From various antecedent remarks it will be perceived that I regard the Copts as a mixed community, derived in diverse proportions from the Caucasian and the Negro; and this diversity of origin may explain the dissimilar characteristics which travellers have ascribed to them.
Denon, for example, described them as having “flat foreheads, eyes half closed, and raised up at the angles, high cheek bones, a broad, flat, and short nose, a large, flattened mouth, placed at a considerable distance from the nose, thick lips, a little beard, a shapeless body, crooked legs, without expression in the contour, and long, flat toes.”[95] Denon even thinks that these features correspond, in a remarkable manner, with the human face and figure as represented in Egyptian painting and sculpture! And Sonnini, after describing them in nearly analogous terms, adds the moral reproach, that while “they are the ugliest of men, they are the filthiest and most disgusting.”[96]
If we compare these seemingly exaggerated descriptions with those of Brown, Lane, and some other travellers, the discrepancy is so great as, at first thought, to baffle all explanation. Brown, for example, “was not struck with any resemblance to the Negro features or form;” and he saw nothing remarkable in the texture of the hair.[97] “The eyes of the Copts,” says Mr. Lane, “are generally large and elongated, slightly inclining from the nose upwards, and always black. The nose is straight, excepting at the end, where it is rounded and wide; and the lips are rather thick, and the hair is black and curly.”[98] Madden adds that they are characterized by a remarkable distance between the eyes. Belzoni observed among them some as fair as Europeans; Rosellini assures us that they are largely mixed with Jewish and Roman blood;[99] and D’Avezac, like Depauw, discovers in them a partial Chinese ancestry. These, and numberless other opinions which might be cited, prove that the Copts differ greatly among themselves; and that they are, physically and morally, a mixture of all the nations which have successively held dominion in Egypt, or swelled its varied population—Egyptians of various castes, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Hebrews, Negroes, and some others Such was, at least in part, the opinion of Pugnet, (whose memoir I have not seen,) for he separates them “into two divisions; those whose ancestry has been intermixed, and partly of Greek and Latin descent, and a class of purely Egyptian origin.”[100] But, after all, perhaps the traces which are most invariable in the Copt are derived from the Negro; and they are manifest in the very bones of the head and face.
“The inhabitants of the towns of Arabia and Egypt,” says Burckhardt, “are in the daily habit of taking in wedlock Abyssinian as well as Negro slaves;”[101] and, in a subsequent part of his travels, the same intelligent author describes a class of people in Nubia who are the direct offspring of this mixture of race, and who seem, from his description, to answer the characters of the Copts themselves. “The Nouba slaves (among whom must be reckoned those who are born in Senaar of male Negroes and female Abyssinians) form a middle class between the blacks and the Abyssinians. Their features, though they retain evident signs of Negro origin, have still something of what is called regular; their noses, though smaller than those of Europeans, are less flat than those of Negroes their lips are less thick, and the cheek bones less prominent. The hair of some is woolly but among the greater part it is similar to the hair of Europeans, but stronger, and always curled.” Another, and yet more striking example of the Negroid conformation is seen in the vast Foulah or Fellatah population of central Africa, which is now spread over a region of fifteen hundred miles from east to west, and five hundred miles from north to south. That they are a mixed progeny of Arabs, Berbers and Negroes, no longer admits of a reasonable doubt. Such is the opinion of D’Avezac and Hodgson, Vater, Adelung, and most other inquirers. “In the midst of the Negro races,” observes M. D’Avezac, “there stands out a mÉtive population, of tawny or copper colour, prominent nose, small mouth, and oval face, which ranks itself among the white races, and asserts itself to be descended from Arab fathers and Taurodo mothers. Their crisped hair, even woolly, though long, justifies their classification among the Oulotric (woolly-haired) populations; but neither the traits of their features, nor the colour of their skin, allow them to be confounded with Negroes, however great the fusion of the two types may be.”[102] These and other facts derived from the slave trade, when considered in connexion with the Negro colonization of Nubia in the reign of Dioclesian, will account, I may repeat, not only for every blending of race observable in that country, but also assists us in tracing the origin of the Copts;—not to a period of time, it is true, but to circumstances which have been in operation for ages, and which were once, in all probability, far more active than they are at present.
By the kindness of Mr. Gliddon I possess three Coptic skulls, two of which are adult, and are accurately sketched in the subjoined drawings, (A and B.)
In A the cranium is elongated, narrow, but otherwise mediately developed in front, with great breadth and fulness in the whole posterior region. The nasal bones, though prominent, are broad, short, and concave, and the upper jaw is everted. There is, also, a remarkable distance between the eyes. The facial angle measures 81°, the internal capacity 85 cubic inches.
In the second head, B, the head is long and narrow, with a receding forehead, flat or concave nasal bones, and short, everted upper maxilla. Facial angle 78°; internal capacity 77 cubic inches.
A glance at these two crania will satisfy any one that they possess, in degree, both the conformation and expression of the Negro.
The third skull, that of a child of two years of age, corresponds in general form with the preceding, without having the African characteristics quite so obviously expressed.
It therefore follows, from all the evidence we possess in relation to the Copts, that, as a people, they partake sensibly, and sometimes largely, of Negro lineage.
An inspection of the royal portraits preserved in Rosellini, shows several heads which are obviously of the Coptic form; those, for example, of Sabakon and Tirhaka, of the Ethiopian dynasty, and of the queen Metumva, of an earlier epoch. (Plate XIV.) The same lineaments, though in less degree, are also obvious in the effigies of Sheshonk (Shishak) and Osorkon II., of the twenty-second dynasty, and in a few others of different periods of time. I wish it to be understood that I do not say these sovereigns were of Coptic lineage; but merely that their physiognomy, as expressed on the monuments, has the Coptic character. The history of the Copts remains an enigma in Egyptian ethnography.
