what I have heard of the clucking of Hottentots. It seems a succession of monosyllables, accompanied with a rise and fall of voice that is not disagreeable.

I saw few traces among them of government, or law, or religion. They know no master, although the cashief claims a nominal command of the country it extends no farther than sending his soldiers to collect their tax, or rent, called Mirri. The Pasha of Egypt was named as sovereign in all transactions from Cairo to Assuan. Here, and beyond, as far as I went, the reigning Sultan Mahmood was considered the sovereign; though the cashief's was evidently the power they feared the most. They look for redress of injuries to their own means of revenge, which, in cases of blood, extends from one generation to another, till blood is repaid by blood. On this account, they are obliged to be ever on the watch and armed; and, in this manner, even their daily labours are carried on the very boys go armed. : They profess to be the followers of Mahomet, though I rarely happened to observe any of their ritual observances of that religion. Once, upon my endeavouring to make some of them comprehend the benefit of obedience to the rules of justice for punishing offences, instead of pursuing the offender to death as they practised, they quoted the Koran, to justify their requiring blood for blood.

Their dress, for the men, is a linen smock, commonly brown, with red or dark coloured skull cap. A few wear turbans and slippers. The women have a brown robe thrown gracefully over their head and body, discovering the right arm and breast, and part of one thigh and leg. They are of good size and shape, but very ugly in the face. Their necks, arms, and ankles, are ornamented with beads or bone rings, and one nostril with a ring of bone or metal. Their hair is anointed with oil of cassia, of which every village has a small plantation. It is matted or plaited, as now seen in the heads of sphinxes and female figures of their ancient statues. I found one at Elephantina, which might have been supposed their model. Their little children are naked. Girls wear round the waist an apron of strings of raw hide, and boys a girdle of linen.

'Their arms are knives or daggers, fastened to the back of the elbow or in the girdle, javelins, tomahawks, swords of Roman shape, but longer, and slung behind them. Some have round shields of buffalo hide, and a few pistols and muskets are to be seen.'-pp. 93-97.

The Thebiad has been so often described, that, although every attentive traveller may find something new, the objects are mostly a repetition of what have before been observed-gigantic masses of stone, colossal statues, columns of immense magnitude, and deep caverns, excavated out of the living rock. At Luxor the diameters of some of the columns are upwards of eight feet, and their height forty; and they support masses of stone eighteen feet long and six square, which gives to each a weight from forty-five to fifty tons. Captain Light thus describes Carnac :

My visit to Carnac, the ancient Diospolis, a ruined temple farther

from the banks of the river, on the same side as Luxor, was equally gratifying. It was impossible to look on such an extent of building without being lost in admiration; no description will be able to give an adequate idea of the enormous masses still defying the ravages of time. Enclosure within enclosure, propylæa in front of propylæa; to these, avenues of sphinxes, each of fourteen or fifteen feet in length, lead from a distance of several hundred yards. The common Egyptian sphinx is found in the avenues to the south; but, to the west, the crio sphinx, with the ram's head, from one or two that have been uncovered, seems to have composed its corresponding avenue. Those of the south and east are still buried. Headless statues of gray and blue granite, of gigantic size, lay prostrate in different parts of the ruins. In the western court, in front of the great portico, and at the entrance to this portico, is an upright headless statue of one block of granite, whose size may be imagined from finding that a man of six foot just reaches to the patella of the knee.

The entrance to the great portico is through a mass of masonry, partly in ruins; through which the eye rests on an avenue of fourteen columns, whose diameter is more than eleven feet, and whose height is upwards of sixty. On each side of this are seven rows, of seven columns in each, whose diameter is eight feet, and about forty feet high, of an architecture which wants the elegance of Grecian models, yet suits the immense majesty of the Egyptian temple.

Though it does not enter into my plan to continue a description which has been so ably done by others before me, yet, when I say that the whole extent of this temple cannot be less than a mile and a half in circumference, and that the smallest blocks of masonry are five feet by four in depth and breadth, that there are obelisks of eighty feet high on a base of eighteen feet, of one block of granite; it can be easily imagined that Thebes was the vast city history describes it to be.'— pp. 105-107.

Of the Memnonium and its statues, on the opposite side of the Nile, Captain Light says but little, and that little is incorrect. He is mistaken, for instance, in ascribing to Herodotus the information that the 'statues of Memnon and his queen were thrown down by the first Cambyses.' Herodotus never once mentions Memnon nor his queen; indeed this is the first time we ever heard of his 'queen' from any author. It is Pausanias, and not Herodotus, who relates the fact of Cambyses having cut down the statue of Memnon; but Strabo says it was thrown down by the shock of an earthquake. Again, in observing that the head of the female, described by Denon in such high terms, and by Mr. Hamilton, might be easily taken away,' he is mistaken in supposing that the latter describes any female bead on the Memnonian side of the river. The male and female colossal statues scen by this intelligent_traveller at Luxor have no relation to the head which Captain Light thinks 'might easily be taken away,' and which, in fact, has been taken away, and is now lodged in the British Museum.

6

Denon, it is true, conjectures that the two sitting colossal statues near Medinet-Abou, one of which, from the numerous inscriptions on its legs, is justly considered, by Pococke, to be that of Memnon, are in fact the mother and the son, not of Memnon, but of Osymandyas, a conjecture for which he has not the shadow of a foundation; but whether Osymandyas or Memnon, or neither, these statues have no connexion with the head in question, which has, unaccountably enough, been called the head of the younger Memnon.' It might have been as well to ascertain who the elder Memnon was, before a young one had been created. The youthful appearance' of a statue mentioned by Philostratus, being applicable to that beautiful specimen in the British Museum, which was found in what is now considered to be the Memnonium, may have. suggested the idea of a younger Memnon: there can be little doubt, however, of its being an assumed name, wholly unauthorized by ancient history.

Captain Light crept into one of the mummy pits or caverns, which were the common burial places of the ancient Thebans. As it happened to be newly discovered, he found thousands of dead bodies, placed in regular horizontal layers side by side; these he conceives to be the mummies of the lower order of people, as they were covered only with simple teguments, and smeared over with a composition that preserved the muscles from corruption. The suffocating smell, he says, ' and the natural horror excited by being left alone unarmed with the wild villagers in this charnel house, made me content myself with visiting two or three chambers, and quickly return to the open air.'

The Troglodites of Goornoo, it seems, still inhabit the empty tombs or caverns; they derive their chief subsistence, he tells us, from the pillage of the tombs, of which they are constantly in quest. Whenever a new one is discovered, 'the bodies,' he adds, 'are taken out and broken up, and the resinous substance found in the inside of the mummy forms a considerable article of trade with Cairo.'

Captain Light mentions, what indeed we have frequently heard before, that the Sepoys, in their march to join the army of Lord Hutchinson, imagined they had found their own temples in the ruins of Dendyra, and were greatly exasperated at the Egyptians for their neglect of their deities; so strongly, indeed, were they impressed with the identity, that they performed their devotions in those temples with all the ceremonies practised in Hindostan. That there is a likeness, and a very striking one, between the massy buildings of India and Egypt, the monolithic temples, the excavated mountains, and even between some of the minor decorations and appendages, as the phallus, the lotus, the serpent, &c. no one will venture to deny ; but, on the other side, there are points of disagree

ment,of sufficient weight to counterbalance the argument in favour of a common origin. With regard to the physical, moral, and religious character of the two people, there is nothing in common; and it does not appear that the Hindoos had at any time subterranean tombs or sarcophagi, or mummies, fresco paintings, or hieroglyphics. It may be urged perhaps, as on a former occasion we ourselves suggested, that the architects and artificers may have been a distinct race of people from either the Hindoos or the Egyptians, and that the decorative parts may have been adapted to the views and prejudices of the two nations, and derived from the products of beauty or utility peculiar to the two countries respectively. This however is entitled to be received only as conjecture: and we entirely concur with Captain Light in thinking that the only way to clear up the point of an ancient connexion between the Hindoos and the Egyptians would be that of employing some traveller well versed in the antiquities of the one country, to examine accurately those of the other; and when the several species of architectural remains, and their concomitant decorations, shall have been brought together side by side in detail, then, and not till then, will it be safe to pronounce a decided opinion on the question. Mr. Hamilton, whose opinion is always deserving of attention, considers the architecture of the two countries to be very different when duly examined, and gives the preference in point of simplicity, symmetry, and taste, to the temples of Egypt.

In point of fact, however, the temples of Nubia and of Egypt are in themselves essentially different; those above ground, in the former, being small, and mean, and ill-constructed, when compared with those of the latter, while the excavations of the mountains, and the colossal statues hewn out of the living rock, are far superior to those of Egypt-of which it may be said that the structures above the surface are only equalled by those of Ethiopia below it. On a MS. map of the course of the Nile, from Essuan to the confines of Dongola, constructed by Colonel Leake, chiefly from the journal of Mr. Burckhardt, we have read the following note. The ancient temples above Philæ are of two very different kinds. Those excavated in the rock at Gyrshe and Ebsambul rival some of the grandest works of the Egyptians, and may be supposed at least coeval with the ancient monarchy of Thebes. The temples constructed in masonry, on the other hand, are not to be compared with those of Egypt either in size or in the costly decorations of sculpture and painting; they are probably the works of a much later age.'

If we were to institute a comparison between the journal of Captain Light and that of Mr. Legh, we are not sure that, on the whole, we should not be disposed to give a preference to the

former, were it only on account of its numerous prints, and of the notices respecting the temples, catacombs, excavations, and statuary, in which Mr. Legh's was remarkably deficient; we ought not to conceal, however, that we found it somewhat dull and heavy, and particularly deficient in personal enterprise, which seldom fails to interest in a book of travels. It was in fact the well told tale of the subterranean adventure which communicated a charm to Mr. Legh's journal, and which tended more than any thing else to give it the stamp of public approbation. We have frequently been told that our review of that work contained more than was to be found in the book itself; if the additional matter charged upon us was of a novel and interesting nature, (as we flatter ourselves was, in some measure, the case,) such a circumstance we apprehend will not be objected to us as a very grievous fault; and we trust that Captain Light will not complain if, on the present occasion, we should terminate our remarks with his Nubian journey, and confine the remainder of this article to African subjects which have not yet met the public eye.

We took an opportunity, in our last Number, to introduce to the acquaintance of our readers a Roman traveller of the name of Belzoni, who, in laying open the front of the great sphinx, had made some singular discoveries in Egyptian antiquities. The uncommon sagacity and perseverance displayed by this Italian are worthy of all praise; and we apprehend that we cannot conclude this article in a more satisfactory way than by giving a summary account of what his recent discoveries have been, and what may yet be expected from him.

Mr. Belzoni has already completed two journeys to Upper Egypt and Nubia, under the auspices of Mr. Salt, the British consul-general at Cairo. In the first he proceeded beyond the second cataract, and opened the celebrated but hitherto undescribed temple at Ipsambul, or, as it is called by Mr. Burckhardt, Ebsambul, and by Captain Light, Absimbul, being the largest and most extensive excavations either in Nubia or Egypt. More than two-thirds of the front of this grand temple were completely buried in the sand, which, in some places, covered it to the height of fifty feet. Its site however is easily recognised by four colossal figures in front in a sitting posture, each of which is about sixty feet high; but one of the four has been thrown down, and lies prostrate in the sand, with which it is partially covered. It was this statue, we believe, from the tip of whose ear Mr. Bankes could just reach to its forehead, and which measures, according to Burckhardt, twentyone feet across the shoulders. Mr. Belzoni found this extraordinary excavation to contain fourteen chambers and a great hall in the latter of which were standing erect eight colossal figures, each thirty