In the same celebrated scene I notice another head of the same general cast, but of a darker complexion and more delicate features, who answers yet more accurately to the type of the northern Hindoos. He wears a light dress and grass hat, and moreover leads an elephant, all of which point to a warm climate. Mr. Hoskins remarks that “the elephant must be from Ethiopia: if, therefore, they [the attendants] are Scythians, as some suppose, they must be employed as slaves bringing the produce of Ethiopia.” And he concludes by suggesting that they may be white slaves of the latter country, sent as a present to the Egyptian king. This appears to me to be an involved and unsatisfactory explanation. The elephant, like the bear, is obviously an Asiatic animal, (for the Egyptians made no use of the living native species,) and it is evident that this group is merely typical of some conquered Hindoo nation, or proximate and cognate tribe.

Winkelman, Blumenbach, and other authors, have also been struck with these cranial resemblances; and certain physical analogies were familiar to the writers of antiquity. They are especially recorded by Strabo and Arrian, who compare the southern Hindoos to the Ethiopians, and the northern Hindoos to the Egyptians. Various shades of complexion, as we have remarked, were common to both countries, together with a small stature and slender limbs.

History, mythology and the arts discover various additional analogies between these venerable nations. Apis, the Egyptian bull, was the symbol of Osiris; and the white bull is the animal on which Siva is represented on the Indian pagodas: worship was bestowed alike on the Ganges and the Nile; both nations paid homage to the sun and the serpent; and even at the present time, the objects held in greatest veneration by the Hindoos of the Vishnu sect are the ape, the monkey, the bird called garruda, and the serpent capella. Among the symbols of superstition in each are the sphinx, the lotus, the lingam, and the cross. “The dog, sacred to Bhairava, a form of Siva, and the jackall of Durga, remind us of the barking Anubis, the companion of Osiris. The dogs of Yama, one of which was termed Cerbura, or spotted, and was feigned to have three heads, corresponds remarkably, as Mr. Wilford has observed, with the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of Pluto.”^[81]

This affinity is also recognised in their almost exclusive vegetable diet, and by the singular institution of castes. Analogies are, moreover, traced in the architecture of the two nations, whether in their monolithic temples and subterranean sanctuaries, or in the statuary and minor decorations of their stupendous temples.^[82]

That there was extensive and long-continued intercourse between the Hindoos and Egyptians is beyond a question; and history speaks, also, of conquest and migration. Which was primitively the dominant power? The Egyptians very naturally decided this point in their own favour; for they assert that Osiris crossed Arabia to the utmost inhabited parts of India, and built many cities there. “He left, likewise,” says Diodorus, “many other marks of his being in these parts, which have induced the inhabitants to believe and affirm, that this god (Osiris) was born in India.”^[83] Thus it appears that, in the age of Diodorus, the Hindoos not only worshipped, but claimed as original to themselves, the principal divinity of the Egyptians. There is, moreover, a passage in Syncellus which directly asserts that the Hindoos, who, as we have observed, are sometimes called Ethiopians in ancient history, formed colonies in Egypt. “Æthiopes ab Indo fluvio profecti, supra Ægyptum sedem sibi eligerunt.” Heeren, from whom I derive this quotation, remarks, that as the Hindoos would necessarily arrive by sea, they would establish themselves on the coast. We grant it; but a commercial and migratory people would soon find their way to the great mart of MeroË, and thence to every part of the Egyptian provinces. It has been observed by Mr. Bonomi, that the affiliation of the Hindoos with the people of the upper Nile is confirmed by the affinity which exists between the Ethiopic and Sanscrit systems of writing, as pointed out by Dr. Wall and Mr. Tudor.^[84]

Dr. Prichard, whose profound investigations into this and all other questions in ethnography, command our highest respect, while he admits that great difficulties present themselves in the present inquiry, remarks “that a common origin, if not of the races themselves, at least of the mental culture characteristic of both of them, has been proved; and that the people of India and of Egypt derived from one source the first principles of all their peculiarities of thought and action, of their religious and social observances, and civil and political institutions; and that these principles had even been developed to a considerable extent, before the nations themselves were entirely cut off from communication with each other or with a common centre.”^[85]

It has been proved by the philosophic Heeren, that MeroË was the grand emporium of the trade between the richest and most productive portions of the earth; the gold countries of eastern Africa, the spice lands of India, and the region of frankincense and precious stones in southern Arabia. He has shown that the communication between these countries was established in the most ancient periods, and continued without interruption through successive ages of time; that the ruins of AdulÉ, Azab, and Axum, yet mark the caravan routes between MeroË and Arabia Felix; and that Yemen, though separated from India by an open sea, is yet connected with it by nature in an extraordinary manner. “One half of the year,” he adds, “from spring to autumn, the wind regularly sets in and wafts the vessels from Arabia to India; the other half, from autumn to spring, it as regularly carries them back from India to Arabia.”^[86]

In truth, what Diodorus says, in general, of early Egyptian commerce and conquest by sea, need be no longer regarded as fabulous, although the details, like much that we glean from the remote history of all heathen nations, are to be received with circumspection. He tells us that Sesostris (Rameses III.) fitted out a fleet of four hundred ships in the Arabian gulf, with which he conquered all the countries bordering on the Erythrean sea, as far as India, whence he led an army beyond the Ganges until he again reached the ocean. This account is not likely to be all fable, especially since it comes from a Greek historian; and we may safely regard it as an indication of that extensive maritime enterprise in which the Egyptians engaged with the southern nations of Asia. When the Romans under the guidance of Hippalus, eighty years after their conquest of Egypt, began to trade with India by way of the Red Sea and Malabar, they only re-established the ancient route, which had been long forgotten amidst the chaos of political revolutions. In fine, if the Egyptians had been their own historians, we should probably learn that they were as familiar with India in ancient as the English are in modern times.^[87]

While we conclude, therefore, that the Egyptians were a distinct people from either the Arabs or Hindoos, we cannot deny those resemblances which are too obvious to be mistaken, yet not to be accounted for without difficulty; nor can there be a reasonable doubt that the people of both these nations formed an important part of the once multitudinous population of Egypt.^[88]