countenance turn on him, take hold of his hand." These hymns are remarkable, both as showing that the sentiments of personal piety and contrition for sin as a thing hateful to the Supreme Being, might be as intense in a polytheistic as in a monotheistic religion; and as illustrating the immense interval of time which must have elapsed before such sentiments could have grown up from the rude beginnings of savage or semi-civilized superstitions. The two oldest religions of the world, those of Egypt and ChaldÆa, tell the same story; that of the immense interval which must have elapsed prior to the historical date of 5000 b.c. when written records begin, to allow of such ideas and such a civilization having grown up from such a state of things as we find prevailing during the neolithic period, and still prevailing among the inferior races of the world, who have remained isolated and unchanged in the hunting or nomad condition. I have dwelt at some length on the ancient religions, for nothing tends more to open the mind, and break down the narrow barriers of sectarian prejudice, than to see how the ideas which we have believed to be the peculiar possession of our own religion, are in fact the inevitable products of the evolution of the human race from barbarism to civilization, and have appeared in substantially the same forms in so many ages and countries. And surely, in these days, when faith in direct inspiration has been so rudely shaken, it must be consoling to many enlightened Christians to find that the fundamental articles of their creed, trinities, emanations, incarnations, atonements, a future life and day of judgment, are not the isolated conceptions of a minority of the human race in recent times, but have been held from a remote antiquity by all the nations which have taken a leading part in civilization. To all enlightened minds also, whatever may be their theological creeds, it must be a cheering reflection that the fundamental axioms of morality do not depend on the evidence that the Decalogue was written on a stone by God's own finger, or that the Sermon on the Mount is correctly reported, but on the evolution of the natural instincts of the human mind. All advanced and civilized communities have had their Decalogues and Sermons on the Mount, and it is impossible for any dispassionate observer to read them without feeling that in substance they are all identical, whether contained in the Egyptian Todtenbuch, the Babylonian hymns, the Zoroastrian Zendavesta, the sacred books of Brahmanism and Buddhism, the Maxims of Confucius, the Doctrines of Plato and the Stoics, or the Christian Bible. None are absolutely perfect and complete, and of some it may be said that they contain precepts of the highest practical importance which are either omitted or contradicted in the Christian formulas. For instance, the virtue of diligence, and the injunction not to be idle, in the Egyptian and Zoroastrian creeds contrast favourably with the "take no thought for the morrow," and "trust to be fed like the sparrows," of the Sermon on the Mount. But in this, and in all these summaries of moral axioms, apparent differences arise not from fundamental oppositions, but from truth having two sides, and passing over readily into "The falsehood of extremes." Even the injunction to "take no thought for the morrow," is only an extreme way of stating that the active side of human life, strenuous effort, self-denial, and foresight, must not be pushed so far as to stifle all higher aspirations. Probably if the same concrete case of conduct had been submitted to an Egyptian, a Babylonian or Zoroastrian priest, and to the late Bishop of Peterborough, their verdicts would not have been different. Such a wide extension does the maxim take, "One touch of Nature makes the world akin," when we educate ourselves up to the culture which gives some general idea of how civilized man has everywhere felt and believed since the dawn of history very much as we ourselves do at the close of the nineteenth century. Evidence of Antiquity—Pyramids and Temples—Arithmetic—Decimal and Duodecimal Scales—Astronomy—Geometry reached in Egypt at earliest Dates—Great Pyramid—Piazzi Smyth and Pyramid-Religion—Pyramids formerly Royal Tombs, but built on Scientific Plans—Exact Orientation on Meridian—Centre in 30° N. Latitude—Tunnel points to Pole—Possible use as an Observatory—Procter—Probably Astrological—Planetary Influences—Signs of the Zodiac—Mathematical Coincidences of Great Pyramid—ChaldÆan Astronomy—Ziggurats—Tower of Babel—Different Orientation from Egyptian Pyramids—Astronomical Treatise from Library of Sargon I., 3800 b.c.—Eclipses and Phases of Venus—Measures of Time from Old ChaldÆan—Moon and Sun—Found among so many distant Races—Implies Commerce and Intercourse—Art and Industry—Embankment of Menes—Sphynx—Industrial Arts—Fine Arts—Sculpture and Painting—The Oldest Art the best—ChaldÆan Art—De Sarzec's Find at Sirgalla—Statues and Works of Art—Imply long use of Bronze—Whence came the Copper and Tin—Phoenician and Etruscan Commerce—Bronze known 200 years earlier—Same Alloy everywhere—Possible Sources of Supply—Age of Copper—Names of Copper and Tin—Domestic Animals—Horse—Ox and Ass—Agriculture—All proves Extreme Antiquity. The conclusion drawn from the religions of Egypt and ChaldÆa, as to the existence of a very long period of advanced civilization prior to the historical era, is fully confirmed by the state of the arts and sciences at the commencement of the earliest records. A knowledge of astronomy implies a long series of observations and a certain amount of mathematical calculation. The construction of great works of hydraulic engineering, and of such buildings as temples and pyramids, also proves an advanced state of scientific knowledge. Such a building, for instance, as the Great Pyramid must have required a considerable acquaintance with geometry, and with the effects of strains and pressures; and the same is true of the early temples and ziggurats, or temple observatories of ChaldÆa. There must have been regular schools of astronomers and architects, and books treating on scientific subjects, before such structures could have been possible. The knowledge of science possessed by a nation affords a more definite test of its antecedent civilization than its religion. It is always possible to say that advanced religious ideas may have been derived from some supernatural revelation, but in the case of the exact sciences, such as arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, this is no longer possible, and their progress can be traced step by step by the development of human reason. Thus there are savage races, like the Australians at the present day, who cannot count beyond "one, two, and a great number"; and some philologists tell us that traces of this state can be discovered in the origin of civilized languages, from the prevalence of dual forms which seem to have preceded those of the plural. The next stage is that of counting by the fingers, which gives rise to a natural system of decimal notation, as shown by such words as ten, which invariably means two hands; twenty, which is twice ten, and so on. Many existing races, who are a little more advanced than the Australians, use their fingers for counting, and can count up to five or ten, and even the chimpanzee Sally could count to five. But when we come to a duodecimal system we may feel certain that a considerable advance has been made, and arithmetic has come into existence as a science; for the number 12 has no natural basis of support like 10, and can only have been adopted because it was exactly divisible into whole numbers by 2, 3, 4, 6. The mere fact therefore of the existence of a duodecimal system shows that the nation which adopts it must have progressed a long way from the primitive "one, two, a great many," and acquired ideas both as to the relation of numbers, and a multitude of other things, such as the division of the circle, of days, months, and years, of weights and measures, and other matters, in which ready division into whole parts without fractions had become desirable. And at the very first in Egypt, ChaldÆa, and among the Turanian races generally, we find this duodecimal system firmly established. The circle has 360 degrees, the year 360 days, the day 24 single or 12 double hours, and so on. But from this point the journey is a long one to calculations which imply a knowledge of geometry and mathematics, and observations of celestial bodies which imply a long antecedent science of astronomy, and accurate records of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, and of eclipses and other memorable events. The earliest records, both of Egypt and ChaldÆa, show that such an advanced state of science had been reached at the first dawn of the historical period, and we read of works on astronomy, geometry, medicine, and other sciences, written, or compiled from older treatises, by Egyptian kings of the old empire, and by Sargon I. of Accade from older Accadian works. But the monuments prove still more conclusively that such sciences must have been long known. Especially the Great Pyramid of Cheops affords a very definite proof of the progress which must have been made in geometrical, mechanical, and astronomical science at the time of its erection. If we were to believe Professor Piazzi Smyth, and the little knot of his followers who have founded what may be called a Pyramid-religion, this remarkable structure contains a revelation in stone for future ages, of almost all the material scientific facts which have been discovered since by 6000 years of painful research by the unaided human intellect. Its designers must have known and recorded, with an accuracy surpassing that of modern observation, such facts as the dimensions of the earth, the distance of the sun, the ratio of the area of a circle to its diameter, the precise determination of latitude and of a true meridian line, and the establishment of standards of measure taken, like the metre, from a definite division of the earth's circumference. It is argued that such facts as these could not have been discovered so accurately in the infancy of science, and without the aid of the telescope, and therefore that they must have been made known by revelation, and the Great Pyramid is looked upon therefore as a sort of Bible in stone, which is, in some not very intelligible way, to be taken as a confirmation of the inspiration of the Hebrew Bible, and read as a sort of supplement to it. This is of course absurd. A supernatural revelation to teach a chosen people the worship of the one true God, is at any rate an intelligible proposition, but scarcely that of such a revelation to an idolatrous monarch and people, to teach details of abstruse sciences, which in point of fact were not taught, for the monument on which they were recorded was sealed up by a casing of polished stone almost directly after it was built, and its contents were only discovered by accident, long after the facts and figures which it is supposed to teach had been discovered elsewhere by human reason. The only thing approaching to a revelation of religious import which Piazzi Smyth professed to have discovered in the Pyramid was a prediction, which is now more than ten years overdue, of the advent of the millennium in 1881. But these extravagances have had the good effect of giving us accurate measurements of nearly all the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, and raising a great deal of discussion as to its aim and origin. In the first place it is quite clear that its primary object was to provide a royal tomb. A tomb of solid masonry with a base larger than Lincoln's Inn Fields, and 130 feet higher than St. Paul's, seems very incomprehensible to modern ideas, but there can be no doubt as to the fact. When the interior is explored both of this and other pyramids, nothing is found but one or two small sepulchral chambers containing the stone coffins of a king or queen. The Great Pyramid is not an exceptional monument, but one of a series of some seventy pyramid-tombs of kings, beginning with earlier and continued by later dynasties of the Old Empire. The reason of their construction is obvious. It originates from the peculiar ideas, which have been already pointed out, of the existence of a Ka or shadowy double, and a still more ethereal soul or spirit, whose immortality depended on the preservation of a material basis in the form of a mummy or likeness of the deceased person, preferably no doubt by the preservation of the mummy. This led to the enormous outlay, not by kings only, but by private persons, on costly tombs, which, as Herodotus says, were considered to be their permanent habitations. With an absolute monarchy in which the divine right of kings was strained so far that the monarch was considered as an actual god, it was only natural that their tombs should far exceed those of their richest subjects, and that unusual care should be taken to prevent them from being desecrated in future ages by new and foreign dynasties. Suppose a great and powerful monarch to have an unusually long and prosperous reign, it is quite conceivable that he should wish to have a tomb which should not only surpass those of his predecessors, but any probable effort of his successors, and be an unique monument defying the attacks not only of future generations, but of time itself. This seems, without doubt, to have been the primary motive of the Great Pyramid, and in a lesser degree of all pyramids, sepulchral mounds, and costly tombs. But the pyramids, and especially the Great Pyramid, are not mere piles of masonry heaped together without plan or design. On the contrary, they are all built on a settled plan, which implies an acquaintance with the sciences of geometry and astronomy, and which, in the case of the Great Pyramid, is carried to an extent which shows a very advanced knowledge of those sciences, and goes far to prove that it must have been used, during part of the period of its construction, as a national observatory. The full details of this plan are given by Procter in his work on the Great Pyramid, and although the want of a more accurate knowledge of Egyptology has led him into some erroneous speculations as to the age and object of this pyramid, his authority is undoubted as to the scientific facts and the astronomical and geometrical conclusions which are to be drawn from them. It appears that the first object of all pyramid builders was to secure a correct orientation; that is, that the four sides should face truly to the north, south, east, and west, or in other words that a line drawn through the centre of the base parallel to the sides should stand on a true meridian line. This would be a comparatively easy task with modern instruments, but before the invention of the telescope it must have required great nicety of observation to obtain such extremely accurate results in all the sides and successive layers of such an enormous building. There are only two ways in which it could be attempted—one by observing the shadow cast by a vertical gnomon when the sun was on the meridian, the other by keeping a standard line constantly directed to the true north pole of the heavens. In the case of the Great Pyramid another object seems to have been in view which required the same class of observations, viz. to place the centre of the base on the thirtieth degree of north latitude, being the latitude in which the pole of the heavens is exactly one-third of the way from the horizon to the zenith. Both these objects have been attained with wonderful accuracy. The orientation of the Great Pyramid is correct, and the centre of its base corresponds with the thirtieth degree of north latitude within a slight error which was inevitable, if, as is probable, the Egyptian astronomers were unacquainted with the effect of atmospheric refraction in raising the apparent above the true place of celestial bodies, or had formed an insufficient estimate of its amount. The centre of the base is 2328 yards south of the real thirtieth parallel of latitude, which is 944 yards north of the position which would have been deduced from the pole-star method, and 3459 yards south of that from the shadow method, by astronomers ignorant of the effect of refraction. The shadow method could never have been so reliable as the polar method, and it is certain therefore À priori that the latter must have been adopted either wholly or principally, and this conclusion is confirmed by the internal construction of the pyramid itself, which is shown by the subjoined vertical section. The tunnel A B C is bored for a distance of 350 feet underground through the solid rock, and is inclined at an angle pointing directly to what was then the pole-star, Alpha Draconis, at its lower culmination. As there is no bright star at the true pole, its position is ascertained by taking the point half-way between the highest and lowest positions of the conspicuous star nearest to it, and which therefore revolves in the smallest circle about it. This star is not always the same on account of the precession of the equinoxes, and Alpha Draconis supplied the place of the present pole-star about 3440 b.c., and practically for several centuries before and after that date. Now the underground tunnel is bored exactly at the angle of 26° 17´ to the horizon, at which Alpha Draconis would shine down it at its lower culmination when 3° 42´ from the pole; and the ascending passage and grand gallery are inclined at the same angle in an opposite direction, so that the image of the star reflected from a plane mirror or from water at B, would be seen on the southern meridian line by an observer in the grand gallery, while another very conspicuous star in the southern hemisphere, Alpha Centauri, would at that period shine directly down it. The passages therefore would have the double effect, 1st, of enabling the builders to orient the base and lower layers of the pyramid up to the king's chamber in a perfectly true north and south line; 2nd, of making the grand gallery the equivalent of an equatorially-mounted telescope of a modern observatory, by which the transit of heavenly bodies in a considerable section of the sky comprising the equatorial and zodiacal regions, across the meridian, and therefore at their highest elevations, could be observed by the naked eye with great accuracy. Those who wish to study the evidence in detail should read Procter's work on the Problems of the Pyramids, but for the present purpose it may be sufficient to sum up the conclusions of that accomplished astronomer. He says, "The sun's annual course round the celestial sphere could be determined much more exactly than by any gnomon by observations made from the great gallery. The moon's monthly path and its changes could have been dealt with in the same effective way. The geometric paths, and thence the true paths of the planets, could be determined very accurately. The place of any visible star along the zodiac could be most accurately determined." If therefore the pyramid had only been completed up to the fiftieth layer, which would leave the southern opening of the great gallery uncovered, the object might have been safely assumed to be the erection of a great national observatory. But this supposition is negatived by the fact that the grand gallery must have been shut up, and the building rendered useless for astronomical purposes in a very short time, by the completion of the pyramid, which was then covered over by a casing of polished stone, evidently with a view of concealing all traces of the passages which led to the tomb. The only possible solution seems to be that suggested by Procter, that the object was astrological rather than astronomical, and that all those minute precautions were taken in order to provide not only a secure tomb but an accurate horoscope for the reigning monarch. Astrology and astronomy were in fact closely identified in the ancient world, and relics of the superstition still linger in the form of Zadkiel almanacs. When the sun, moon, and five planets had been identified as the celestial bodies possessing motion, and therefore, as it was inferred, life, and had been converted into gods, nothing was more natural than to suppose that they exercised an influence on human affairs, and that their configuration affected the destinies both of individuals and of nations. A superstitious people who saw auguries in the flight of birds, the movements of animals, the rustling of leaves, and in almost every natural occurrence, could not fail to be impressed by the higher influences and omens of those majestic orbs, which revolved in such mysterious courses through the stationary stars of the host of heaven. Accordingly in the very earliest traditions of the Accadians and Egyptians we find an astrological significance attached to the first astronomical facts which were observed and recorded. The week of seven days, which was doubtless founded on the first attempts to measure time by the four phases of the lunar month, became associated with the seven planets in the remotest antiquity, and the names of their seven presiding gods, in the same order and with the same meaning, have descended unchanged to our own times, as will be shown more fully in a subsequent chapter. Observations on the sun's annual course led to the fixing of it along a zodiac of twelve signs, corresponding roughly to twelve lunar months, and defined by constellations, or groups of stars, having a fanciful resemblance to animals or deified heroes. Those zodiacal signs are of immense antiquity and world-wide universality. We find them in the earliest mythology of ChaldÆa and Egypt, in the labours of Hercules, in the traditions of a deluge associated with the sign of Aquarius, and even, though in a somewhat altered form, in such distant countries as China and Mexico. Probably they originated in ChaldÆa, where the oldest records and universal tradition show the primitive Accadians to have been astronomers, who from time immemorial had made observations on the heavenly bodies, and who remained down to the Roman Empire the most celebrated astrologers, though it is not quite clear whether Egyptian astronomy and astrology were imported from ChaldÆa or invented independently at an equally remote period. Even if we admit, however, Procter's suggestion that the pyramids had an astrological origin in addition to their primary object as tombs, it is difficult to understand how such enormous structures could have been built. The Great Pyramid must have been built on a plan designed from the first, and not by any haphazard process of adding a layer each year according to the number of years the monarch happened to reign. How could he foresee the exact number of years of an unusually long life and reign, or what security could he have that, if he died early, his successor would complete his pyramid in addition to erecting one of almost equal magnitude for himself? How could three successive kings have devoted such an amount of the nation's capital and resources to the building of three such pyramids as those of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, without provoking insurrections? Herodotus has a piece of gossip, probably picked up from some ignorant guides, which represents Cheops and Chephren as detested tyrants, who shut up the temples of the gods, and confounds the national hatred of the shepherd kings, who conquered Egypt some 2000 years later, with that of these pyramid-builders; but this is confuted by the monuments, which show them as pious builders or restorers of temples of the national gods in other localities, as for instance at Bubastis, where the cartouche of Chephren was lately found by M. Naville on an addition to the Temple of Isis. All the records also of the fourth or pyramid-building dynasty, and of the two next dynasties, show it to have been a period of peace and prosperity. The pyramids therefore must still remain a subject enveloped in mystery, but enough is certain from the undoubted astronomical facts disclosed in their construction to show the advanced state of this science at this remote period. Nor is this all, for the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, when stripped of the fanciful coincidences and mystical theories of Piazzi Smyth, still show enough to prove a wonderful knowledge of mathematics and geometry. The following may be taken as undoubted facts from the most accurate measurements of their dimensions. 1st. The triangular area of each of the four sloping sides equals the square of the vertical height. This was mentioned by Herodotus, and there can be no doubt that it was a real relation intended by the builders. 2nd. The united length of the four sides of the square base bears to the vertical height the same proportion as that of the circumference of a circle to its radius. In other words it gives the ratio, which under the symbol p plays such an important part in all the higher mathematics. There are other remarkable coincidences which seem to show a still more wonderful advance in science, though they are not quite so certain, as they depend on the assumption that the builders took as their unit of measurement, a pyramid inch and sacred cubit different from those in ordinary use, the former being equal to the 500,000,000th part of the earth's diameter, and the latter containing twenty-five of those inches, or about the 20,000,000th part of that diameter. To arrive at such standards it is evident that the priestly astronomers must have measured very accurately an arc of the meridian or length of the line on the earth's surface which just raised or lowered the pole of the heavens by 1°; and inferred from it that the earth was a spherical body of given dimensions. Those dimensions would not be quite accurate, for they must have been ignorant of the compression of the earth at its poles and protuberance at the equator, but the measurement of such an arc at or near 30° of north latitude would give a close approximation to the mean value of the earth's diameter. Procter thinks that from the scientific knowledge which must have been possessed by the builders of the pyramid, it is quite possible that they may have measured an arc of the meridian with considerable accuracy, and calculated from it the length of the earth's diameter, assuming it to be a perfect sphere. And if so they may have intended to make the side of the square base of the pyramid of a length which would bear in inches some relation to the length of this diameter; for it is probable that at this stage of the world's science, the mysterious or rather magical value which was attached to certain words would attach equally to the fundamental facts, figures, and important discoveries of the growing sciences. It is quite probable, therefore, that the sacred inch and cubit may have been invented, like the metre, from an aliquot part of the earth's supposed diameter, so as to afford an invariable standard. But there is no positive proof of this from the pyramid itself, the dimensions of which may be expressed just as well in the ordinary working cubit, and it must remain open to doubt whether the coincidences prove the pyramid inch, or the inch was invented to prove the coincidences. Assuming, however, for the moment that these measures were really used, some of the coincidences are very remarkable. The length of each side of the square base is 365-1/4 of these sacred cubits, or equal to the length of the year in days. The height is 5819 inches, and the sun's distance from the earth, taken at 91,840,000 miles, which is very nearly correct, is just 5819 thousand millions of such inches. It has been thought, therefore, that this height was intended to symbolize the sun's distance. But independently of the fact that this distance could not have been known with any approach to accuracy before the invention of the telescope, it is forgotten that this height had been already determined by a totally unconnected consideration, viz. the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. The coincidence, therefore, of the sun's distance must be purely accidental. A still more startling coincidence has been found in the fact that the two diagonals of the base contain 25,824 pyramid inches, or almost exactly the number of years in the precessional period. This also must be accidental, for the number of inches in the diagonals follows as a matter of course from the sides being taken at 365-1/4 cubits, corresponding to the length of the year; and there can be no connection between this and the precession of the equinoxes, which, moreover, was unknown in the astronomy of the ancient world until it was discovered in the time of the Ptolemies by Hipparchus. But with all these doubtful coincidences, and the many others which have been discovered by devotees of the pyramid religion, quite enough remains to justify the conclusion that between 5000 and 6000 years ago there were astronomers, mathematicians, and architects in Egypt, who had carried their respective sciences to a high degree of perfection corresponding to that shown by their engineers and artists. When we turn to ChaldÆa we find similar evidence as to the advance of science, and especially of astronomical science, in the earliest historical times. Every important city had its temple, and attached to its temple its ziggurat, which was a temple-observatory. The ziggurat is in some respects the counterpart of the pyramid, being a pyramidal structure built up in successive stages or platforms superimposed on one another and narrowing as they rose, so as to leave a small platform on the top, on which was a small shrine or temple, and from which observations could be made. These ziggurats being built entirely of bricks, mostly sun-burnt, have crumbled into shapeless mounds of rubbish, but a fair idea of their size and construction may be obtained from the descriptions and pictures of them preserved in contemporary tablets and slabs, especially from those of the great ziggurat of the seven spheres or planets at Borsippa, a suburb of Babylon, which was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar about 500 b.c., on the site of a much more ancient ruined construction. This, which was the largest and most famous of the ziggurats, became identified in after times with the tower of Babel and the legend of the confusion of tongues, but it was in fact an astronomical building in seven stages dedicated to the sun, moon, and five planets, taken in the order of magnitude of their respective orbits, and each distinguished by their respective colours. Thus the lowest or largest platform was dedicated to Saturn, and coloured black; the second to Jupiter was orange; the third to Mars red; the fourth to the Sun golden; the fifth to Venus pale yellow; the sixth to Mercury an azure blue, obtained by vitrifying the facing bricks; and the seventh to the Moon was probably coated with plates of silver. The height of this ziggurat was 150 feet, and standing as it did on a level alluvial plain, it must have been a very imposing object.
ZIGGURAT RESTORED (Perrot and Chipiez), THE TOWER OF BABEL. It may be affirmed of all these ziggurats that they were not tombs like the Egyptian pyramids, but were erected exclusively for astronomical and astrological purposes. The number of stages had always reference to some religious or astronomical fact, as three to symbolize the great triad; five for the five planets; or seven for these and the sun and moon; the number of seven being never exceeded, and the order the same as that adopted for the days of the week, viz. according to the magnitudes of their respective orbits. They were oriented with as much care as the pyramids, which is of itself a proof that they were used as observatories, but with this difference, that their angles instead of their faces were directed towards the true north and south. To this rule there are only two exceptions, probably of late date after Egyptian influences had been introduced, but the original and national ziggurats invariably observe the rule of pointing angles and not sides to the four cardinal points. This is a remarkable fact as showing that the astronomies of Egypt and ChaldÆa were not borrowed one from the other, but evolved independently in prehistoric times. An explanation of it has been found in the fact recorded on a geographical tablet, that the Accadians were accustomed to use the terms north, south, east, and west to denote, not the real cardinal points, but countries which lay to the N.W., S.E., and S.W. of them. It is inconceivable, however, that such skilful astronomers should have supposed that the North Pole was in the north-west, and a more probable explanation is to be found in the meaning of the word ziggurat, which is holy mountain. It was a cardinal point in their cosmogony that the heavens formed a crystal vault, which revolved round an exceedingly high mountain as an axis, and the ziggurats were miniature representations of this sacred mountain of the gods. The early astronomers must have known that this mountain could be nowhere but in the true north, as the daily revolutions of the heavenly bodies took place round the North Pole. It was natural, therefore, that they should direct the apex or angle of a model of this mountain rather than its side to the position in the true north occupied by the peak of the world's pivot. Be this as it may, the fact that the ziggurats were carefully oriented, and certainly used as observatories at the earliest dates of ChaldÆan history, is sufficient to prove that the priestly astronomers must have already attained an advanced knowledge of science, and kept an accurate record of long-continued observations. This is fully confirmed by the astronomical and astrological treatise compiled for the royal library of Sargon I., date 3800 b.c., which treats of eclipses, the phases of Venus, and other matters implying a long previous series of accurate and refined astronomical observations. The most conclusive proof, however, of the antiquity of ChaldÆan science is afforded by the measures of time which were established prior to the commencement of history, and have come down to the present era in the days of the week and the signs of the zodiac. There can be no doubt that the first attempts to measure time beyond the single day and night, were lunar, and not solar. The phases of the moon occur at short intervals, and are more easily discerned and measured than those of the sun in its annual revolution. The beginning and end of a solar year, and the solstices and equinoxes are not marked by any decided natural phenomena, and it is only by long-continued observations of the sun's path among the fixed stars that any tolerably accurate number of days can be assigned to the duration of the year and seasons. But the recurrence of new and full moon, and more especially of the half-moons when dusk and light are divided by a straight line, must have been noted by the first shepherds who watched the sky at night, and have given rise to the idea of the month, and its first approximate division into four weeks of seven days each. Accordingly we find that in all primitive languages and cosmogonies the moon takes its name from a root which signifies "the measurer," while the sun is the bright or shining one. A relic of this superior importance of the moon as the measurer of time is found in the old Accadian mythology, in which the moon-god is masculine and the sun-god feminine, while with the Semites and other nations of a later and more advanced civilization, the sun is the husband, and the moon his wife. For as observations multiplied and science advanced, it would be found that the lunar month of twenty-eight days was only an approximation, and that the solar year and months defined by the sun's progress through the fixed stars afforded a much more accurate chronometer. Thus we find the importance of the moon and of lunar myths gradually superseded by the sun, whose daily risings and settings, death in winter and resurrection in spring, and other myths connected with its passage through the signs of the solar zodiac, assume a preponderating part in ancient religions. Traces, however, of the older period of lunar science and lunar mythology still survived, especially in the week of seven days, and the mysterious importance attached to the number 7. This was doubtless aided by the discovery which could not fail to be made with the earliest accurate observations of the heavens, that there were seven moving bodies, the sun, moon, and five planets, which revolved in settled courses, while all the other stars remained fixed. Scientific astrology, as distinguished from a mere superstitious regard of the flight of birds and other omens, had its origin in this discovery. The first philosophers who pondered on these celestial phenomena were certain to infer that motion implied life, and in the case of such brilliant and remote bodies divine life; and that as the sun and moon exerted such an obvious influence on the seasons and other human affairs, so probably did the other planets or the gods who presided over them. The names and order of the days of the week, which have remained so similar among such a number of ancient and modern nations, show how far these astrological notions must have progressed when they assumed their present form, for the order is a highly artificial one. Why do we divide time into weeks of seven days, and call the days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and why are these names of special planets, or of the special gods associated with them, identical, and occur in the same order among so many different nations? For whether we say Thor's-day or Jove's-day, and call it " Thursday" or "Jeudi," the same god is meant, who is identified with the same planet, and so for the others. It is quite clear that the names of the seven days of the week were originally taken from the seven planets—i.e. from the seven celestial bodies which were observed by ancient astronomers to move, and, therefore, be presumably endowed with life, while the rest of the host of heaven remained stationary. These bodies are in order of apparent magnitude:— - 1. The Sun.
- 2. The Moon.
- 3. Jupiter.
- 4. Venus.
- 5. Mars.
- 6. Saturn.
- 7. Mercury
And this is the natural order in which we might have expected to find them appropriated to the days of the week. But, obviously, this is not the principle on which the days have been named; for, to give a single instance, the nimble Mercury, the smallest of the visible planets, comes next before the majestic Jupiter, the ruler of the heavens and wielder of the thunderbolt. Let us try another principle, that of classifying the planets in importance, not by their size and splendour, but by the magnitude of their orbits and length of their revolutions. This will give the following order:— - 1. Saturn.
- 2. Jupiter.
- 3. Mars.
- 4. The Sun (i.e. really the earth).
- 5. Venus.
- 6. Mercury.
- 7. The Moon.
We are now on the track of the right solution, though there is still apparently hopeless discord between this order and that of the days of the week. The true solution is such an artificial one, that we should never have discovered it if it had not been disclosed to us by the clay tablets exhumed from ancient royal libraries in the temples and palaces of ChaldÆa. These tablets are extremely ancient, going back in many cases to the times of the old Accadians who inhabited ChaldÆa prior to the advent of the Semites. Some of them, in fact, are from the royal library of Sargon I., of Accade, whose date is fixed by the best authorities at about 3800 b.c. These Accadians were a civilized and literary people, well versed in astronomy, but extremely superstitious, and addicted beyond measure to astrology. Every city had its ziggurat, or observatory-tower, attached to its temple, from which priests watched the heavens and calculated times and seasons. To some of those ancient priests it occurred that the planets must be gods watching over and influencing human events, and that, as Mars was ruddy, he was probably the god of war; Venus, the lovely evening star, the goddess of love; Jupiter, powerful; Saturn, slow and malignant; and Mercury, quick and nimble. By degrees the idea expanded, and it was thought that each planet exerted its peculiar influence, not only on the days of the week, but on the hours of the day; and the planet which presided over the first hour of the day was thought to preside over the whole of that day. But the day had been already divided into twenty-four hours, because the earliest ChaldÆans had adopted the duodecimal scale, and counted by sixes, twelves, and sixties. Now, twenty-four is not divisible by seven, and, therefore, the same planets do not recur in the same order, to preside over the same hours of successive days. If Saturn ruled the first hour, he would rule the twenty-second hour; and, if we refer to the above list of the planets, ranged according to the magnitude of their orbits, we shall find that the Sun would rule the first hour of the succeeding day, and then in succession the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, round to Saturn again, in the precise order of our days of the week. This order is so artificial that it cannot have been invented separately, and wherever we find it we may feel certain that it has descended from the astrological fancies of Accadian priestly astronomers at least 6000 years ago. Now for the Sabbath. The same clay tablets, older by some 1000 years than the accepted Biblical date for the creation of the world, mention both the name and the institution. The "Sabbath" was the day ruled over by the gloomy and malignant Saturn, the oldest of the planetary gods, as shown by his wider orbit, but dimmed with age, and morose at having been dethroned by his brilliant son, Jupiter. It was unlucky in the extreme, therefore, to do any work, or begin any undertaking, on the "Sabbath," or Saturday. Hence, long centuries before Jewish Pharisees or English Puritans, rules of Sabbatarian strictness were enforced at Babylon and Nineveh, which remind one of the knight who "Hanged his cat on Monday For killing of a mouse on Sunday." The king was not allowed to ride or walk on the Sabbath; and, even if taken ill, had to wait till the following day before taking medicine. This superstition as to the unluckiness of Saturn's day was common to all ancient nations, including the Jews; but when the idea of a local deity, one among many others, expanded, under the influence of the later prophets and the exile, unto that of one universal God, the ruler of the universe and special patron of his chosen people, the compilers of the Old Testament dealt with the Sabbath as they did with the Deluge, the Creation, and other myths borrowed from the ChaldÆans. That is to say, they revised them in a monotheistic sense, wrote "God" for "gods," and gave them a religious, rather than an astronomical or astrological, meaning. Thus the origin of the Sabbath, as a day when no work was to be done, was transferred from Saturn to Jehovah, and the reason assigned was that "in six days the Lord created the heaven and the earth, and all that therein is, and rested on the seventh day." One more step only remains to bring us to our modern Sunday, and this also, like the last, is to be attributed to a religious motive. The early Christian Church wished to wean the masses from Paganism, and very wisely, instead of attacking old-established usages in front, turned their flank by assigning them to different days. Thus the day of rest was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, which was made the Christian Sabbath, and the name changed by the Latin races from the day of the sun to the Lord's Day, "Dominica Dies," or "Dimanche." It has remained Saturday, however, with the Jews, and it is quite clear that it was on a Saturday, and not a Sunday, that Jesus walked through the fields with his disciples, plucking ears of corn, and saying, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." It is equally clear that our modern Sabbatarians are much nearer in spirit to the Pharisees whom Jesus rebuked, and to the old Accadian astrologers, than to the founder of Christianity. It is encouraging, however, to those who believe in progress, to observe how in this, as in many other cases, the course of evolution makes for good. The absurd superstitions of Accadian astrologers led to the establishment of one day of rest out of every seven days—an institution which is in harmony with the requirements of human nature, and which has been attended by most beneficial results. The religious sanctions which attached themselves to this institution, first, as the Hebrew Sabbath, and, secondly, as transformed into the Christian Sunday, have been a powerful means of preserving this day of rest through so many social and political revolutions. Let us, therefore, not be too hasty in condemning everything which, on the face of it, appears to be antiquated and absurd. Millions will enjoy a holiday, get a breath of fresh air and glimpse of nature, or go to church or chapel cleanly and respectable in behaviour and attire, because there were Accadian Zadkiels 6000 years ago, who believed in the maleficent influence of the planet Saturn. When we find that these highly intricate and artificial calculations of advanced astrological and astronomical lore existed at the dawn of ChaldÆan history, and are found in so many and such widely separated races and regions, it is impossible to avoid two conclusions. 1st. That an immense time must have elapsed since the rude Accadian Highlanders first settled in and reclaimed the alluvial valleys and marshy deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates. 2nd. That the intercourse between remote regions, whether by land or sea, and by commerce or otherwise, must have been much closer in prehistoric times than has been generally supposed. As in the days of the week, so in the festivals of the year, we trace their first origin to astronomical observations. When nations passed from the condition of savages, hunters, or nomads, into the agricultural stage, and developed dense populations, cities, temples, priests, and an organized society, we find the oldest traces of it everywhere in the science of astronomy. They watched the phases of the moon, counted the planets, followed the sun in its annual course, marking it first by seasons, and, as science advanced, by its progress through groups of fixed stars fancifully defined as constellations. Everywhere the moon seems to have been taken as the first standard for measuring time beyond the primary unit of day and night. Its name very generally denotes the "Measurer" in primitive languages, and it appears as the male, and the sun as female, in the oldest mythologies—a distinction of sex which is still maintained in modern German. This is natural, for the monthly changes of the moon come much more frequently, and are more easily measured from day to day, than the annual courses of the sun. But, as observations accumulate and become more accurate, it is found that the sun, and not the moon, regulates the seasons, and that the year repeats on a larger scale the phenomenon presented by the day and night, of a birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death of the sun, followed by a resurrection or new birth, when the same cycle begins anew. Hence the oldest civilized nations have taken from the two phenomena of the day and year the same fundamental ideas and festivals. The ideas are those of a miraculous birth, death, and resurrection, and of an upper and lower world, the one of light and life, the other of darkness and death, through which the sun-god and human souls have to pass to emerge again into life. The festivals are those of the four great divisions of the year: the winter solstice, when the aged sun sinks into the tomb and rises again with a new birth; the spring equinox, when he passes definitively out of the domain of winter into that of summer; the summer solstice, when he is in full manhood, "rejoicing like a giant to run his course," and withering up vegetation as with the hot breath of a raging lion; and, finally, the autumnal equinox, when he sinks once more into the wintry half of the year and fades daily amidst storms and deluges to the tomb from which he started. Of these festivals Christmas and Easter have survived to the present day, and the last traces of the feast of the summer solstice are still lingering in the remote parts of Scotland and Ireland in the Bel fires, which, when I was young, were lighted on Midsummer night on the highest hills of Orkney and Shetland. As a boy, I have rushed, with my playmates, through the smoke of those bonfires without a suspicion that we were repeating the homage paid to Baal in the Valley of Hinnom. When we turn from science to art and industry, the same conclusion of immense antiquity is forcibly impressed on us. In Egypt the reign of Menes, 5000 b.c., was signalized by a great engineering work, which would have been a considerable achievement at the present day. He built a great embankment, which still remains, by which the old course of the Nile close to the Libyan hills was diverted, and a site obtained for the new capital of Memphis on the west side of the river, placing it between the city and any enemy from the east. At the same time this dyke assisted in regulating the flow of the inundation, and it may be compared for magnitude and utility to the modern barrage attempted by Linant Bey and carried out by Sir Colin Moncrieff. Evidently such a work implies great engineering skill, and great resources, and it prepares us for what we have seen a few centuries later in the construction of the Great Pyramids. Many of the most famous cities and temples also of Egypt date back for their original foundation to a period prior to that of Menes. There is indeed every reason to suppose that one of the most colossal and remarkable monuments, the Sphynx, with the little temple of granite and alabaster between its paws, is older than the accession of Menes. A tablet discovered by Mariette informs us that Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, discovered this temple, which had been buried in the sand, and restored it. If a building of such simplicity and solidity of structure required repairs, it must have existed for a long time and been lost sight of. It is almost certain also that if such a colossal and celebrated monument as the Sphynx had been constructed by any of the historical kings, it would have been mentioned by Manetho, as for instance is that of the step-pyramid of Sakkarah by the fourth king of the first dynasty, and of a temple of Pthah at Memphis, and a treatise on medicine, by the king who succeeded Menes. The name of the Sphynx also, "the great Hor," points to the period of the Horsheshu, or ruler priests of Horus, prior to the foundation of the empire by Menes, and to the time before Osiris superseded Horus, as the favourite personification of the Solar God. Be this as it may, there is abundant proof that at the dawn of Egyptian history, some 7000 years ago, the arts of architecture, engineering, irrigation, and agriculture had reached a high level corresponding to that shown by the state of religion, science, and letters. A little later the paintings on the tombs of the Old Empire show that all the industrial arts, such as spinning, weaving, working in wood and metals, rearing cattle, and a thousand others, which are the furniture of an old civilized country, were just as well understood and practised in Egypt 6000 or 7000 years ago as they are at the present day. This being the case, I must refer those who wish to pursue this branch of the subject to professed works on Egyptology. For my present purpose, if the oldest records of monuments prove the existence of a long antecedent civilization, it is superfluous to trace the proofs in detail through the course of later ages. When we turn to the Fine Arts we find the same evidence. The difficulty is not to trace a golden age up to rude beginnings, but to explain the seeming paradox that the oldest art is the best. A visit to the Museum of Boulak, where Mariette's collection of works of the first six dynasties is deposited, will convince any one that the statues, statuettes, wall-pictures, and other works of art of the Ancient Empire from Memphis and its cemetery of Sakkarah, are in point of conception and execution superior to those of a later period. None of the later statues equal the tour de force by which the majestic portrait statue of Chephren, the builder of the Boulak Museum, from Gizeh.—According to the chronological table of Mariette, this statue is over 6000 years old. From a photograph by Brugsch Bey.] second great pyramid, has been chiselled out from a block of diorite, one of the hardest stones known, and hardly assailable by the best modern tools. Nor has portraiture in wood or stone ever surpassed the ease, grace, and life-like expression of such statues as that known as the Village Sheik, from its resemblance to the functionary who filled that office 6000 years later in the village where the statue was discovered; or those of the kneeling scribes, one handing in his accounts, the other writing from dictation. And the pictures on the walls of tombs, of houses, gardens, fishing and musical parties, and animals and birds of all kinds, tame and wild, are equally remarkable for their colouring and drawing, and for the vivacity and accuracy with which attitudes and expressions are rendered. In short Egypt begins where most modern countries seem to be ending, with a very perfect school of realistic art.
THE VILLAGE SHEIK, A WOODEN STATUETTE. For it is remarkable that this first school of art of the Old Empire is thoroughly naturalistic, and knows very little of the ideal or supernatural. And the tombs tell the same story. The statues and paintings represent natural objects and not theological conventions; the tombs are fac-simile representations of the house in which the deceased lived, with his mummy and those of his family, and pictures of his oxen, geese, and other belongings, but no gods, and few of those quotations from the Todtenbuch which are so universal in later ages. It would seem that at this early period of Egyptian history life was simple and cheerful, and both art and religion less fettered by superstitions and conventions than they were when despotism and priestcraft had been for centuries stereotyped institutions, and originality of any sort was little better than heresy. War also and warlike arms hardly appear on these earliest representations of Egyptian life, and wars were probably confined to frontier skirmishes with Bedouins and Libyans, such as we see commemorated on the tablet of Snefura at Wady Magerah. In ChaldÆa the evidence for great antiquity is derived less from architectural monuments and arts, and more from books, than in Egypt, for the obvious reason that stone was wanting and clay abundant in Mesopotamia. Where temples and palaces were built of sun-dried bricks, they rapidly crumbled into mounds of rubbish, and nothing was preserved but the baked clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. In like manner sculpture and wall-painting never flourished in a country devoid of stone, and the religious ideas of ChaldÆa never took the Egyptian form of the continuance of ordinary life after death by the Ka or ghost requiring a house, a mummy, and representations of belongings. The bas-relief and fringes sculptured on slabs of alabaster brought home by Layard and others, belong mostly to the later period of the Assyrian Empire. Accordingly, the oldest works of art from ChaldÆa consist mainly of books and documents in the form of clay cylinders, and of gems, amulets, and other small articles of precious stones or metals. But the recent discovery of De Sarzec at Sirgalla shows that in the very earliest period of ChaldÆan history the arts stood at a level which is fairly comparable to that of the Old Empire in Egypt. He found in the ruins of the very ancient Temple of the Sun nine statues of Patesi or priest-kings of Accadian race, who had ruled there prior to the consolidation of Sumir and Accad into one empire by Sargon I., somewhere about 3800 b.c. The remarkable thing about these statues is that they are of diorite, similar to that of the statue of Chephren, which is believed to be only found in the peninsula of Sinai, and is so hard that it must have taken excellent tools and great technical skill to carve it. The statues are much of the same size and in the same seated attitude as that of Chephren, and have the appearance of belonging to the same epoch and school of art. This is confirmed by the discovery along with the statues of a number of statuettes and small objects of art which are also in an excellent style, very similar to that of the Old Egyptian dynasty, and show great proficiency both in taste and in technical execution. The discovery of these diorite statues at such a very early date both in Egypt and ChaldÆa, raises a very interesting question as to the tools by which such an intractable material could be so finely wrought. Evidently these tools must have been of the very hardest bronze, and the construction of such works as the dyke of Menes and the Pyramids, shows that the art of masonry must have been long known and extensively practised. But this again implies a large stock of metals and long acquaintance with them since the close of the latest stone period. Perhaps there is no test which is more conclusive of the state of prehistoric civilization and commerce than that which is afforded by the general knowledge and use of metals. It is true that a knowledge of some of the metals which are found in a native state, or in easily fusible ores, may coexist with very primitive barbarism. Some even of the cannibal tribes of Africa are well acquainted with iron, and know how to smelt its ores and manufacture tools and weapons. Gold also, which is so extensively found in the native state, could not fail to be known from the earliest times; and in certain districts pure copper presents itself as only a peculiar and malleable sort of stone. But when we come to metals which require great knowledge of mining to detect them in their ores, and to produce them in large quantities; and to alloys, which require a long practice of metallurgy to discover, and to mix in the proper proportions, the case is different, and the stone period must be already far behind. Still more is this the case when tools and weapons of such artificial alloys are found in universal use in countries where Nature has provided no metals, and where their presence can only be accounted for by the existence of an international commerce with distant metal-producing countries. Iron was no doubt known at a very early period, but it was extremely scarce, and even as late as Homer's time was so valuable that a lump of it constituted one of the principal prizes at the funeral games of Patroclus. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the art of making from it the best steel, which alone could have competed with bronze in cutting granite and diorite, had been discovered. It may be assumed, therefore, that bronze was the material universally used for the finer tools and weapons by the great civilized empires of Egypt and ChaldÆa during the long interval between the neolithic stone age and the later adoption of iron. Evidently then, both the Egyptians and the ChaldÆans must have been well provided with bronze tools capable of hewing and polishing the hardest rocks. Now bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is a common metal, easily reduced from its ores, and not infrequently occurring in a metallic state, as in the mines of Lake Superior, where the North American Indians hammered out blocks of it from the native metal. And we have proofs that the ancient Egyptians obtained copper at a very early date from the mines of Wady Magerah in the peninsula of Sinai, and probably also from Cyprus. But where did they get their tin, without which there is no bronze? Tin is a metal which is only found in a few localities, and in the form of a black oxide which requires a considerable knowledge of metallurgy to detect and to reduce. The only considerable sources of tin now known are those of Cornwall, Malacca, Banca, and Australia. Of these, the last was of course unknown to the ancient world, and it is hardly probable that its supplies were obtained from such remote sources as those of the extreme East. Not that it is at all impossible that it might have been brought from Malacca by prehistoric sea-routes to India, and thence to Egypt by the Red Sea and to ChaldÆa by the Persian Gulf, and this is the conjecture of one of the latest authorities in a very interesting work just published on the Dawn of Ancient Art. But it seems highly improbable that, if such routes had been established, they should have been so completely abandoned as they certainly were when the supply of tin for the Eastern world was brought from the West. In fact, when we get the first authoritative information as to the commerce in tin, about 1000 b.c., we find that it was supplied mainly by Tyre, and came from the West beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; and in the Greek Periplus, written in the first century, it is distinctly stated that India was supplied with tin from Britain by way of Alexandria and the Red Sea, which is hardly consistent with the supposition that the tin of Malacca had been long known and worked. In the celebrated 27th chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the commerce of Tyre when in the height of its glory, tin is only mentioned once as being imported along with silver, iron, and lead from Tarshish, i.e. from the emporium of Gades or Cadiz, to which it had doubtless been brought from Cornwall. The only other reference to tin is, that Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, i.e. the Ionians, and tribes of Asia Minor in the mountainous districts to the south of the Black Sea, traded with slaves and vessels of brass, and if brass meant bronze, this would imply a knowledge of tin. The only other considerable supply of tin which is certainly known came from the Etruscans, who worked extensive tin mines in Northern Italy. But the evidence of these does not go back farther than from 1000 to 1500 b.c., and it leaves untouched the question how Egypt and ChaldÆa had obtained large stocks of bronze, certainly long before 5000 b.c.; and how they kept up these stocks for certainly more than 2000 years before the Phoenicians appeared on the scene to supply tin by maritime commerce. It is in some other direction that we must look, for it is certain that neither Egypt nor ChaldÆa had any native sources of this metal. They must have imported, and that from a distance, either the manufactured bronze, or the tin with which to manufacture it themselves by alloying copper. The latter seems most probable, for the Egyptians worked the copper mines of Sinai from a very early date, and drew supplies of copper from Cyprus, which could only have been made useful by alloying it with tin, while if they imported all the immense quantity of bronze which they must have used, in the manufactured state, the pure copper would have been useless to them. A remarkable fact is that the bronze found from the earliest monuments downwards, throughout most of the ancient world, including the dolmens, lake villages, and other prehistoric monuments in which metal begins to appear, is almost entirely of uniform composition, consisting of an alloy of 10 to 15 per cent. of tin to 85 or 90 per cent. of copper. That is for tools and weapons where great hardness was required, for objects of art and statuettes were often made of pure copper, or with a smaller alloy of tin, showing that the latter metal was too scarce and valuable to be wasted.[5] Evidently this alloy must have been discovered in some locality where tin and copper were both found, and trials could be made of the proportions which gave the best result, and the secret must have been communicated to other nations along with the tin which was necessary for the manufacture. Where could the sources have been which supplied this tin and this knowledge how to use it, to the two great civilized nations of Egypt and ChaldÆa, where we can say with certainty that bronze was in common use prior to 5000 b.c.? If we exclude Britain and the extreme East, there are only two localities in which extensive remains of ancient workings for tin have been discovered; one in Georgia on the slopes of the Caucasus, and the other on the northern slope of the Hindoo-Kush in the neighbourhood of Bamian. And the knowledge both of bronze and of other metals, such as iron and gold, seems to have been universally diffused among the Turanian races who were the primitive inhabitants of Northern Asia. How could Egypt have got its tin even from the nearest known source? Consider the length of the caravan route; the number of beasts of burden required; the necessity for roads, depÔts, and stations; the mountain ranges, rivers, and deserts to be traversed; such a journey is scarcely conceivable either through districts sparsely peopled and without resources, or infested by savage tribes and robbers. And yet if the tin did not come by land, it must have come for the greater part of the way by water, floating down the Euphrates or Tigris, and being shipped from Ur or Eridhu by way of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. It is difficult to conceive that such an international commerce can have existed at such a remote period, and the difficulty is increased by the fact that in Europe, where we can pretty well trace the passage from the neolithic into the bronze period, bronze does not seem to have been known until some 2000 or 3000 years later, when the Phoenicians had migrated to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and extended their commerce and navigation far and wide over its northern coasts and islands; and at a still later period, when the Etruscans had established themselves in Italy and exported the products of the Tuscan tin mines by trade routes over the RhÆtian Alps. It is even doubtful whether there was any knowledge of metals in Europe prior to the Phoenician period, as the Aryan names for gold, silver, copper, tin, and iron are borrowed from foreign sources; and have no common origin in any ancestral language of the Aryan races before they were differentiated into Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavic. Copper seems to have been the first metal known, and there are traces of a copper age prior to that of bronze in some of the older neolithic lake villages of Switzerland and Italy, and in very old tombs and dolmens in Hungary, France, and the south-west of Spain. But these copper implements are very few and far between, they are evidently modelled in the prior forms of polished stone, and must have been superseded after a very short time by the invention or importation of bronze, which, as already stated, implies a supply of tin, and a common knowledge of the art of alloying copper with it in the same uniform proportion which gives the best result. But in the historic records and remains of Egypt and ChaldÆa, which go so much further back, bronze had evidently been long known when history commences. The Accadian name for tin, Id-Kasdaru, is the oldest known, and reappears in the Sanscrit Kastira, the Assyrian Kasugeteira, and the Greek Kassiteros. The oldest known name for copper is the Accadian urud or urudu, which singularly enough is preserved in the Basque urraida, while as rauta it reappears as the name for iron in Finnish, and as ruda for metal generally in Old Slavonic. In Semitic Babylonian, copper is eru, which confirms the induction that the metal was unknown to the primitive Semites, and adopted by them from the previously existing Accadian civilization. We are thus driven back by every line of evidence to the conclusion that Egypt and ChaldÆa were in the full, bronze age, and had left the stone period far behind them, long before the primitive stocks of the more modern Aryan and Semitic populations of Europe and Western Asia had emerged from the neolithic stage, and for an unknown period before the definite date when their history commences, certainly not less than 7000 years ago. We are also driven to the conclusion that other nations, capable of conducting extensive mining operations, must have been in existence in the Caucasus, the Hindoo-Kush, the Altai, or other remote regions; and that routes of international commerce must have been established by which the scarce but indispensable tin could be transported from these regions to the dense and civilized communities which had grown up in the alluvial valleys and deltas of the Nile and the Euphrates. It is very singular, however, that if such an intercourse existed, the knowledge of other objects of what may be called the first necessity, should have been so long limited to certain areas and races. For instance, in the case of the domestic animals, the horse was unknown in Egypt and Arabia till after the Hyksos conquest, when in a short time it became common, and these countries supplied the finest breeds and the greatest number of horses for exportation. On the other hand, the horse must have been known at a very early period in ChaldÆa, for the tablet of Sargon I., b.c. 3800, talks of riding in brazen chariots over rugged mountains. This makes it the more singular that the horse should have remained so long unknown in Egypt and Arabia, for it is such an eminently useful animal, both for peace and war, that one would think it must have been introduced almost from the very first moment when trading caravans arrived. And yet tin must have arrived from regions where in all probability the horse had been long domesticated before the time of Menes. The only explanation I can see is, that the tin must have come by sea, but by what maritime route could it have come prior to the rise of Phoenician commerce, which was certainly not earlier than about 2000 b.c., or some 3000 years after the date of Menes? Could it have come down the Euphrates or Tigris and been exported from the great sea-ports of Eridhu or Ur by way of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea? This seems the more probable, as Eridhu was certainly an important maritime port at the early period of ChaldÆan civilization. The diorite statues found at Tell-loh by M. de Sarzec are stated by an inscription on them to have come from Sinai, and indeed they could have come from no other locality, as this is the only known site of the peculiar greenish-black basalt or diorite of which those statues and the similar one of the Egyptian Chephren of the second pyramid are made. And in this case the transport of such heavy blocks for such a distance could only have been effected by sea. There are traces also of the maritime commerce of Eridhu having extended as far as India. Teak wood, which could only have come from the Malabar coast, has been found in the ruins of Ur; and "Sindhu," which is Indian cloth or muslin, was known from the earliest times. It seems not improbable, therefore, that Eridhu and Ur may have played the part which was subsequently taken by Sidon and Tyre, in the prehistoric stages of the civilizations both of Egypt and of ChaldÆa, and this is confirmed by the earliest traditions of the primitive Accadians, which represent these cities on the Persian Gulf as maritime ports, whose people were well acquainted with ships, as we see in their version of the Deluge, which, instead of the Hebrew ark of Noah, has a well-equipped ship with sails and a pilot, in the legend of Xisuthros. The instance of the horse is the more remarkable, as throughout a great part of the stone period the wild horse was the commonest of animals, and afforded the staple food of the savages whose remains are found in all parts of Europe. At one station alone, at Solutre in Burgundy, it is computed that the remains of more than 40,000 horses are found in the vast heap of dÉbris of a village of the stone period. What became of these innumerable horses, and how is it that the existence of the animal seems to have been so long unknown to the great civilized races? It is singular that a similar problem presents itself in America, where the ancestral tree of the horse is most clearly traced through the Eocene and Miocene periods, and where the animal existed in vast numbers both in the Northern and Southern Continent, under conditions eminently favourable for its existence, and yet it became so completely extinct that there was not even a tradition of it remaining at the time of the Spanish conquest. On the other hand, the ass seems to have been known from the earliest times, both to the Egyptians and the Semites of Arabia and Syria, and unknown to the Aryans, whose names for it are all borrowed from the Semitic. Large herds of asses are enumerated among the possessions of great Egyptian landowners as far back as the fifth and sixth dynasties, and no doubt it had been the beast of burden in Egypt for time immemorial. It is in this respect only, viz. the introduction of the horse, that we can discern any foreign importation calculated to materially affect the native civilization of Egypt, during the immensely long period of its existence. It had no doubt a great deal to do with launching Egypt on a career of foreign wars and conquests under the eighteenth dynasty, and so bringing it into closer contact with other nations, and subjecting it to the vicissitudes of alternate triumphs and disasters, now carrying the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris, and now bringing Assyrian and Persian conquerors to Thebes and Memphis. But in the older ages of the First and Middle Empire, the ox, the ass, the sheep, ducks and geese, and the dog, seem to have been the principal domestic animals. Gazelles also were tamed and fed in herds during the Old Empire, and the cat was domesticated from an African species during the Middle Empire. Agriculture was conducted both in Egypt and ChaldÆa much as it is in China at the present day, by a very perfect system of irrigation depending on embankments and canals, and by a sort of garden cultivation enabling a large population to live in a limited area. The people also, both in Egypt and ChaldÆa, seem to have been singularly like the modern Chinese, patient industrious, submissive to authority, unwarlike, practical, and prosaic. Everything, therefore, conspires to prove that an enormous time must have elapsed before the dawn of history 7000 years ago, to convert the aborigines who left their rude stone implements in the sands and gravels of these localities, into the civilized and populous communities which we find existing there long before the reigns of Menes and of Sargon. Short Duration of Tradition—No Recollection of Stone Age—Celts taken for Thunderbolts—Stone Age in Egypt—PalÆolithic Implements—Earliest Egyptian Traditions—Extinct Animals forgotten—Their Bones attributed to Giants—Chinese and American Traditions—Traditions of Origin of Man—Philosophical Myths—Cruder Myths from Stones, Trees, and Animals—Totems—Recent Events soon forgotten—Autochthonous Nations—Wide Diffusion of Prehistoric Myths—The Deluge—Importance of, as Test of Inspiration—More Definite than Legend of Creation—What the Account of the Deluge in Genesis really says—Date—Extent—Duration—All Life destroyed except Pairs preserved in the Ark—Such a Deluge impossible—Contradicted by Physical Science—By Geology—By Zoology—By Ethnology—By History—How Deluge Myths arise—Local Floods—Sea Shells on Mountains—Solar Myths—Deluge of Hasisadra—Noah's Deluge copied from it—Revised in a Monotheistic Sense at a comparatively Late Period—Conclusion—National View of Inspiration. In passing from the historical period, in which we can appeal to written records and monuments, into that of palÆontology and geology, where we have to rely on scientific facts and reasons, we have to traverse an intermediate stage in which legends and traditions still cast a dim and glimmering twilight. The first point to notice is that this, like the twilight of tropical evenings, is extremely brief, and fades almost at once into the darkness of night. It is singular in how short a time all memory is lost of events which are not recorded in some form of writing or inscription, and depend solely on oral tradition. Thus it may be safely affirmed that no nation which has passed into the metal age retains any distinct recollection of that of polished stone, and À fortiori none of the palÆolithic period, or of the origins of their own race or of mankind. The proof of this is found in the fact that the stone axes and arrow-heads which are found so abundantly in many countries are everywhere taken for thunderbolts or fairy arrows shot down from the skies. This belief was well-nigh universal throughout the world; we find it in all the classical nations, in modern Europe, in China, Japan, and India. Its antiquity is attested by the fact that neolithic arrow-heads have been found attached as amulets in necklaces from Egyptian and Etruscan tombs, and palÆolithic celts in the foundations of ChaldÆan temples. In India many of the best specimens of palÆolithic implements were obtained from the gardens of ryots, where they had been placed on posts, and offerings of ghee duly made to them. Like so many old superstitions, this still lingers in popular belief, and the common name for the finely-chipped arrow-heads which are so plentifully scattered over the soil from Scotland to Japan, is that of elf-bolts, supposed to have been shot down from the skies by fairies or spirits. Until the discoveries of Boucher-de-Perthes were confirmed only half a century ago, this belief was not only that of simple peasants, but of the learned men of all countries, and the volumes are innumerable that have been written to explain how the "cerauni," or stone-celts, taken to be thunderbolts, were formed in the air during storms. They are already described by Pliny, and a Chinese EncyclopÆdia says that "some of these lightning stones have the shape of a hatchet, others of a knife, some are made like mallets. They are metals, stones, and pebbles, which the fire of the thunder has metamorphosed by splitting them suddenly and uniting inseparably different substances. On some of them a kind of vitrification is distinctly to be observed." The Chinese philosopher was evidently acquainted with real meteorites and with the stone implements which were mistaken for them, and his account is comparatively sober and rational. But the explanations of the Christian fathers and mediÆval philosophers, and even of scientific writers down to a very recent period, are vastly more mystical. A single specimen may suffice which is quoted by Tylor in his Early History of Mankind. Tollius in 1649 figures some ordinary palÆolithic stone axes and hammers, and tells us that "the naturalists say they are generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfused humour, and are as it were baked hard by intense heat, and the weapon becomes pointed by the damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end denser, but the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out through the cloud and makes thunder and lightning." But these attempts at scientific explanations were looked upon with disfavour by theologians, the orthodox belief being that the "cerauni" were the bolts by which Satan and his angels had been driven from heaven into the fiery abyss. These speculations, however, of later ages are of less importance for our present purpose than the fact that in no single instance can anything like a real historical tradition be found connecting the stone age with that of metals, and giving a true account of even the latest forms of neolithic implements. This is the more remarkable in the case of Egypt, where historical records go back so very far, for here, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the relics of a stone age exist in considerable numbers. There is every probability, therefore, that Egyptian civilization had been developed, mainly on the spot, from the rude beginnings of a palÆolithic age, through the incipient civilization of the neolithic, into the age of metals, and the advanced civilization which preceded the consolidation of the empire under Menes and the commencement of history.[6] And yet no tradition, with a pretence to be historical, goes back farther than with a very dim and nickering light for a few centuries before Menes, when the Horsheshu, or priests of Horus, ruled independent cities, and small districts attached to the temples. There are accounts of some passages of the Todtenbuch being taken from old hymns written on goatskin in the time of these Horsheshu, and of historical temples built on plans taken from older temples and attributed to Thoth; and it seems probable also that the Sphynx and its temple may date from the same period. But beyond these few and vague instances, there is nothing to confirm the statement attributed to Manetho, that, prior to Menes, historical kings had reigned in Thebes for 1817 years, in Memphis for 1790 years, and in This for 350 years; before whom came heroes and kings for 5813 years, heroes for 1255 years, and gods for 13,900 years. The disappearance of all historical recollections of a stone age is paralleled by the oblivion of the origin of the remains of the great extinct quaternary animals which were contemporary with man. Everywhere we find the fossil bones of the elephant and rhinoceros attributed to monsters and giants, both in the ancient and modern worlds. St. Augustine denounces infidels who do not believe that "men's bodies were formerly much greater than now," and quotes, in proof of the assertion, that he had seen himself "so huge a molar tooth of a man, that it would cut up into a hundred teeth of ordinary men,"—doubtless the molar of a fossil elephant. Marcus Scaurus brought to Rome from Joppa the bones of the monster who was to have devoured Andromeda. The Chinese EncyclopÆdia, already referred to, describes the "Fon-shu, an animal which dwells in the extreme cold on the coast of the Northern Sea, which resembles a rat in shape, but is as big as an elephant, and lives in dark caverns, ever shunning the light. There is got from it an ivory as white as that of an elephant;" evidently referring to the frozen mammoths found in Siberia. Similar circumstances gave rise to the same myth in South America, and the natives told Darwin that the skeletons of the mastodon on the banks of the Parana were those of a huge burrowing animal, like the bizchaca or prairie-rat. Numerous similar instances are given by Tyler in his Early History of Mankind, and among the whole multitude of this class of myths, there is only one which has the least semblance of being derived from actual tradition, viz. the bas-relief of the sacrifice of a human victim by a Mexican priest, who wears a mask of an animal with a trunk resembling an elephant or mastodon; and certain vague traditions among some of the Red Indian tribes speak of an animal with an arm protruding from its shoulder. It is more probable, however, that these may have been derived from traditions brought over from Asia like the Mexican Calendar, or be creations of the fancy, like dragons and griffins, inspired by some idea of an exaggerated tapir, than that, in this solitary instance, a Mexican priest should have been actually a contemporary of the mammoth or mastodon. If fossil animals have thus given rise everywhere to legends of giants, fossil shells have played the same part as regards legends of a deluge. These are in many cases so abundant at high levels that they could not fail to be observed, and, if observed, to be attributed to the sea having once covered these levels, and inundated all the earth except the highest peaks. The tradition of an universal deluge is however so important that I reserve it for separate consideration at the end of the present chapter. If then all memory of a period so comparatively recent as that of the neolithic stone age and of the latest extinct animals was completely lost when the first dawn of history commences, it follows as a matter of course that nothing like an historical tradition survives anywhere of the immensely longer palÆolithic period and of the origin of man. Man in all ages has asked himself how he came here, and has indulged in speculations as to his origin. These speculations have taken a form corresponding very much to the stage of culture and civilization to which he had attained. They are of almost infinite variety, but may be classed generally under three heads. Those nations which had attained a sufficient degree of culture to personify first causes and the phenomena of Nature as gods, attribute the creation of the world and of man to some one or more of these gods; and as they advance further in philosophical reasonings, embellish the myth with allegories embodying the problems of human existence. Thus if Bel makes man out of clay, and moulds him with his own blood; or Jehovah fashions him from dust, and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life; in each case it is an obvious allegory to explain the fact that man has a dual nature, animal and spiritual. So the myth of the Garden of Eden, the Temptation by the Serpent, the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, and the Fall of Adam, which we see represented on a Babylonian cylinder as well as in the second chapter of Genesis, is obviously an allegorical attempt to explain what remains to this day the perplexing problem of the origin of evil. These philosophical myths are, however, very various among different nations. Thus the orthodox belief of 200,000,000 of Hindoos is that mankind were created in castes, the Brahmins by an emanation from Brahma's head, the warriors from his chest, the traders and artisans from his legs, and the sudras or lowest caste from his feet; obviously an ex post facto myth to account for the institution of castes, and to stamp it with divine authority. But before reflection had risen to this level, and among the savage and semi-barbarous people of the present day, we find much more crude speculations, which, in the main, correspond with the kindred creeds of Animism and Totemism. When life and magical powers were attributed to inanimate objects, nothing was more natural than to suppose that stones and trees might be converted into men and women, and conversely men and women into trees and stones. Thus we find the stone theory very widely diffused. Even with a people so far advanced as the early Greeks, it meets us in the celebrated fable of Deucalion and Pyrrha peopling the earth by throwing stones behind them, which turned into men and women; and the same myth, of stones turning into the first men, meets us at the present day in almost every reliable myth of creation, brought home by missionaries and anthropologists from Africa, America, and Polynesia. In some cases trees take the place of stones, and transformations of men into both are among the commonest occurrences. From Daphne into a laurel, and Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, down to the Cornish maidens transformed into a circle of stones for dancing on Sunday, we find everywhere that wherever natural objects present any resemblance to the human figure, such myths sprung up spontaneously in all ages and countries. Another great school of creation-myths originates in the widespread institution of the totem. It is a step in advance of the pure fetich-worship of stocks and stones, to conceive of animals as having thought and language, and being in fact men under a different form. From this it is a short step to endowing them with magical attributes and supernatural powers, adopting them as patrons of tribes and families, and finally considering them as ancestors. Myths of this kind are common among the lower races, especially in America, where many of the tribes considered themselves as descendants of some great bear or elk, or of some extremely wise fox or beaver, and held this belief so firmly, that intermarriage among members of the same totem was considered to be incestuous. The same system prevails among most races at an equally low or lower stage of civilization, as in Australia; and there are traces of its having existed among old civilized nations at remote periods. Thus the animal-worship of Egypt was probably a survival of the old faith in totems, differing among different clans, which was so firmly rooted in the popular traditions, that the priests had to accommodate their religious conceptions to it, as the Christian fathers did with so many pagan superstitions. The division of the twelve tribes of Israel seems also to have been originally totemic, judging from the old saga in which Jacob gives them his blessing, identifying Judah with a lion, Dan with an adder, and so on. And even at the present day, the crest of the Duke of Sutherland carries us back to the time when the wild-cat was the badge, and very probably some great and fierce wild-cat the ancestor, in popular belief, of the fighting clan Chattan. But in all these various and discordant myths of the creation of man, it is evident there is nothing which comes within a hundred miles of being a possible historical reminiscence of anything that actually occurred; and they must be relegated to the same place as the corresponding myths of the creation of the animal world and of the universe. They are neither more or less credible than the theories that the earth is a great tortoise floating on the water, or the sky a crystal dome with windows in it to let down the rain, and stars hung from it like lamps to illuminate a tea-garden. Even when we come to comparatively recent periods, and have to deal with traditions, not of how races originated, but how they came into the abodes where we find them, it is astonishing how little we can depend on anything prior to written records. Most ancient nations fancied themselves autochthonous, and took a pride in believing that they sprang from the soil on which they lived. And this is also the case with ruder races, unless where the migrations and conquests recorded are of very recent date. Thus Ancient Egypt believed itself to be autochthonous, and traced the origin of arts and sciences to native gods. ChaldÆa, according to Berosus, was inhabited from time immemorial by a mixed multitude, and though Oannes brought letters and arts from the shores of the Persian Gulf, he taught them to a previously existing population. This is the more remarkable as the name of Accad and the form of the oldest Accadian hieroglyphics make it almost certain that they had migrated into Mesopotamia from the highlands of Kurdistan or of Central Asia. The Athenians also and other Greek tribes all claimed to be autochthonous, and their legends of men springing from the stones of Deucalion, and from the dragon's teeth of Cadmus, all point in the same direction. The great Aryan races also have no trustworthy traditions of any ancient migrations from Asia into Europe, or vice versÂ, and their languages seem to denote a common residence during the formation of the different dialects in those regions of Northern Europe and Southern Russia in which we find them living when we first catch sight of them. The only exception to this is in the record in the Zendavesta of successive migrations from the Pamer or Altai, down the Oxus and Jaxartes into Bactria, and from thence into Persia. But this is not found in the original portion of the Zendavesta, and only in later commentaries on it, and is very probably a legend introduced to exemplify the constant warfare between Ormuzd and Ahriman. The Hindoo Vedas contain no history, and the inference that the Aryans lived in the Punjaub when the Rig-Veda was composed, and conquered Hindostan later, is derived from the references contained in the oldest hymns which point to that conclusion, rather than from any definite historical record. Rome again had no tradition of Umbrian pile-dwellers descending from neolithic Switzerland, expelling Iberians, and being themselves expelled by Etruscans. It is singular, considering the almost total absence of genuine historical traditions, how certain myths and usages have been universally diffused, and come down to the present day from a very remote antiquity. The identity of the days of the week, based on a highly artificial and complicated calculation of ChaldÆan astrology, has been already referred to as a striking instance of the wide diffusion of astronomical myths in very early times. Many of the most popular nursery tales also, such as Jack the Giant-killer, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella, are found almost in the same form in the most remote regions and among the most various races, both civilized and uncivilized, and many of them are obviously derived from the oldest and simplest forms of solar myths. I come now to the tradition of a Deluge, which is most important both on account of its prevalence among a number of different races and nations, often remote from one another, and because it affords the most immediate and crucial test of the claim of the Bible to be taken as a literally true and inspired account, not only of matters of moral and religious import, but of all the historical and scientific facts recorded in its pages. The Confession of Faith of an able and excellent man, the late Mr. Spurgeon, and adopted by fifteen or twenty other Nonconformist ministers, says— "We avow our firmest belief in the verbal inspiration of all Holy Scripture as originally given. To us the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God, but is the Word of God." Following this example, thirty-eight clergymen of the Church of England have put forward a similar Declaration. They say— "We solemnly profess and declare our unfeigned belief in all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as handed down to us by the undivided Church in the original languages. We believe that they are inspired by the Holy Ghost; that they are what they profess to be; that they mean what they say; and that they declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled." It is perfectly obvious that for those who accept these Confessions of Faith, not only the so-called "higher Biblical Criticism," but all the discoveries of modern science, from Galileo and Newton down to Lyall and Darwin, are simple delusions. There can be no question that if the words of the Old Testament are "literally inspired," and "mean what they say," they oppose an inflexible non possumus to all the most certain discoveries of Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Biology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and other modern sciences. Now the account of the Deluge in Genesis affords the readiest means of bringing this theory to the test, and proving or disproving it, by the process which Euclid calls the reductio ad absurdum. Not that other narratives, such as those of the Creation in Genesis, do not contain as startling contradictions, if we keep in mind the assertion of the orthodox thirty-eight, that the inspired words of the Old Testament "mean what they say," i.e. that they mean what they were necessarily taken to mean by contemporaries and long subsequent generations; for instance, that if the inspired writer says days defined by a morning and an evening, he means natural days, and not indefinitely long periods. But this is just what the defenders of orthodoxy always ignore, and all the attempts at reconciling the accounts of Creation in Genesis with the conclusions of science turn on the assumption that the inspired writers do not "mean what they say," but something entirely different. If they say "days," they mean geological periods of which no reader had the remotest conception until the present century. If they say that light was made before the sun, and the earth before the sun, moon, and stars, they really mean, in some unexplained way, to indicate Newton's law of gravity, Laplace's nebular theory, and the discoveries of the spectroscope. By using words therefore in a non-natural sense, and surrounding them with a halo of mystical and misty eloquence, they evade bringing the pleadings to a distinct and definite issue such as the popular mind can at once understand. But in the case of the Deluge no such evasion is possible. The narrative is a specific statement of facts alleged to have occurred at a comparatively recent date, not nearly so remote as the historical records of Egypt and ChaldÆa, and which beyond all question must be either true or false. But if false, there is an end of any attempt to consider the whole scientific and historical portions of the Bible as written by Divine inspiration; for the narrative is not one of trivial importance, but of what is really a second creation of all life, including man, from a single or very few pairs miraculously preserved and radiating from a single centre.[7] Consider then what the narrative of the Deluge really tells us. First, as to date. The Hebrew Bible, from which our own is translated, gives the names of the ten generations from Noah to Abraham, with the precise dates of each birth and death, making the total number of years 297 from the Flood to Abraham. For Abraham, assuming him to be historical, we have a synchronism which fixes the date within narrow limits. He was a contemporary of Chedorlaomer, or Khuder-Lagomar, known to us from ChaldÆan inscriptions as one of the last of the Elamite dynasty, who subverted the old dynasty in the year 2280 b.c., and who reigned for 160 years. Abraham's date is, therefore, approximately about 2200 b.c., and that of the Deluge about 2500 b.c. The Septuagint version assigns 700 years more than that of the Hebrew Bible for the interval between Abraham and Noah; but this is only done by increasing the already fabulous age of the patriarchs. Accepting, however, this Septuagint version, though it has been constantly repudiated by the Jews themselves, and by nearly all Christian authorities from St. Jerome down to Archbishop Usher, the date of the Deluge cannot be carried further back than to about 3000 b.c., a date at least 1000, and more probably 2000, years later than that shown by the records and monuments of Egypt and ChaldÆa, when great empires, populous cities, and a high degree of civilization already existed in those countries. The statement of the Bible, therefore, is that, at a date not earlier than 2200 b.c., or at the very earliest 3000 b.c., a deluge occurred which "covered all the high hills that were under the whole heaven," and prevailed upon the earth for 150 days before it began to subside; that seven months and sixteen days elapsed before the tops of the mountains were first seen; and that only after twelve months and ten days from the commencement of the flood was the earth sufficiently dried to allow Noah and the inmates of the Ark to leave it. Naturally all life was destroyed, with the exception of Noah and those who were with him in the Ark, consisting of his wife, his three sons and their wives, and pairs, male and female, of all beasts, fowls, and creeping things; or, as another account has it, seven pairs of clean beasts and of birds, and single pairs of unclean beasts and creeping things. The statement is absolutely specific: "All flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon earth, and every man." And again: "Every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both men and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven, and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the Ark." And finally, when the Ark was opened, "God spake unto Noah and said, Go forth of the Ark, thou and thy wife, and thy sons and sons' wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth." It is evident that such a narrative cannot be tortured into any reminiscence of a partial and local inundation. It might possibly be taken for a poetical exaggeration of some vague myth or tradition of a local flood, if it were found in the legends of some early races, or semi-civilized tribes. But such an interpretation is impossible when the narrative is taken, as orthodox believers take it, as a Divinely-inspired and literally true account contained in one of the most important chapters in the history of the relations of man to God. In this view it is a still more signal instance than the fall of Adam, of God's displeasure with sin and its disastrous consequences, of his justice and mercy in sparing the innocent and rewarding righteousness; it establishes a new departure for the human race, a new distinction between the chosen people of Israel and the accursed Canaanites, based not on Cain's murder of Abel, but on Ham's irreverence towards his father; and it introduces a covenant between God and Noah, which continued through Abraham and David, and became the basis of Jewish nationality and of the Christian dispensation. If in such a narrative there are manifest errors, the theory of Divine inspiration obviously breaks down, and the book which contains it must be amenable to the ordinary rules of historical criticism. Now, that no such Deluge as that described in Genesis ever took place is as certain as that the earth moves about the sun. Physical science tells us that it never could have occurred; geology, zoology, ethnology, and history all tell us alike that it never did occur. Physical science tells us two things about water: that it cannot be made out of nothing, and that it always finds its level. In order to cover the highest mountains on the earth and remain stationary at that level for months, we must suppose an uniform shell of water of six miles in depth to be added to the existing water of the earth. Even if we take Ararat as the highest mountain covered, the shell must have been three miles in thickness over the whole globe. Where did this water come from, and where did it go to? Rain is simply water raised from the seas by evaporation, and is returned to them by rivers. It does not add a single drop of water to that already existing on the earth and in its atmosphere. The heaviest rains do nothing but swell rivers and inundate the adjacent flat lands to a depth of a few feet, which rapidly subsides. The only escape from this law of nature is to suppose some sudden convulsion, such as a change in the position of the earth's axis of rotation, by which the existing waters of the earth were drained in some latitudes and heaped up in others. But any such local accumulation of water implies a sudden and violent rush to heap it up in forty days, and an equally violent rush to run it down to its old level when the disturbing cause ceased, as it must have done in 150 days. Such a disturbance in recent times is not only inconsistent with all known facts, but with the positive statement of the narrative that the whole earth was covered, and that the Ark floated quietly on the waters, drifting slowly northwards, until it grounded on Ararat. The only other alternative is to suppose a subsidence of the land below the level of the sea. But a subsidence which carried a whole continent 15,000, or even 1500 feet down, followed by an elevation which brought it back to the old level, both accomplished within the space of twelve months, is even more impossible than a cataclysmal deluge of water. Such movements are now, and have been throughout all the geological periods, excessively slow, and certainly not exceeding, at the very outside, a few feet in a century. And, if physical science shows that no such Deluge as that described in Genesis could have occurred, geology is equally positive that it never did occur. The drift and boulders which cover a great part of Europe and North America are beyond all doubt glacial, and not diluvial. They are strictly limited by the extension of glaciers and ice-sheets, and of the streams flowing from them. The high-level gravels in which human remains are found in conjunction with those of extinct animals, are the result of the erosion of valleys by rivers. They are not marine, they are interstratified with beds of sand and silt, containing often delicate fluviatile shells, which were deposited when the stream ran tranquilly, as the coarser gravels were when it ran with a stronger torrent. And the gravels of adjacent valleys, even when separated by a low water-shed, are not intermixed, but each composed of the dÉbris of its own system of drainage, by which small rivers like the Somme and the Avon have, in the course of ages, scooped out their present valleys to an extent of more than 100 feet in depth and two miles in width. Masses of loose sand, volcanic ashes, and other incoherent materials of tertiary formation remain on the surface, which must have been swept away by anything resembling a diluvial wave. And, above all, Egypt and other flat countries adjoining the sea, such as the deltas of the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Mississippi, which must have been submerged by a slight elevation of the sea or subsidence of the land, show by borings, carried in some cases to the depth of 100 feet and upwards, nothing but an accumulation of such tranquil deposits as are now going on, continued for hundreds of centuries, and uninterrupted by anything like a marine or diluvial deposit. Zoology is even more emphatic than geology in showing the impossibility of accepting the narrative of the Deluge as a true representation of actual events. Whoever wrote it must have had ideas of science as infantile as those of the children who are amused by a toy ark in the nursery. His range of vision could hardly have extended beyond the confines of his own country. And, if a reductio ad absurdum were needed of the fallacies to which reconcilers are driven, it would be afforded by Sir J. Dawson's comparison of the Ark to an American cattle-steamer. Recollect that the date assigned to the Deluge affords no time for the development of new species and races, since every "living substance was destroyed that was upon the face of the ground," except the pairs preserved in the Ark. It is a question, therefore, not of one pair of bears, but of many—polar, grizzly, brown, and all the varieties, down to the pigmy bear of Sumatra. So of cattle: there must have been not only pairs of the wild and domestic species of Europe, but of the gaur of India, the Brahmin bull, the yak, the musk-ox, and of all the many species of buffaloes and bisons. If we take the larger animals only, there must have been several pairs of elephants, rhinoceroses, camels, horses, oxen, buffaloes, elk, deer and antelopes, apes, zebras, and innumerable others of the herbivora, to say nothing of lions, tigers, and other carnivora. Let any one calculate the cubic space which such a collection would require for a year's voyage under hatches, and he will see at once the absurdity of supposing that they could have been stowed away in the Ark. And this is only the beginning of the difficulty, for all the smaller animals, all birds, and all creeping things have also to be accommodated, and to live together for a year under conditions of temperature and otherwise which, if suited for some, must inevitably have been fatal for others. How did polar bears, lemmings, and snowy owls live in a temperature suited for monkeys and humming-birds? Then there is the crowning difficulty of the food. Go to the Zoological Gardens, and inquire as to the quantity and bulk of a year's rations for elephants, giraffes, and lions, or multiply by 365 the daily allowance of hay and oats for horses, and of grass of green food for bullocks, and he will soon find that the bulk required for food is far greater than that of the animals. And what did the birds and creeping things feed upon? Were there rats and mice for the owls, gnats for the swallows, worms and butterflies for the thrushes, and generally a supply of insects for the lizards, toads, and other insectivora, whether birds, reptiles, or mammals? And of the humbler forms which live on microscopic animals and on each other, were they also included in the destruction of "every living substance," and was the earth repeopled with them from the single centre of Ararat? Here also zoology has a decisive word to say. The earth could not have been repeopled, within any recent geological time, from any single centre, for in point of fact it is divided into distinct zoological provinces. The fauna of Australia, for instance, is totally different from that of Europe, Asia, and America. How did the kangaroo get there, if he is descended from a pair preserved in the Ark? Did he perchance jump at one bound from Ararat to the Antipodes? Ethnology again takes up a limited branch of the same subject, but one which is more immediately interesting to us—that of the variety of human races. The narrative of Genesis states positively that "every man in whose nostrils was the breath of life" was destroyed by the Flood, except those who were saved in the Ark, and that "the whole earth was overspread" of the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth. That is, it asserts distinctly that all the varieties of the human race have descended from one common ancestor, Noah, who lived not more than 5000 years ago. Consider the vast variety and diversity of human races existing now, and in some of the most typical instances shown by Egyptian and ChaldÆan monuments to have existed before Noah was born—the black and woolly-haired Negroes, the yellow Mongolians, the Australians, the Negritos, the Hottentots, the pygmies of Stanley's African forest, the Esquimaux, the American Red Indians, and an immense number of others, differing fundamentally from one another in colour, stature, language, and almost every trait, physical and moral. To suppose these to have all descended from a single pair, Noah and his wife, and to have "spread over the whole earth" from Ararat, since 3000 years b.c., is simply absurd. No man of good faith can honestly say that he believes it to be true; and, if not true, what becomes of inspiration? If anything were wanting to complete the demonstration, it would be furnished by history. We have perfectly authentic historical records, confirmed by monuments, extending in Egypt to a date certainly 2000 years older than that assigned for Noah's Deluge; and similar records in ChaldÆa probably going back as far. In none of these is there any mention of an universal deluge as an historical event actually occurring within the period of time embraced by those records. The only reference to such a deluge is contained in one chapter of a ChaldÆan epic poem based on a solar myth, and placed in an immense and fabulous antiquity. In Egypt the case is, if possible, even stronger, for here the configuration of the Nile valley is such that anything approaching an universal deluge must have destroyed all traces of civilization, and buried the country thousands of feet under a deep ocean. Even a very great local inundation must have spread devastation far and wide and been a memorable event in all subsequent annals. When remarkable natural events, such as earthquakes, did occur, they are mentioned in the annals of the reigning king, but no mention is made of any deluge. On the contrary, all the records and monuments confirm the statement made by the priests of Heliopolis to Herodotus when they showed him the statues of the 360 successive high priests who had all been "mortal men, sons of mortal men," that during this long period there had been no change in the average duration of human life, and no departure from the ordinary course of nature. When this historical evidence is added to that of geology, which shows that nothing resembling a deluge could have occurred in the valleys of the Nile or Euphrates without leaving unmistakable traces of its passage which are totally absent, the demonstration seems as conclusive as that of any of the propositions of Euclid. It remains to consider how so many traditions of a deluge should be found among so many different races often so widely separated. There are three ways in which deluge-myths must have been inevitably originated. 1. From tradition of destructive local floods. 2. From the presence of marine shells on what is now dry land. 3. From the diffusion of solar myths like that of Izdubar. There can be no doubt that destructive local floods must have frequently occurred in ancient and prehistoric times as they do at the present day. Such an inundation as that of the Yang-tse-Kiang, which only the other year was said to have destroyed half a million of people, or the hurricane wave which swept over the Sunderbunds, must have left an impression which, among isolated and illiterate people, might readily take the form of an universal deluge. And such catastrophes must have been specially frequent in the early post-glacial period, when the ice-dams, which converted many valleys into lakes, were melting. But I am inclined to doubt whether the tradition of such local floods was ever preserved long enough to account for deluge-myths. All experience shows that the memory of historical events fades away with surprising rapidity when it is not preserved by written records. If, as Xenophon records, all memory of the great city of Nineveh had disappeared in 200 years after its destruction, how can it be expected that oral tradition shall preserve a recollection of prehistoric local floods magnified into universal deluges? And when the deluge-myths of different nations are examined closely, it generally appears that they have had an origin rather in solar myths or cosmogonical speculations, than in actual facts. For instance, the tradition of a deluge in Mexico has often been referred to as a confirmation of the Noachian flood. But when looked into, it appears that this Mexican deluge was only a part of their mythical cosmogony which told of four successive destructions and renovations of the world by the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The first period being closed by earthquakes, the second by hurricanes, the third by volcanoes, it did not require any local tradition to ensure the fourth being closed by a flood. Again, deluge-myths must have inevitably arisen from the presence of marine shells, fossil and recent, in many localities where they were too numerous to escape notice. If palÆolithic stone implements and bones of fossil elephants gave rise to myths of thunderbolts and giants, sea-shells on mountain-tops must have given rise to speculations as to deluges. At the very beginning of history, Egyptian and ChaldÆan astronomers were sufficiently advanced in science to wish to account for such phenomena, and to argue that where sea-shells were found the sea must once have been. Many of the deluge-myths of antiquity, such as that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, look very much as if this had been their origin. They are too different from the ChaldÆan and Biblical Deluge, as for instance in repeopling the world by stones, to have been copied from the same original, and they fit in with the very general belief of ancient nations that they were autochthonous. In a majority of cases, however, I believe it will be found that deluge-myths have originated from some transmission, more or less distorted, of the very ancient ChaldÆan astronomical myths of the passage of the sun through the signs of the zodiac. This is clearly the case in the Hindoo mythology, where the fish-god Ea-han, or Oannes, is introduced as a divine fish who swims up to the Ark and guides it to a place of refuge. The legend in Genesis is much closer to the original myth, and in fact almost identical with that of the deluge of Hasisadra in the ChaldÆan epic, discovered by Mr. George Smith among the clay tablets in the British Museum. This poem was obviously based on an astronomical myth. It was in twelve chapters, dedicated to the sun's passage through the twelve signs of the zodiac. The adventures of Izdubar, like those of Heracles, have obvious reference to these signs, and to the sun's birth, growth, summer splendour, decline to the tomb when smitten with the sickness of approaching winter by the incensed Nature-goddess, and final new birth and resurrection from the nether world. The Deluge is introduced as an episode told to Izdubar during his descent to the lower regions by his ancestor Hasisadra, one of the God-kings, who are said to have reigned for periods of tens of thousands of years in a fabulous antiquity. It has every appearance of being a myth to commemorate the sun's passage through the rainy sign of Aquarius, just as the contests of Izdubar and Heracles with Leo, Taurus, Draco, Sagittarius, etc., symbolize his passage through other zodiacal constellations. It forms the eleventh chapter of the Epic of Izdubar, corresponding to the eleventh month of the ChaldÆan year, which was the time of heavy rains and floods. Now, this deluge of Hasisadra, as related by Berosus, and still more distinctly by Smith's Izdubar tablets, corresponds so closely with that of Noah that no doubt can remain that one is taken from the other. All the principal incidents and the order of events are the same, and even particular expressions, such as the dove finding no rest for the sole of her foot, are so identical as to show that they must have been taken from the same written record. Even the name Noah is that of Nouah, the Semitic translation of the Accadian god who presided over the realm of water, and navigated the bark or ark of the sun across it, when returning from its setting in the west to its rising in the east. The chief difference is the same as in the ChaldÆan and Biblical cosmogonies of the creation of the universe—viz. that the former is Polytheistic, and the latter Monotheistic. Where the former talks of Bel, Ea, and Istar, the latter attributes everything to Jehovah or Elohim. Thus the warning to Hasisadra is given in a dream sent by Ea, who is a sort of ChaldÆan Prometheus, or kindly god, who wishes to save mankind from the total destruction contemplated by the wrathful superior god, Bel; while in Genesis it is "Elohim said unto Noah." In Genesis the altar is built to the Lord, who smells the sweet savour of the sacrifice, while in the ChaldÆan legend the altar is built to the seven gods, who "smelt the sweet savour of sacrifice, and swarmed like bees about it." The ChaldÆan narrative is more prolix, more realistic, and, on the whole, more scientific. That is, it mitigates some of the more obvious impossibilities of the Noachian narrative. Instead of an ark, there is a ship with a steersman, which was certainly more likely to survive the perils of a long voyage on the stormy waters of an universal ocean. The duration of the Deluge and of the voyage is shortened from a year to a little more than a month; more human beings are saved, as Hasisadra takes on board not his own family only, but several of his friends and relations; and the difficulty of repeopling the earth from a single centre is diminished by throwing the date of the Deluge back to an immense and mythical antiquity. On the other hand, the moral and religious significance of the legend is accentuated in the Hebrew narrative. It is no longer the capricious anger of an offended Bel which decrees the destruction of mankind, but the righteous indignation of the one Supreme God against sin, tempered by justice and mercy towards the upright man who was "perfect in his generations." If we had to decide on internal evidence only, there could be little doubt that the Hebrew narrative is of much later date than the ChaldÆan. It is, in fact, very much what might be expected from a revised edition of it, made at the date which is assigned by all competent critics for the first collection of the legends and traditions of the Hebrew people into a sacred book—viz. at or about the date when the first mention is made of such a book as being discovered in the Temple in the reign of Josiah. Kuenen, Wellhausen, and other leading authorities place the date of the Elohistic and Jehovistic narratives, which include the Creation and Deluge, even later; and, if not compiled during or after the Babylonian Captivity, they were certainly revised, and have come down to us in their present form after that event. Even the most orthodox critics, such as Dillman and Canon Driver, admit that they were written in the golden age of Hebrew literature, and in the spirit of the later prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and do not think it possible to assign to them an earlier date than 800 or 900 b.c., while many parts may be much later. But the question is not one of internal evidence only, but of the positive fact that, even if these chapters of Genesis were written by Moses, or about 1350 b.c., and even accepting the Septuagint addition of 700 years to the already mythical duration of the lives of the patriarchs, the date of the Biblical Deluge cannot be carried back beyond 3100 or 3200 b.c., while a practically identical account of the same event is given, as a legendary episode of fabulous antiquity, in an epic poem, based on a solar myth, which was certainly reduced to writing many centuries before the earliest possible date of the Scriptural Deluge. It is absolutely certain also that the Egyptian records and traditions, which extend in an uninterrupted succession of dynasties and kings for at least 2000 years before this alleged universal Deluge, know nothing whatever of such an event; and, on the contrary, assume an unvarying continuance of the ordinary laws of Nature. I have dwelt at such length on the Deluge because it affords a crucial test of the dogma of Divine inspiration for the whole of the Bible. The account of the Creation may be obscured by forced interpretations and misty eloquence; but there can be no mistake as to the specific and precise statements respecting the second creation of man and of animal life. Either they are true or untrue; and the issue is one upon which any unprejudiced mind of ordinary intelligence and information can arrive at a conclusive verdict. If there never was an universal Deluge within historical times; if the highest mountains were never covered; if all life was never destroyed, except the contents of the Ark; if the whole animal creation, including beasts, birds, and creeping things, never lived together for twelve months cooped up in it; and if the earth was not repeopled with all the varieties of the human race, and all the orders, genera, and species of animal life, from a single centre at Ararat, then the Bible is not inspired as regards its scientific and historical statements. This, however, in no way affects the question of the inspiration of the religious and moral portions of the Bible. I have sometimes thought how, if I were an advocate stating the case for the inspiration of the Bible, I should be inclined to put it. I should start with Bishop Temple's definition of the First Cause, a personal God, with faculties like ours, but so transcendentally greater that he had no occasion to be perpetually patching and mending his work, but did everything by an original impress, which included all subsequent evolution, as the nucleolus in the primitive ovum includes the whole evolution and subsequent life of the chicken, mammal, or man. I should go on to say that the Bible has clearly been an important factor in this evolution of the human race; that it consists of two portions—one of moral and religious import, the other of scientific statements and theories, relating to such matters of purely human reason as astronomy, geology, literary criticism, and ancient history; and that these two parts are essentially different. It is quite conceivable that, on the hypothesis of a Divine Creator, one step in the majestic evolution from the original impress should have been that men of genius and devout nature should write books containing juster notions of man's relations to his Maker than prevailed in the polytheisms of early civilizations, and thus gradually educating a peculiar people who accepted these writings as sacred, and preparing the ground for a still higher and purer religion. But it is not conceivable that this, which may be called inspiration, of the religious and moral teaching, should have been extended to closing the record of all human discovery and progress, by teaching, as it were by rote, all that subsequent generations have, after long and painful effort, found out for themselves. In point of fact, the Bible does not teach such truths, for in the domain of science it is full of the most obvious errors, and teaches nothing but what were the primitive myths, legends, and traditions of the early races. It is to be observed also that, on the theory of "original impress," those errors are just as much a part of the evolution of the Divine idea as the moral and religious truths. Those who insist that all of the Bible must be inspired or none, remind me of the king who said that, if God had only consulted him in his scheme of creation, he could have saved him from a good many mistakes. It is not difficult to understand how, even if we assume the theory of inspiration, or of original impress, for the religious portion of the Bible, the other or scientific portion should have been purposely left open to all the errors and contradictions of the human intellect in its early strivings to arrive at some sort of conception of the origin of things, and of the laws of the universe. And also that a collection of narratives of different dates and doubtful authorship should bear on the face of them evidence of the writers sharing in the errors and prejudices, and generally adopting points of view of successive generations of contemporaries. Assuming this theory, I can only say for myself that the removal of the wet blanket of literal inspiration makes me turn to the Bible with increased interest. It is a most valuable record of the ways of thinking, and of the early conceptions of religion and science in the ancient world, and a most instructive chapter in the history of the evolution of the human mind from lower to higher things. Above all, it is a record of the preparation of the soil, in a peculiar race, for Christianity, which has been and is such an important factor in the history of the foremost races and highest civilizations. With all the errors and absurdities, all the crimes and cruelties which have attached themselves to it, but which in the light of science and free thought are rapidly being sloughed off, it cannot be denied that the European, and especially our English-speaking races, stand on a higher platform than if Gibbon's suggestion had been realized, the Arabs had been victorious at Tours, and Moslem Ulemas had been expounding the Koran at the University of Oxford. Moral and Religious distinct from Historical Inspiration—Myth and Allegory—The Higher Criticism—All Ancient History unconfirmed by Monuments untrustworthy—Cyrus—Old Testament and Monuments—Jerusalem—Tablet of Tell-el-Amarna—Flinders Petrie's Exploration of Pre-Hebrew Cities—Ramses and Pi-thom—First certain Synchronism Rehoboam—Composite Structure of Old Testament—Elohist and Jehovist—Priests' Code—Canon Driver—Results—Book of Chronicles—Methods of Jewish Historians—Post-Exilic References—Tradition of Esdras—Nehemiah and Ezra—Foundation of Modern Judaism—Different from Pre-Exilic—Discovery of Book of the Law under Josiah—Deuteronomy—Earliest Sacred Writings—Conclusions—Aristocratic and Prophetic Schools—Triumph of Pietism with Exile—Both compiled partly from Old Materials—Crudeness and Barbarism of Parts—Pre-Abrahamic Period clearly mythical—Derived from ChaldÆa—Abraham—Unhistoric Character—His Age—Lot's Wife—His double Adventure with Sarah—Abraham to Moses—Sojourn in Egypt—Discordant Chronology—Josephus' Quotation from Manetho—Small Traces of Egyptian Influence—Future Life—Legend of Joseph—Moses—Osarsiph—Life of Moses full of Fabulous Legends—His Birth—Plagues of Egypt—The Exodus—Colenso—Contradictions and Impossibilities—Immoralities—Massacres—Joshua and the Judges—Barbarisms and Absurdities—Only safe Conclusion no History before the Monarchy—David and Solomon—Comparatively Modern Date. In dealing with the historical portion of the Old Testament, it is important to keep clearly in view the distinction between the historical and the religious and moral elements which are contained in the collection of works comprised in it. It is quite open to any one to hold that a certain moral and religious idea runs through the whole of these writings, which is gradually developed from rude beginnings into pure and lofty views of an Almighty God who created all things, and who loves justice and mercy better than the blood of bulls and rams. It is open to him to call this inspiration, and to see it also in the series of influences and events by which the Jews were moulded into a peculiar people, through whose instrumentality the three great Monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity, and Mahometanism, superseded the older forms of polytheism. With inspiration in this sense I have no quarrel, any more than I have with Bishop Temple's definition of "original impress," though possibly I might think "Evolution" a more modest term to apply, with our limited faculties and knowledge, to that "unceasing purpose" which the poet tells us "Through the ages runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." But admitting this, I do not see how any candid man, who is at all acquainted with the results of modern science and of historical criticism, can doubt that the materials with which this edifice was gradually built up, consist, to a great extent, of myths, legends, and traditions of rude and unscientific ages which have no pretension to be true statements, or real history. After all this is only applying to the Old, the same principles of interpretation as are applied to the New Testament. If the theory of literal inspiration requires us to accept the manifest impossibilities of Noah's Deluge, why does it not equally compel us to believe that there really was a certain rich man who fared sumptuously every day, a beggar named Lazarus, and definite localities of a Heaven and Hell within speaking distance of one another, though separated by an impassable gulf. The assertion is made positively and without any reservation. There was a rich man; Lazarus died, and was carried to Abraham's bosom; and Dives cried to Abraham, who answered him in a detailed colloquy. But common sense steps in and says, all this never actually occurred, but was invented to illustrate by a parable the moral truth that it is wrong for the selfish rich to neglect the suffering poor. Why should not common sense equally step in, and say of the narrative of the Garden of Eden with its trees of Knowledge and of Life, that here is an obvious allegory, stating the problem which has perplexed so many generations of men, of the origin of evil, man's dual nature, and how to reconcile the fact of the existence of sin and suffering with the theory of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator? Or again, why hesitate to admit that the story of the Deluge is not literal history, but a version of a chapter of an old ChaldÆan solar epic, revised in a monotheistic sense, and used for the purpose of impressing the lesson that the ways of sin are ways of destruction, and that righteousness is the true path of safety? This is in effect what continental critics have long recognized, and what the most liberal and learned Anglican Divines of the present day are beginning to recognize; and we find men like Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, and Canon Cheyne, insisting on "the fundamental importance of disengaging the religious from the critical and historical problems of the Old Testament." We hear a great deal about the "higher criticism," and those who dislike its conclusions try to represent it as something very obscure and unintelligible, spun from the inner consciousness of German pedants. But really there is nothing obscure about it. It is simply the criticism of common sense applied from a higher point of view, which embraces, not the immediate subject only, but all branches of human knowledge which are related to it. This new criticism bears the same relation to the old, as Mommsen's History of Rome does to the school-boy manuals which used to assume Romulus and Remus, Numa and Tarquin, as real men who lived and reigned just as certainly as Julius CÆsar and Augustus, and who found nothing to stagger them in Livy's speaking oxen. This criticism has now been carried so far by the labours of a number of earnest and learned men in all the principal countries of Europe for the last century, that it has become to a great extent one of the modern sciences, and although there are still differences as to details, the leading outlines are no more in dispute than those of Geology or Biology. The conclusions of enlightened English divines like Canons Driver and Cheyne are practically very nearly the same as those of foreign professors, like Kuenen, Welhausen, Dillman, and Renan, and any one who wishes to have any intelligent understanding of the Hebrew Bible must take them into consideration. Although the Old Testament does not carry history back nearly as far as the records of Egypt and ChaldÆa, still, when freed from the incubus of literal inspiration, it affords a very interesting picture of the ways of thinking of ancient races, of their manners and customs, their first attempts to solve problems of science and philosophy, and of their popular legends and traditions. It is with these historical results only that I propose to deal, and this not in the way of minute criticism, but of the broad, common-sense aspects of the question, and in view of the salient facts which rise up like guiding pillars in the vast mass of literature on the subject, of which it may be said, in the words of St. John's Gospel, that if all that has been written were collected, "I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books." I may begin by referring to the extreme uncertainty that attaches to all ancient history unless it is confirmed by monuments, or by comparison with annals of other nations which have been so confirmed. The instance of Cyrus is a most instructive one. Here is one of the greatest conquerors the world has seen, and the founder of a mighty Empire; who flourished at a comparatively recent period, and whose life and exploits are related by well-known historians, such as Herodotus, who wrote within a few generations after his death; confirmed also to a great extent by almost contemporary records of Hebrew writers who were in close relations with him. The picture given of him is that of the son of a Median princess by an obscure Persian; in common with so many of the gods and heroes of antiquity, he is said to have been exposed in infancy and saved miraculously or marvellously; he incites the poor and hardy people of Persia to revolt; defeats the Medes, consolidates Media and Persia, conquers Lydia and all Asia Minor; and finally, as the "servant of the most High God," and instrument of his vengeance on Babylon, takes and destroys the cruel city of Nebuchadnezzar, and allows the Jews to return from exile out of sympathy with their religion. Unexpectedly a tablet of Cyrus himself turns up, and plays havoc alike with prophets and historians Instead of being the son of an obscure Persian father, he proves to be the legitimate descendant of a long line of Elamite kings; instead of being a servant of the most High God, or even a Zoroastrian, he appears as a devoted worshipper of the ChaldÆan gods, Assur, Merodach, and Nebo; so far from being an instrument of divine vengeance for the destruction of Babylon, he enters it without a battle, and is welcomed by its priests and people as an orthodox deliverer from the heretical tendencies of the last native king Nabonidus. It is apparent from this and other records, that Darius and not Cyrus was the real founder of the Persian Empire. Cyrus indeed founded a great Empire, but it fell to pieces after the death of his son Cambyses and the usurpation of the Magi, and it was Darius who, after years of hard fighting, suppressed revolts, really besieged and took Babylon, and reconstituted the Empire, which now for the first time became Persian and Zoroastrian. Such an example teaches us to regard with considerable doubt all history prior to the fifth or sixth century b.c. which is not confirmed by contemporary monuments. Of such nations, Egypt and ChaldÆa (including in the latter term Assyria) alone give us a series of annals, proved by monuments confirming native historians, which extend for some 4000 years back, from the commencement of what may be called the modern and scientific history of the Greek period. The historical portion of the Old Testament is singularly deficient in this essential point of confirmation by monumental evidence. Of Hebrew inscriptions there are none except that of the time of Hezekiah in the tunnel which brought water from the Pool of Siloam into the city; and the Moabite stone, which confirms the narrative in 2 Kings of the siege of Rabbah by Jehoshaphat and Jehoram, and their repulse after the sacrifice of his eldest son in sight of the armies by the King of Moab. Both of these inscriptions are of comparatively modern date, and close to or within the period when contact with the Assyrian Empire removes all uncertainty as to the history of JudÆa and Israel under their later kings. The capture of Jerusalem by David and the building of the Temple there by Solomon are doubtless historical facts, but they cannot be said to receive any additional confirmation from monuments. There have been so many destructions and rebuildings of temples on this site, that it is difficult to say to what era the lower strata belong. It is apparent, moreover, from the Egyptian tablets of Tel-el-Amarna, the city founded by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., about 1500 b.c., that Jerusalem was a well-known city and sacred shrine prior to the Hebrew conquest, and even to the date of the Exodus. Professor Sayce tells us that on one of these tablets is written, "The city of the mountain of Jerusalem (or Urasalim), the City of the temple of the God Uras, whose name there is Marra, the City of the King, which adjoins the locality of the men of Keilah." Uras was a Babylonian deity, and Marra is probably the Aramaic Mare, "lord," from which it may be conjectured that Mount Moriah received its name from the Temple of Uras which stood there. Some of the other tablets show that in the century before the Exodus, Jerusalem was occupied by a semi-independent king, who claimed to have derived his authority from "the oracle of the mighty King," which is explained to mean a deity, though he acknowledged the superiority of Egypt, which still retained the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty in Palestine. This, however, relates not to the Hebrews, but to the state of things prior to their invasion, when Palestine was occupied by comparatively civilized races of Amorites and Canaanites, and studded with numerous fenced cities. A glimpse at the later state of things, when those earlier nations and cities were overwhelmed by an invasion of a rude nomad race, as described in the Books of Joshua and Judges, has been afforded quite recently by the exploration by Mr. Flinders Petrie of a mound on the plain of Southern JudÆa, which he is disposed to identify with the ancient Lachish. A section of this mound has been exposed by the action of a brook, and it shows, as in Dr. Schliemann's excavations on the supposed site of Troy at Hissarlik, several successive occupations. The lowest and earliest city was fortified by a wall of sun-burnt bricks, 28 feet 8 inches thick, and which still stands to a height of 21 feet. It shows signs of great antiquity, having been twice repaired, and a large accumulation of broken pottery was found both outside and within it. This city, which Petrie identifies with one of those Amorite cities which were "walled up to heaven," had been taken and destroyed, and the wall had fallen into ruins. Then, to use Professor Sayce's words, "came a period when the site was occupied by rude herdsmen, unskilled in the arts either of making bricks or of fortifying towns. Their huts were built of mud and rolled stones from the Wady below, and resembled the wretched shanties of the half-savage Bedouins, which we may still see on the outskirts of the Holy Land. They must have been inhabited by the invading Israelitish tribes, who had overthrown the civilization which had long existed in the cities of Canaan, and were still in a state of nomadic barbarism." Above this come newer walls, which had been built and repaired three or four times over by the Jewish kings, one of the later rebuildings being a massive brick wall 25 feet thick, with a glacis of large blocks of polished stone traced to a height of 40 feet, which Petrie refers to the reign of Manasseh. Then comes a destruction, probably by the Assyrians under Sennacherib, and then other buildings of minor importance, the latest being those of a colony of Greeks, who were swept away before the age of Alexander the Great. This discovery is of first-rate importance as regards the early history of the Hebrews, and especially as to their relations with Egypt, their sojourn there, and the Exodus. If Abraham really came from Ur of ChaldÆa, the seat of a very old civilization; and if his descendants really lived for 400 years or longer in Egypt, mixed up a good deal with the native population, and for a great part of the time treated with favour, and occupying, if the legend of Joseph be true, the highest posts in the land; and if they really left Egypt, as described in the Exodus, laden with the spoils of the Egyptians, and led by Moses, a priest of Heliopolis skilled in all the lore of that ancient temple, it is inconceivable that in a single generation they should have sunk to such a level as that of the half-savage Bedouins, as indicated by Petrie's researches. And yet who else could have been the barbarians whose inroad destroyed the walled city of the Amorites; and how well does this condition of rude savagery correspond with the bloodthirsty massacres, and the crude superstitions, which meet us at every turn in the traditions of the period between the departure from Egypt and the establishment of a monarchy, which have been used by the compilers of the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges? If we are ever to know anything beyond legend and conjecture as to this obscure period, it is to the pick and the spade that we must look for certain information, and the exploration of mounds of ruined cities must either confirm or modify Petrie's inference as to the extreme rudeness of the nomad tribes who broke in upon the civilized inhabitants of older races. Another exploration by Mr. Flinders Petrie, that of the ruins of Pi-thom and Ramses, gives a certain amount of monumental confirmation to the statement in Exodus i. 2, that during the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt they were employed as slaves by Ramses II. in building two treasure cities, Ramses and Pi-thom. Some wall-paintings show slaves or forced labourers, of a Jewish cast of countenance, working at the brick walls under the sticks of taskmasters. The first certain synchronism, however, between the Egyptian monuments and Jewish history is afforded by the capture of Jerusalem by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam in the year 974 b.c. Among the wall-paintings in the temple at Thebes commemorating the triumphs of this campaign of Shishak, is a portrait of a captive with Jewish features, inscribed Yuten-Malek. This has been read "King of the Jews," and taken to be a portrait of Rehoboam, but it is more probable that it means "Kingdom of the Jews," and that the portrait is one representative of the country conquered. In any case this gives us the first absolutely certain date in Old Testament history. From this time downwards there is no reason to doubt that annals substantially correct, of successive kings of Judah and Israel, were kept, and after the reign of Ahaz, when the great Assyrian Empire appeared on the scene, we have a full confirmation, from the Assyrian monuments, of the principal events recorded in the Book of Kings. In fact, we may say that from the foundation of the Jewish Monarchy by Saul and David, we are fairly in the stream of history, but that for everything prior to about 1000 b.c. we have to grope our way almost entirely by the light of the internal evidence afforded by the Old Testament itself. The first point evidently is to have some clear idea of what this Old Testament really consists of. Until the recent era of scientific criticism, it was assumed to constitute, in effect, one volume, the earlier chapters of which were written by Moses, and the later ones by a continuance of the same Divine inspiration, which made the Bible from Genesis to Chronicles one consistent and infallible whole, in which it was impossible that there should be any error or contradiction. Such a theory could not stand a moment's investigation in the free light of reason. It is only necessary to read the two first chapters of Genesis to see that the book is of a composite structure, made up of different and inconsistent elements. We have only to include in the first chapter the two first verses printed in the second chapter, and to write the original Hebrew word "Elohim" for "God," and "Yahve" or Jehovah for "Lord God," to see this at a glance. The two accounts of the creation of the heaven and earth, of animal and vegetable life, and of man, are quite different. In the first Man is created last, male and female, in the image of God, with dominion over all the previous forms of matter and of life, which have been created for his benefit. In the second Man is formed from the dust of the earth immediately after the creation of the heavens and earth and of the vegetable world, and subsequently all the beasts of the field and fowls of the air are formed out of the ground, and brought to Adam to name, while, last of all, woman is made from a rib taken from Adam to be an helpmeet for him. The two narratives, Elohistic and Jehovistic, distinguished both by the different names of God, and by a number of other peculiarities, run almost side by side through a great part of the earlier portion of the Old Testament, presenting often flagrant contradictions. Thus Lamech, the father of Noah, is represented in one as a descendant of Cain, in the other of Seth. Canaan is in one the grandson of Adam, in the other the grandson of Noah. The Elohist says that Noah took two of each sort of living things, a male and a female, into the ark; the Jehovist that he took seven pairs of clean, and single pairs of unclean animals. The difference between these narratives, the Elohistic and Jehovistic, is, however, only the first and most obvious instance of the composite character of the Pentateuch. These narratives are distinguished from one another by a number of minute peculiarities of language and expressions, and they are both embedded in a much larger mass of matter which relates mainly to the sacrificial and ceremonial system of the Israelites, and to the position, privileges, and functions of the priests and priestly caste of Levites. This is commonly known as the "Priests' Code," and a great deal of it is obviously of late date, having relation to practices and ceremonies which had gradually grown up after the foundation of the Temple at Jerusalem. A vast amount of erudition has been expended in the minute analysis of these different documents by learned scholars who have devoted their lives to the subject. I shall not attempt to enter upon it, but content myself with taking the main results from Canon Driver, both because he is thoroughly competent from his knowledge of the latest foreign criticism and from his position as Professor of Hebrew, and because he cannot be suspected of any adverse leaning to the old orthodox views. In fact he is a strenuous advocate of the inspiration of the Bible, taken in the larger sense of a religious and moral purpose underlying the often mistaken and conflicting statements of fallible writers. The conclusions at which he arrives, in common with a great majority of competent critics in all countries, are— 1. That the old orthodox belief that the Pentateuch is one work written by Moses is quite untenable. 2. That the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua have been formed by the combination of different layers of narrative, each marked by characteristic features of its own. 3. That the Elohistic and Jehovistic narratives, which are the oldest portion of the collection, have nothing archaic in their style, but belong to the golden period of Hebrew literature, the date assigned to them by most critics being not earlier than the eighth or ninth century b.c., though of course they may be founded partly on older legends and traditions; and, on the other hand, they contain many passages which could only have been introduced by some post-exilic editor. 4. That Deuteronomy, which is placed almost unanimously by critics in the reign of either Josiah or Manasseh, is absolutely inconsistent in many respects with the Priests' Code, and apparently of earlier date, before the priestly system had crystallized into such a definite code of minute regulations, as we find it in the later days of Jewish history after the Exile. 5. There is a difference of opinion, however, in respect to the date of the Priests' Code, Kuenen, Wellhausen, and Graf holding it to be post-Deuteronomic, and probably committed to writing during the period from the beginning of the exile to the time of Nehemiah, while Dillman assigns the main body to about 800 b.c., though admitting that additions may have been made as late as the time of Ezra. Being concerned mainly with the historical question, I shall not attempt to pursue this higher criticism further, but content myself with referring to the principal points which, judged by the broad conclusions of common-sense, stand out as guiding pillars in the mass of details. Taking these in ascending order of time, they seem to me to be— 1. The Book of Chronicles. 2. The foundation of modern Judaism as described in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. 3. The discovery of the Book of the Law or Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah. The Book of Chronicles is important because we know its date, viz. about 300 b.c., and to a great extent the materials from which it was compiled, viz. the Books of Samuel and Kings. We have thus an object-lesson as to the way in which a Hebrew writer, as late as 300 b.c., or nearly 300 years after the exile, composed history and treated the earlier records. It is totally different from the method of a classical or modern historian, and may be aptly described as a "scissors and paste" method. That is to say, he makes excerpts from the sources at his disposal; sometimes inserts them consecutively and without alteration; at other times makes additions and changes of his own; and, in Canon Driver's words, "does not scruple to omit what is not required for his purpose, and in fact treats his authorities with considerable freedom." He also does not scruple to put in the mouth of David and other historical characters of the olden time, speeches which, from their spirit, grammar, and vocabulary, are evidently of his own age and composition. If this was the method of a writer as late as 300 b.c., whose work was afterwards received as canonical, two things are evident. First, that the canon of the earlier Books of the Old Testament could not have been then fixed and invested with the same sacred authority as we find to be the case two or three centuries later, when the Thora, or Book of Moses and the Prophets, was regarded very much as the Moslems regard the Koran, as an inspired volume which it was impious to alter by a single jot or tittle. This late date for fixing the canon of the Books of the Old Testament is confirmed by Canon Cheyne's learned and exhaustive work on the Psalter, in which he shows that a great majority of the Psalms, attributed to David, were written in the time of the Maccabees, and that there are only one or two doubtful cases in which it can be plausibly contended that any of the Psalms are pre-exilic. Secondly, that if a writer, as late as 300 b.c., could employ this method, and get his work accepted as a part of the Sacred Canon, a writer who lived earlier, say any time between the Chronicler and the foundation of the Jewish Monarchy, might probably adopt the same methods. If the Chronicler put a speech of his own composition into the mouth of David, the Deuteronomist might well do so in the case of Moses. According to the ideas of the age and country, this would not be considered to be what we moderns would call literary forgery, but rather a legitimate and praiseworthy means of giving authority to good precepts and sentiments. A perfect illustration of this which I have called the "scissors and paste" method, is afforded by the first two chapters of Genesis, and the way in which the Elohistic and Jehovistic narratives are so strangely interblended throughout the Pentateuch. No attempt is made to blend the two narratives into one harmonious and consistent whole, but excerpts, sometimes from one and sometimes from the other, are placed together without any attempt to explain away the evident contradictions. Clearly the same hand could not have written both narratives, and the compilation must have been made by some subsequent editor, or editors, for there is conclusive proof that the final edition, as it has come down to us, could not have been made until after the Exile. Thus in Leviticus xxvi. we find, "I will scatter you among the heathen, and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste," and "they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' land." And in Deuteronomy xxix., "And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is to this day." Even in Genesis, which professes to be the earliest Book, we find (xii. 6), "and the Canaanite was then in the land." This could not have been written until the memory of the Canaanite had become a tradition of a remote past, and this could not have been until after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, for we find from the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah that the Canaanites were then still in the land, and the Jewish leaders, and even priests and Levites, were intermarrying freely with Canaanite wives. The Apocryphal Book of Esdras contains a legend that the sacred books of the Law having been lost or destroyed when Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar, they were re-written miraculously by Ezra dictating to five ready writers at once in a wonderfully short time. This is a counterpart of the legend of the Septuagint being a translation of the Hebrew text into Greek, made by seventy different translators, whose separate versions agreed down to the minutest particular. This legend, in the case of the Septuagint, is based on an historical fact that there really was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Sacred Books made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus; and it may well be that the legend of Esdras contains some reminiscence of an actual fact, that a new and complete edition of the old writings was made and stamped with a sacred character among the other reforms introduced by Ezra. These reforms, and the condition of the Jewish people after the return from the Captivity, as disclosed by the Books of Nehemiah and Ezra, afford what I call the second guiding pillar, in our attempt to trace backwards the course of Jewish history. These books were indeed not written in their present form until a later period, and, as most critics think, by the same hand as Chronicles; but there is no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of the historical facts recorded, which relate, not to a remote antiquity, but to a comparatively recent period after the use of writing had become general. They constitute in fact the dividing line between ancient and modern Judaism, and show us the origin of the latter. Modern Judaism, that is, the religious and social life of the Jewish people, since they fairly entered into the current of modern history, has been marked by many strong and characteristic peculiarities. They have been zealously and almost fanatically attached to the idea of one Supreme God, Jehovah, with whom they had a special covenant inherited from Abraham, and whose will, in regard to all religious rites and ceremonies and social usages, was conveyed to them in a sacred book containing the inspired writings of Moses and the Prophets. This led them to consider themselves a peculiar people, and to regard all other nations with aversion, as being idolaters and unclean, feelings which were returned by the rest of the world, so that they stood alone, hating and being hated. No force or persuasion were required in order to prevent them from lapsing into idolatry or intermarrying with heathen women. On the contrary, they were inspired to the most heroic efforts, and ready to endure the severest sufferings and martyrdom for the pure faith. The belief in the sacred character of their ancient writings gradually crystallized into a faith as absolute as that of the Moslems in the Koran; a canon was formed, and although, as we have seen in the case of the Chronicles and Psalms, some time must have elapsed before this sacred character was fully recognized, it ended in a theory of the literal inspiration of every word of the Old Testament down even to the commas and vowel points, and the establishment of learned schools of Scribes and Pharisees, whose literary labours were concentrated on expounding the text in synagogues, and writing volumes of Talmudic commentaries. Now during the period preceding the Exile all this was very different. So far from being zealous for one Supreme God, Jehovah was long recognized only as a tribal or national god, one among the many gods of surrounding nations. When the idea of a Supreme Deity, who loved justice and mercy better than the blood of bullocks and rams, was at length elaborated by the later prophets, it received but scant acceptance. The great majority of the kings and people, both of Judah and Israel, were always ready to lapse into idolatry, worship strange gods, golden calves, and brazen serpents, and flock to the alluring rites of Baal and Astarte, in groves and high places. They were also always ready to intermarry freely with heathen wives, and to form political alliances with heathen nations. There is no trace of the religious and social repulsion towards other races which forms such a marked trait in modern Judaism. Nor, as we shall see presently, is there any evidence, prior to the reign of Josiah, of anything like a sacred book or code of divine laws, universally known and accepted. The Books of Nehemiah and Ezra afford invaluable evidence of the time and manner in which this modern Judaism was stamped upon the character of the people after the return from exile. We are told that when Ezra came to Jerusalem from Babylon, armed with a decree of Artaxerxes, he was scandalized at finding that nearly all the Jews, including the principal nobles and many priests and Levites, had intermarried with the daughters of the people of the land, "of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites." Backed by Nehemiah, the cup-bearer and favourite of Artaxerxes, who had been appointed governor of Jerusalem, he persuaded or compelled the Jews to put away these wives and their children, and to separate themselves as a peculiar and exclusive people from other nations. It was a cruel act, characteristic of the fanatical spirit of priestly domination, which never hesitates to trample on the natural affections and the laws of charity and mercy, but it was the means of crystallizing the Jewish race into a mould so rigid, that it defied wars, persecutions, and all dissolving influences, and preserved the idea of Monotheism to grow up into the world-wide religions of Christianity and Mahometanism, So true is it that evolution works out its results by unexpected means often opposed to what seem like the best instincts of human nature. What is important, however, for the present object is, to observe that clearly at this date the population of the Holy Land must have consisted mainly of the descendants of the old races, who had been conquered but not exterminated by the Israelites. Such a sentence as, "for the Canaanites were then in the land," could not have been written till long after the time when the Jews were intermarrying freely with Canaanite wives. Nor does it seem possible that codes, such as those of Leviticus, Numbers, and the Priests' Code, could have been generally known and accepted as sacred books written by Moses under Divine inspiration, when the rulers, nobles, and even priests and Levites acted in such apparent ignorance of them. In fact we are told in Nehemiah that Ezra read and explained the Book of the Law, whatever that may have included, to the people, who apparently had no previous knowledge of it. By far the most important landmark, however, in the history of the Old Testament, is afforded by the account in 2 Kings xxii. and xxiii. of the discovery of the Book of the Law in the Temple in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah. It says that Shaphan the scribe, having been sent by the king to Hilkiah the high priest, to obtain an account of the silver collected from the people for the repairs of the Temple, Hilkiah told him that he had "found the Book of the Law in the house of the Lord." Shaphan brought it to the king and read it to him; whereupon Josiah, in great consternation at finding that so many of its injunctions had been violated, and that such dreadful penalties were threatened, rent his clothes, and being confirmed in his fears by Huldah the prophetess, proceeded to take stringent measures to stamp out idolatry, which, from the account given in 2 Kings xxiii., seems to have been almost universal. We read of vessels consecrated to Baal and to the host of heaven in the Temple itself, and of horses and chariots of the Sun at its entrance; of idolatrous priests who had been ordained by the kings of Judah to burn incense "unto Baal, to the Sun, and to the Moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven"; and of high places close to Jerusalem, with groves, images, and altars, which had been built by Solomon to Ashtaroth, the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the Ammonites, and had apparently remained undisturbed and places of popular worship ever since the time of Solomon. On any ordinary principles of criticism it is impossible to doubt that, if this narrative is correct, there could have been no previous Book of the Law in existence, and generally recognized as a sacred volume written by Divine inspiration. When even such a great and wise king as Solomon could establish such a system of idolatry, and pious kings like Hezekiah, and Josiah during the first eighteen years of his reign, could allow it to continue, there could have been no knowledge that it was in direct contravention of the most essential precepts of a sacred law dictated by Jehovah to Moses. It is generally admitted by critics that the Book of the Law discovered by Hilkiah was Deuteronomy, or rather perhaps an earlier or shorter original of the Deuteronomy which has come down to us, and which had already been re-edited with additions after the Exile. The title "Deuteronomy," which might seem to imply that it was a supplement to an earlier law, is taken, like the other headings of the books of the Old Testament in our Bible, from the Septuagint version, and in the original Hebrew the heading is "the Book of the Law." The internal evidence points also to Deuteronomy, as placing the threats of punishment and promises of reward mainly on moral grounds, and in the spirit of the later prophets, such as Isaiah, who lived shortly before the discovery of the book by Hilkiah. And it is apparent that when Deuteronomy was written, the Priests' Code, which forms such an important part of the other books of the Pentateuch, could not have been known, as so many of the ceremonial rites and usages are clearly inconsistent with it. It is not to be inferred that there were no writings in existence before the reign of Josiah. Doubtless annals had been kept of the principal events of each reign from the foundation of the monarchy, and many of the old legends and traditions of the race had been collected and reduced to writing during the period from Solomon to the later kings. The Priests' Code also, though of later date in its complete form, was doubtless not an invention of any single priest, but a compilation of usages, some of which had long existed, while others had grown up in connection with the Second Temple after the return from exile. So also the civil and social legislation was not a code promulgated, like the Code Napoleon, by any one monarch or high priest, but a compilation from usages and precedents which had come to be received as having an established authority. But what is plainly inconsistent with the account of the discovery of the Book of the Law in the reign of Josiah, is the supposition that there had been, in long previous existence, a collection of sacred books, recognized as a Bible or work of Divine inspiration, as the Old Testament came to be among the Jews of the first or second century b.c. It is to be observed that among early nations, such historical annals and legislative enactments never form the first stratum of a sacred literature, which consists invariably of hymns, prayers, ceremonial rites, and astronomical or astrological myths. Thus the Rig Veda of the Hindoos, the early portions of the Vendedad of the Iranians, the Book of the Dead of the Egyptians, and the penitential psalms and invocations of the ChaldÆans formed the oldest sacred books, about which codes and commentaries, and in some cases historical allusions and biographies, gradually accumulated, though never attaining to quite an equal authority. There is abundant internal evidence in the books of the Old Testament which profess to be older than the reign of Josiah, to show that they are in great part, at any rate, of later compilation, and could not have been recognized as the sacred Thora or Bible of the nation. To take a single instance, that of Solomon. Is it conceivable that this greatest and wisest of kings, who had held personal commune with Jehovah, and who knew everything down to the hyssop on the wall, could have been ignorant of such a sacred book if it had been in existence? And if he had known it, or even the Decalogue, is it conceivable that he should have totally ignored its first and fundamental precepts, "Thou shalt have no other gods but me," and "thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image"? Could uxoriousness, divided among 700 wives, have turned the heart of such a monarch so completely as to make him worship Ashtaroth and Milcom, and build high places for Chemosh and Moloch? And could he have done this without the opposition, and apparently with the approval, of the priests and the people? And again, could these high places and altars and vessels dedicated to Baal and the host of heaven have been allowed to remain in the Temple, down to the eighteenth year of Josiah, Under a succession of kings several of whom were reputed to be pious servants of Jehovah? And the idolatrous tendencies of the ten tribes of Israel, who formed the majority of the Hebrew race, and had a common history and traditions, are even more apparent. In the speeches put into the mouth of Solomon in 1 Kings, in which reference is made to "statutes and commandments spoken by Jehovah by the hand of Moses," there is abundant evidence that their composition must be assigned to a much later date. They are full of references to the captivity in a foreign land and return from exile (1 Kings viii. 46—53, and ix. 6—9). Similar references to the Exile are found throughout the Book of Kings, and even in Books of the Pentateuch which profess to be written by Moses. If such a code of sacred writings had been in existence in the time of Josiah, instead of rending his clothes in dismay when Shaphan brought him the Book of the Law found by Hilkiah, he would have said, "Why this is only a different version of what we know already." On the whole the evidence points to this conclusion. The idea of a one Supreme God who was a Spirit, while all other gods were mere idols made by men's hands; who created and ruled all things in heaven and earth; and who loved justice and mercy rather than the blood of rams and bullocks, was slowly evolved from the crude conceptions of a jealous, vindictive, and cruel anthropomorphic local god, by the prophets and best minds of Israel after it had settled down under the Monarchy into a civilized and cultured state. It appears for the first time distinctly in Isaiah and Amos, and was never popular with the majority of the kings and upper classes, or with the mass of the nation until the Exile, but it gradually gained ground during the calamities of the later days, when Assyrian armies were threatening destruction. A strong opposition arose in the later reigns between the aristocracy, who looked on the situation from a political point of view and trusted to armies and alliances, and what may be called the pietist or evangelical party of the prophets, who took a purely religious view of matters, and considered the misfortunes of the country as a consequence of its sins, to be averted only by repentance and Divine interposition. It was a natural, and under the circumstances of the age and country quite a justifiable proceeding on the part of the prophetic school to endeavour to stamp their views with Divine authority, and recommend them for acceptance as coming from Moses, the traditional deliverer of Israel from Egypt. For this purpose no doubt numerous materials existed in the form of legends, traditions, customs, and old records, and very probably some of those had been collected and reduced to writing, like the Sagas of the old Norsemen, though without any idea of collecting them into a sacred volume. The first attempt in this direction was made in the reign of Josiah, and it had only a partial success, as we find the nation "doing evil in the sight of the Lord," that is, relapsing into the old idolatrous practices, in the reigns of his three next successors, Jehoiachin, Jehoiachim, and Zedechiah. But the crowning calamity of the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and the seventy years' exile, seems to have crushed out the old aristocratic and national party, and converted all the leading minds among the Jews of the Captivity, including the priests, to the prophetical view that the essence of the question was the religious one, and that the only hope for the future lay in repentance for sins and drawing closer to the worship of Jehovah and the Covenant between him and his chosen people. Prophets disappear from this period because priests, scribes, and rulers had adopted their views, and there was no longer room for itinerant and unofficial missionaries. Under such circumstances the religion, after the return from the Exile, crystallized rapidly into definite forms. Creeds, rituals, and sacred books were multiplied down to the third century b.c. or later, when the canon was closed with the Books of Chronicles and Daniel and the later Psalms, and the era began of commentaries on the text of a Koran or Bible, every word of which was held to be infallibly inspired. The different crystals in solution have now united into one large crystal of fixed form, and henceforward we are in the full age of Talmudism and Pharisaism. It is not to be supposed, however, that the books which thus came to be considered sacred were the inventions of priests and scribes of this later age. Doubtless they were based to a great extent on old traditions, legends, and written annals and records, compiled perhaps in the reigns of Solomon and his successors, but based themselves on still older materials. The very crudeness of many of the representations, and the barbarism of manners, point to an early origin. It is impossible to conceive any contemporary of Isaiah, or of the cultured court of Solomon, describing the Almighty ruler of the universe as showing his hinder part to Moses, or sewing skins to clothe Adam and Eve; and the conception of a jealous and vindictive Jehovah who commanded the indiscriminate massacre of prisoners of war, women and children, must be far removed from that of a God who loved justice and mercy. These crude, impossible, and immoral representations must have existed in the form of Sagas during the early and semi-barbarous stage of the people of Israel, and become so rooted in the popular mind that they could not be neglected when authors of later ages came to fix the old traditions in writing, and religious reformers to use them in endeavouring to enforce higher views and a purer morality. It is from this jungle of old legends and traditions, written and re-written, edited and re-edited, many times over, to suit the ideas of various stages of advancing civilization, that we have to pick out as we best can what is really historical, prior to the foundation of the Monarchy, from which time downwards we doubtless have more or less authentic annals, and meet with confirmations from Egyptian and Assyrian history. The first figure which arrests our attention in the Old Testament as possibly historical, is that of Abraham. Prior to him everything is plainly myth and legend. We have two accounts of the creation of the universe and of man in Genesis, contradictory with one another, and each hopelessly inconsistent with the best established conclusions of astronomy, geology, ethnology, and other sciences. Then follow ten antediluvian patriarchs, who live on the average 847 years each, and correspond manifestly with the ten reigns of gods or demi-gods in the ChaldÆan mythology; while side by side with this genealogy is a fragment of one which is entirely different, mentioning seven only of the ten patriarchs, and tracing the descent of Enoch and Noah from Adam through Cain instead of through Seth. Then comes the Deluge with all the flagrant impossibilities which have been pointed out in a preceding chapter; the building of the Tower of Babel, with the dispersion of mankind and confusion of languages, equally opposed to the most certain conclusions of history, ethnology, and philology. The descent from Noah to Abraham is then traced through ten other patriarchs, whose ages average 394 years each, and similar genealogies are given for the descendants of the other two sons of Noah, Ham and Japheth. It is evident that these genealogies are not history but ethnology, and that of a very rude and primitive description, by a writer with imperfect knowledge and a limited range of vision. A great majority of the primitive races of the world, such as the Negroes and the Mongolians, are omitted altogether, and Semitic Canaan is coupled with Turanian Hittite as a descendant not of Shem but of Ham. It is unnecessary to go into details, for when we find such an instance as that Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, it is evident that this does not mean that two such men really lived, but is an Oriental way of stating that the Phoenicians were of the same race as the Canaanites, and that Sidon was their earliest sea-port on the shore of the Mediterranean. The whole of this Biblical literature prior to Abraham is clearly myth and legend, and not history; and whoever will compare it dispassionately with the much older ChaldÆan myths and legends known to us from Berosus and the tablets, can hardly doubt that it is taken mainly from this source, revised at a later date, in a monotheistic sense. Whole passages are simply altered by writing "God" for "gods," and pruning off or toning down grotesque and revolting incidents. To give a single instance, where the ChaldÆan solar epic of Izdubar, in the chapter on the passage of the sun through the rainy sign of Aquarius, which describes the Deluge, says that "the gods smelt the sweet savour of the sacrifice offered by Hasisadra on emerging from the ark, and flocked like flies about the altar," Genesis says simply that "the Lord smelled a sweet savour"; and where the mixture of a divine and animal nature in man is symbolized in the ChaldÆan legend by Bel cutting off his own head and kneading the clay with the blood into the first man, the Jehovist narrative in Genesis ii. says, that "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." But when we arrive at Abraham we feel as if we might be treading on really historical ground. There is the universal tradition of the Hebrew race that he was their ancestor, and his figure is very like what in the unchanging East may be met with to the present day. We seem to see the dignified sheik sitting at the door of his tent dispensing hospitality, raiding with his retainers on the rear of a retreating army and capturing booty, and much exercised by domestic difficulties between the women of his household. Surely this is an historical figure. But when we look closer, doubts and difficulties appear. In the first place the name "Abram" suggests that of an eponymous ancestor, like Shem for the Semites, or Canaan for the Canaanites. Abram, Sayce tells us, is the Babylonian Abu-ramer or "exalted father," a name much more likely to be given to a mythical ancestor than to an actual man. This is rendered more probable by the fact that, as we have already seen, the genealogy of Abraham traced upwards consists mainly of eponyms: while those which radiate from him downwards are of the same character. Thus two of his sons by Keturah are Jokshan and Midian; and Sheba, Dedan, and Assurim are among his descendants. Again, Abraham is said to have lived for 175 years, and to have had a son by Sarah when she was ninety-nine and he one hundred; and a large family by Keturah, whom he married after Sarah's death. Figures such as these are a sure test that legend has taken the place of authentic history. Another circumstance which tells strongly against the historical character of Abraham is his connection with Lot, and the legend of Lot's wife. The history of this legend is a curious one. For many centuries, in fact down to quite modern times, the volcanic phenomena of the Dead Sea were appealed to as convincing confirmations of the account in Genesis of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, and hundreds of pious pilgrims saw, touched, and tasted the identical pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed. It is now certain that the volcanic eruptions were of an earlier geological age, and that the story of Lot's wife is owing to the disintegration of a stratum of salt marl, which weathers away under the action of wind and rain into columnar masses, like those described by Lyell in a similar formation in Catalonia. Innumerable travellers and pilgrims from early Christian times down to the seventeenth century returned from Palestine testifying that they had seen Lot's wife, and this was appealed to by theologians as a convincing proof of the truth of the Scripture narrative. Some saw her big, some little, some upright, and some prostrate, according to the state of disintegration of the pillars pointed out by the guides, which change their form rapidly under the influence of the weather, but no doubt was entertained as to the attestation of the miracle. It turns out, however, to be one of those geological myths of precisely the same nature as that which attributed the Devil's Dyke near Brighton to an arrested attempt of the Evil One to cut a trench through the South Downs, so as to let in the sea and drown the Weald. The episode of Lot and his daughters is also clearly a myth to account for the aversion of the Hebrews to races so closely akin to them as the Moabites and Ammonites, and it could hardly have originated until after the date of the Book of Ruth, which shows no trace of such a racial aversion. Many of the events recorded of Abraham's life, though not so wildly extravagant as those attributed to Noah, are still clearly unhistorical. That a woman getting on towards one hundred years old should be so beautiful that her husband passes her off for his sister, fearing that, if known to be his wife, the king would kill him in order to take her into his harem, does not seem to be very probable. But when precisely the same thing is said to have occurred twice over to the same man, once at the court of Pharaoh and again at that of Abimelech; and a third time to his son Isaac, at the same place, Gerar, and to the same king Abimelech, the improbability becomes impossibility, and the legend is obviously mythical. Nor is it very consistent with the character of the pious patriarch, the father of the chosen people, to have told such lies, and apparently connived at his wife's prostitution, so that he could save his own skin, and grow rich on the "sheep and oxen, asses, manservants, maidservants, and camels" given him by the king on the supposition that he was Sarah's brother. Nor can we take as authentic history, Abraham talking with the Lord, and holding a sort of Dutch auction with him, in which he beats down from fifty to ten the number of righteous men who, if found in Sodom, are to save it from destruction. On the whole, I do not see that there is anything in the account of Abraham and his times which we can safely assume to be historical, except the general fact that the Hebrews were descended from a Semitic family or clan, who migrated from the district of Ur in Lower ChaldÆa probably about the time, and possibly in consequence, of the Elamite conquest, about 2200 b.c., which set in motion so many wars, revolutions, and migrations in Western Asia. The chronology from Abraham to Moses is hopelessly confused. If Abraham is really an historical character, his synchronism with Chedorlaomer or Kudur-lagomer, the Elamite King of ChaldÆa, must be admitted, which fixes his date at about 2200 b.c. Again, if the narrative of the Exodus is historical, it is generally agreed that it took place in the reign of Menepthah, or about 1320 b.c. The interval between Abraham and Moses therefore must have been about 900 years. But if we take the genealogies as authentic history, Jacob, in whose time the Hebrews went into Egypt, was Abraham's grandson, and Moses, under whom they left it, was the son of Jochebed, who was the granddaughter of Levi, the son of Jacob, who was a man advanced in life when he came to Egypt. The genealogies therefore do not allow of more than five generations, or, at a high average for each, about 200 years for this interval between Abraham and Moses. The tradition respecting this seems to have been already very confused when Genesis was compiled, for we find in chap. xv. vers. 15, 16, the Lord saying to Abraham, that his descendants shall come back to Palestine and possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates, "in the fourth generation" after Abraham had "gone to his fathers in peace, and been buried in a good old age"; while only one verse before it is said, "thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them for four hundred years." Even if 400 years were allowed for the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, it would not extend the interval between Moses and Abraham to more than 500 years, or 400 years less than is required by the synchronism with Chedorlaomer. It is needless to say that neither in the fourth or in any other generation did the descendants of Abraham "possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates." There is no period of Jewish history so obscure as that of the sojourn in Egypt. The long date is based entirely on the distinct statement in Genesis xii., that the sojourning of the children of Israel was 430 years, and other statements that it was 400 years, both of which are hopelessly inconsistent with the genealogies. Genealogies are perhaps more likely to be preserved accurately by oral tradition than dates and figures, which Oriental races generally deal with in a very arbitrary way. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting either date as historical. There is no mention of any specific event during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt between their advent in the time of Joseph and the Exodus, except their oppression by a new king who knew not Joseph, and the building of the treasure cities, Pi-thom and Ramses, by their forced labour. The latter fact may be taken as probably true from the monuments discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie; and if so, it occurred in the reign of Ramses II. But there is no other confirmation, from Egyptian records or monuments, of any of the events related in the Pentateuch, until we come to the passage quoted from Manetho by Josephus, which describes how the unclean people and lepers were oppressed; how they revolted under the leadership of a priest of Hieropolis, who changed his name from Osarphis to Moyses; how they fortified Avaris and called in help from the expelled Hyksos settled at Jerusalem; how the Egyptian king and his army retreated before them into Ethiopia without striking a blow; and the revolters ruled Egypt for thirteen years, killing the sacred animals and desecrating the temples; and how, at the end of this period, the king and his son returned with a great army, defeated the rebels and shepherds with great slaughter, and pursued them to the bounds of Syria. This account is evidently very different from that of Exodus, and does not itself read very like real history, nor is there anything in the Egyptian monuments to confirm it, but rather the reverse. Menepthah certainly reigned many years after he was said to have been drowned in the Red Sea, and his power and that of his immediate successors, though greatly diminished, still extended with a sort of suzerainty over Palestine and Southern Syria. It is said that the Egyptians purposely omitted all mention of disasters and defeats, but this is distinctly untrue, for Manetho records events such as the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos without a battle, and the retreat of Menepthah into Ethiopia for thirteen years before the impure rebels, which were much more disgraceful than would have been the destruction of a pursuing force of chariots by the returning tide of the Red Sea. The question therefore of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt and the Exodus has to be considered solely by the light of the internal evidence afforded by the books of the Old Testament. The long period of 430 years is open to grave objections. It is inconceivable that a people who had lived for four centuries in an old and highly-civilized empire, for part of the time at any rate on equal or superior terms under the king who "knew Joseph"; and who appear to have been so much intermixed with the native Egyptians as to have been borrowing from them as neighbours before their flight, should have carried away with them so little of Egyptian manners and relics. Beyond a few rites and ceremonies, and a certain tendency to revert to the animal worship of the golden calf, there is nothing to show that the Hebrews had ever been in contact with Egyptian civilization. This is most remarkable in the absence of all belief in a resurrection of the body, future life, and day of judgment, which were the cardinal axioms of the practical daily life of the Egyptian people. Temporal rewards and punishments to the individual and his posterity in the present life, are the sole inducements held out to practise virtue and abstain from vice, from the Decalogue down to the comparatively late period of Ecclesiastes, where Solomon the wise king is represented as saying, "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest." Even down to the Christian era the Sadducees, who were the conservative aristocracy who stood on the old ways and on the law of Moses, and from whose ranks most of the high priests were taken, were opposed to the newfangled Pharisaic doctrine of a resurrection. How completely foreign the idea was to the Jewish mind is apparent from the writings of the Prophets and the Book of Job, where the obvious solution of the problem why goodness was not always rewarded and wickedness punished, afforded by the theory of a judgment after death and future life, was never even hinted at by Job or his friends, however hardly they might be pressed in argument. If the sojourn in Egypt really lasted for 430 years, it must have embraced many of the greatest events in Egyptian history. The descendants of Jacob must have witnessed a long period of the rule of the Hyksos, and lived through the desolating thirty years' war by which these foreign conquerors were gradually driven back by the native armies of Upper Egypt. They must have been close to the scene of the final campaigns, the siege of Avaris, and the expulsion of the Hyksos. They must have been subjects of Ahmes, Thotmes, and the conquering kings of the eighteenth dynasty, who followed up the fugitive Hyksos, and carried the conquering arms of Egypt not only over Palestine and Syria, but up to the Euphrates and Tigris, and over nearly the whole of Western Asia. They must have witnessed the decline of this empire, the growth of the Hittites, and the half-century of wars waged between them and the Egyptians in Palestine and Syria. The victory of Ramses II. at Kadesh and the epic poem of Pentaur must have been known to the generation before the Exodus as signal events. And if there is any truth in the account quoted by Josephus, they must have been aware that they did not fly from Egypt as a body of fugitive slaves, but as retreating warriors who for thirteen years had held Egypt up to Ethiopia in subjection. And yet of all these memorable events there is not the slightest trace in the Hebrew annals which have come down to us. An even greater difficulty is to understand how, if the children of Israel had lived for anything like 400 years in such a civilized empire as Egypt, they could have emerged from it in such a plane of low civilization, or rather of ferocious savagery and crude superstitions as are shown by the books of the Old Testament, where they burst like a host of Red Indians on the settlements and cities of the Amorites, and other more advanced nations of Palestine. The discoveries at Lachish already referred to show that their civilization could not have exceeded that of the rudest Bedouins, and their myths and legends are so similar to those of the North American Indians as to show that they must have originated in a very similar stage of mental development. If we adopt the short date of the genealogies we are equally confronted by difficulties. If the Exodus occurred in the reign of Menepthah, 180 years back from that date would take us, not to the Hyksos dynasty where alone it would have been possible for Joseph to be a vizier, and for a Semitic tribe of shepherds to be welcomed in Egypt, but into the midst of the great and glorious eighteenth dynasty who had expelled the Hyksos, and carried the dominion of Egypt to the Euphrates. Nor would there have been time for the seventy souls, who we are told were all of the family of Jacob who migrated into Egypt, to have increased in three generations into a nation numerous enough to alarm the Egyptians, and conquer the Canaanites. The legend of Joseph is very touching and beautiful, but it may just as well be a novel as history, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the episode of Potiphar's wife is almost verbatim the same as one of the chapters of the Egyptian novel of the Two Brothers. Nor does it seem likely that such a seven years' famine and such a momentous change as the conversion of all the land of Egypt from freehold into a tenure held from the king subject to payment of a rent of one-fifth of the gross produce, should have left no trace in the records. Again, the age of 110 years assigned to Joseph, and 147 to his father, are a sufficient proof that we are not upon strictly historical ground; and on the whole this narrative does not go far, in the absence of any confirmation from monuments, to assist us in fixing dates, or enabling us to form any consistent idea of the real conditions of the sojourn of the people of Israel in Egypt. It places them on far too high a level of civilization at first, to have fallen to such a low one as we find depicted in the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges. Further excavations in the mounds of ruined cities in JudÆa and Palestine, like those of Schliemann on the sites of Troy and MycenÆ, can alone give us anything like certain facts as to the real condition of the Hebrew tribes who destroyed the older walled cities of the comparatively civilized Amorites and Canaanites. If the conclusion of Mr. Flinders Petrie from the section of the mound of Lachish, as to the extremely rude condition of the tribes who built the second town of mud-huts on the ruins of the Amorite city, should be confirmed, it would go far to negative the idea that the accounts of their having been trained in an advanced code of Mosaic legislation, can have any historical foundation. We come next to Moses. It is difficult to refuse an historical character to a personage who has been accepted by uniform tradition as the chief who led the Israelites out of Egypt, and as the great legislator who laid the foundations of the religious and civil institutions of the peculiar people. And if the passage from Manetho is correctly quoted by Josephus, and was really taken from contemporary Egyptian annals, and is not a later version of the account in the Pentateuch modified to suit Egyptian prejudices, Moses is clearly identified with Osarsiph the priest of Hieropolis, who abandoned the worship of the old gods, and headed the revolt of the unclean people, which probably meant the heretics. It may be conjectured that this may have had some connection with the great religious revolution of the heretic king of Tel-el-Amarna, which for a time displaced the national gods, worshipped in the form of sacred animals and symbolic statues, by an approach to Monotheism under the image of the winged solar disc. Such a reform must have had many adherents to have survived as the State religion for two or three reigns, and must have left a large number of so-called heretics when the nation returned to its ancient faith; and it is quite intelligible that some of the more enlightened priests should have assimilated to it the doctrine of one Supreme God, which was always at the bottom of the religious metaphysics of the earliest ages in Egypt, and was probably preserved as an esoteric doctrine in the priestly colleges. This, however, must remain purely a conjecture, and we must look for anything specific in regard to Moses exclusively to the Old Testament. And here we are at once assailed by formidable difficulties. As long as we confine ourselves to general views it may be accepted as historical that the Israelites really came out of Egypt under a great leader and legislator; but when we come to details, and to the events connected with Moses, and to a great extent supposed to have been written by him or taken from his journals, they are for the most part more wildly and hopelessly impossible than anything related of the earlier patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph. The story of his preservation in infancy is a variation of the myth common to so many nations, of an infant hero or god, whose life is sought by a wicked king, and who is miraculously saved. We find it in the myths of Khrishna, Buddha, Cyrus, Romulus, and others, and in the inscription by Sargon I. of Accade on his own tablet; he states himself to have been saved in an ark floated on the river Euphrates, just as Moses was on the Nile. When grown up he is represented first as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, and then as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian talking with the Lord in a fiery bush, who for the first time communicates his real name of Jehovah, which he says was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, although constantly used by them, and although men began to call him by that name in the time of Enos, Adam's grandson. At Jehovah's command Moses throws his rod on the ground, when it becomes a serpent from which he flies, and when he takes it up by the tail it becomes a rod again; and as a farther sign his hand is changed from sound to leprous as white as snow, and back again to sound, in a minute or two of time. On returning to Egypt Moses is represented as going ten times into the presence of Pharaoh demanding of him to let the Hebrews depart, and inflicting on Egypt a succession of plagues, each one more than sufficient to have convinced the king of the futility of opposing such supernatural powers, and to have made him only too anxious to get rid of the Hebrews from the land at any price. What could have been the condition of Egypt, if for seven days "the streams, the rivers, the ponds and pools, and even the water in the vessels of wood and of stone, through all the land of Egypt," had been really turned into blood? And what sort of magicians must they have been who could do the same with their enchantments? The whole account of these plagues has distinctly the air of being an historical romance rather than real history. Those repeated interviews accompanied by taunts and reproaches of Moses, the representative of an oppressed race of slaves, in the august presence of a Pharaoh who, like the Inca of Peru or the Mikado of Japan, was half monarch and half deity, are totally inconsistent with all we know of Egyptian usage. The son and successor of the splendid Ramses II., who has been called the Louis XIV. of Egyptian history, would certainly, after the first interview and miracle, either have recognized the supernatural power which it was useless to resist, or ordered Moses to instant execution. It is remarkable also how the series of plagues reproduce the natural features of the Egyptian seasons. Recent travellers tell us how at the end of the dry season when the Nile is at its lowest, and the adjacent plains are arid and lifeless, suddenly one morning at sunrise they see the river apparently turned into blood. It is the phenomenon of the red Nile, which is caused by the first flush of the Abyssinian flood, coming from banks of red marl. After a few days the real rise commences, the Nile resumes its usual colour, percolates through its banks, fills the tanks and ponds, and finally overflows and saturates the dusty plains. The first signal of the renewal of life is the croaking of innumerable frogs, and soon the plains are alive with flies, gnats, and all manner of creeping and hopping insects, as if the dust had been turned into lice. Then after the inundation subsides come the other plagues which in the summer and autumn seasons frequently afflict the young crops and the inhabitants—local hail-storms, locusts, murrain among the cattle, boils and other sicknesses while the stagnant waters are drying up. It reads like what some Rider Haggard of the Court of Solomon might have written in working up the tales of travellers and old popular traditions into an historical romance of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. When we come to the Exodus the impossibilities of the narrative are even more obvious. The robust common-sense of Bishop Colenso, sharpened by a mathematical education, has reduced many of these to the convincing test of arithmetic. The host of Israelites who left Egypt is said to have comprised 603,550 fighting men above the age of twenty; exclusive of the Levites and of a mixed multitude who followed. This implies a total population of at least 2,500,000, who are said to have wandered about for forty years in the desert of Sinai, one of the most arid wildernesses in the world, destitute alike of water, arable soil, and pasture, and where a Bedouin tribe of even 600 souls would find it difficult to exist. They are said to have been miraculously fed during these forty years on manna, a sweetish, gummy exudation from the scanty foliage of certain prickly desert plants, which is described as being "as small as the hoar frost," and as being so imbued with Sabbatarian principles, as to keep fresh only for the day it is gathered during the week, but for two days if gathered on a Friday, so as to prevent the necessity of doing any work on the Sabbath. Bishop Colenso points out with irresistible force the obvious impossibilities in regard to food, water, fuel, sanitation, transport, and other matters, which was involved in the supposition that a population, half as large as that of London, wandered about under tents from camp to camp for forty years in a desert. No attempt has ever been made to refute him, except by vague suppositions that the deserts of Sinai and Arabia may then have been in a very different condition, and capable of supporting a large population. But this is impossible in the present geological age and under existing geographical conditions. These deserts form part of the great rainless zone of the earth between the north tropical and south temperate zones, where cultivation is only possible when the means of irrigation are afforded by lakes, rivers, or melting snow. But there are none of these in the deserts of Sinai and Northern Arabia, and therefore no water and no vegetation sufficient to support any population. No army has ever invaded Egypt from Asia, or Asia from Egypt, except by the short route adjoining the Mediterranean between Pelusium and Jaffa, and with the command of the sea and assistance of trains to carry supplies and water. And the account in Exodus itself confirms this, for both food and water are stated to have been supplied miraculously, and there is no mention made of anything but the present arid and uninhabited desert in the various encampments and marches. In fact, the Bible constantly dwells on the inhospitable character of the "howling wilderness," where there was neither grass nor water. Accordingly reconcilers have been reduced to the supposition that ciphers may have been added by copyists, and that the real number may have been 6000, or even, as some writers think, 600. But this is inconsistent with the detailed numeration by twelve separate tribes, which works out to the same figure of 603,550 fighting men for the total number. Nor is it consistent with the undoubted fact that the Hebrews did evacuate Egypt in sufficient numbers and sufficiently armed to burst through the frontiers, and capture the walled cities of considerable nations like the Amorites and Canaanites, who had been long settled in the country. The narrative of Manetho, quoted by Josephus, seems much more like real history; that the Hebrews formed part of an army, which, after having held Lower Egypt for thirteen years, was finally defeated, and retreated by the usual military route across the short part of the desert from Pelusium to Palestine, the Hebrews, for some reason, branching off, and taking to a Bedouin life on the outskirts of the desert and cultivated land, just as many Bedouin tribes live a semi-nomad life in the same regions at the present day. Apart from statistics, however, the Books of the Pentateuch ascribed to Moses are full of the most flagrant contradictions and absurdities. It is evident that, instead of being the production of some one contemporary writer, they have been compiled and edited, probably many times over, by what I have called the "scissors and paste method," of clipping out extracts from old documents and traditions, and piecing them together in juxtaposition or succession, without regard to their being contradictory or repetitions. Thus in Exodus xxxiii. 20, God says to Moses: "Thou canst not see my face and live; for there shall no man see me and live"; and accordingly he shows Moses only his "back parts"; while in ver. 11 in the very same chapter we read, "And the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend." Again in Exodus xxiv. the Lord says to Moses, "that he alone shall come near the Lord" (ver. 2), while in vers. 9—11 of the same chapter, we are told that "Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up; and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone," and although they saw God, were none the worse for it, but survived and "did eat and drink." Is it possible to believe that these excessively crude representations of the Deity, and these flagrant inconsistencies, were all written at the same time, by the same hand, and that the hand of a man who, if not a holy inspired prophet, was at any rate an educated and learned ex-priest of Hieropolis, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians? The contradictions in the ideas and precepts of morality and religion are even more startling. These oscillate between the two extremes of the conception of the later prophets of a one Supreme God, who loves justice and mercy better than sacrifice, and that of a ferocious and vindictive tribal god, whose appetite for human blood is as insatiable as that of the war-god of the Mexicans. Thus we have, on the one hand, the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder," and on the other, the injunction to commit indiscriminate massacres. A single instance may suffice. The "Book of the Law of Moses" is quoted in 2 Kings xiv. as saying, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin." In Numbers xxxi., Moses, the "meekest of mankind," is represented as extremely wroth with the captains who, having warred against Midian at the Lord's command, had only slaughtered the males, and taken the women of Midian and their little ones captives; and he commands them to "kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that hath known man by lying with him; but all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." These Midianites, be it remembered, being the people whose high priest Jethro had hospitably received Moses when he fled for his life from Egypt, and gave him his daughter as a wife, by whom he had children who were half Midianites, so that if the zealous Phinehas was right in slaying the Hebrew who had married a Midianite woman, Moses himself deserved the same fate. The same injunction of indiscriminate massacre in order to escape the jealous wrath of an offended Jehovah is repeated, over and over again, in Joshua and Judges, and even as late as after the foundation of the Monarchy, we find Samuel telling Saul in the name of the Lord of Hosts, to "go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy them, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," and denouncing Saul, and hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord, because this savage injunction had not been literally obeyed. Even under David, the man after the Lord's own heart, we find him torturing to death the prisoners taken at the fall of Rabbah, and giving up seven of the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be sacrificed before the Lord as human victims. It is one of the strangest contradictions of human nature that such atrocious violations of the moral sense should have been received for so many centuries as a divine revelation, rather than as instances of what may be more appropriately called "devil worship." Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepossessions that such a medley of the sublime religious ideas and lofty poetry of the prophetic ages, with such a mass of puerile and absurd legends, such obvious contradictions, and such a number of passages obviously dating from a later period, should be received by many men of intelligence, even to the present day, as the work of a single contemporary writer, the inspired prophet Moses. When we pass from the Pentateuch to the succeeding Books of Joshua and of Judges the same remarks apply. The falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet, and the defeat of an army of 135,000 men of Midian and Amalek with a slaughter of 120,000, by 300 men under Gideon, armed with pitchers and trumpets, are on a par with the wandering of 2,500,000 Israelites in the desert for forty years, fed with manna of the size of hoar-frost. The moral atmosphere also continues to be that of Red Indians down to the time of David, for we read of nothing but murders and massacres, sometimes of other races, sometimes of one tribe by another; while the actions selected for special commendation are like those of Jael, who drove a nail into the head of the sleeping fugitive whom she had invited into her tent; or of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as an offering to the Lord in obedience to a vow. This barbarous state of manners is confirmed by Flinders Petrie's discoveries at the supposed site of Lachish, which show the ruins of a walled city of the Amorites, built upon by the mud hovels of a race as rude as the rudest Bedouins who now wander on the edge of the Arabian desert. The only safe conclusion seems to be that authentic annals of Jewish history only begin with the Monarchy, and that everything prior to David and Solomon, or possibly Saul and Samuel, consists of myth, legend, and oral tradition, so inextricably blended, and so mixed up with successive later additions, as to give no certain information as to events or dates. All that it is safe to assume is, that in a general way the Hebrews were originally a Semitic tribe who migrated from ChaldÆa into Palestine and thence into Egypt, where they remained for an uncertain time and were oppressed by the national dynasty which expelled the Hyksos; that they left Egypt probably in the reign of Menepthah, and as a consequence of the rebellion recorded by Manetho; that they then lived for an unknown time as wandering Bedouins on the frontier of Palestine in a state of very rude barbarism; and finally burst in like a horde of Aztecs on the older and more civilized Toltecs of Mexico. For a long period after this, perhaps for 200 or 300 years, they lived in a state of chronic warfare with one another, and with their neighbours, massacring and being massacred with the alternate vicissitudes of war, but with the same rudeness and ferocity of superstitions and manners. Gradually, however, they advanced in civilization, and something of a national feeling arose, which led to a partial consolidation under priests, and a more complete one under kings. The first king, Saul, was opposed by priestly influence and defeated and slain in battle, but a captain of condottieri, David, arose, a man of great energy and military genius, who gradually formed a standing army and conquered province after province, until at his death he left to his successor, Solomon, an empire extending from the frontier of Egypt to Damascus, and from the Red Sea almost to the Mediterranean. This kingdom commanded two of the great commercial routes between the East and West, the caravan route between Tyre and Babylon, vi Damascus and Tadmor, and the route from Tyre to the terminus at Ezion-Gebir, of the sea-routes to Arabia, Africa, and India. Solomon entered into close commercial relations with Tyre, and during his long and splendid reign, Jerusalem blossomed rapidly into a wealthy and a cultured city, and the surrounding cities and districts shared in the general prosperity. The greatness of the kingdom did not last long, for the revolt of the ten tribes and the growth of other powers soon reduced JudÆa and Samaria to political insignificance; but Jerusalem, down to the time of its final destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, i.e. for a period of some 400 years after Solomon, never seems to have lost its character of a considerable and civilized city. It is evident from the later prophets that it was the seat of a good deal of wealth and luxury, for their invectives are, to a great extent, what we should call at the present day, Socialist denunciations of the oppression of the poor by the rich, land-grabbing by the powerful, and extravagance of dress by the ladies of fashion. There were hereditary nobles, organized colleges of priests and scribes, and no doubt there was a certain amount of intellectual life and literary activity. But of a sacred book there is no trace until the discovery of one in the Temple in the reign of Josiah; and the peculiar tenets of modern Judaism had no real hold on the mass of the people until after the return from Exile and the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. The history, therefore, contained in the Old Testament is comparatively modern. There is nothing which can be relied on as authentic in regard to events and dates prior to the establishment of the Monarchy, and even the wildest myths and the most impossible legends do not carry us back within 2000 years of the time when we have genuine historical annals attested by monuments both in Egypt and ChaldÆa. |
