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deeds of the warrior Horus, similarly handed down and magnified, formed the basis of another Demigod; but he likewise is Egyptian-no sign or hint of being borrowed elsewhere. The cranial, facial, and other physical characters of those Egyptians who lived and died nearest to the period when Gods and Demigods ceased in the flesh to govern Egypt yield no evidence on which I can rest that they were a colony of Asiatics. Evidence is still needed-at least it is not yet forthcoming-to demonstrate the posteriority of Egyptian civilized man to any such advanced race in other lands. There are, doubtless, linguistic elements, as in that which recognizes the worth of woman,-her right to a vocal sign significant of sex,— evidencing affinity with tongues called "Semitic." But whether such affinity be due to migration from a hypothetical centre, Asiatic or European, whether to Egypt from any other land, or from Egypt to any other land, are problems which still wait for solution.

Permit me to trespass with the following remarks, which seem in some measure to bear upon this pregnant ethnological question. The Isthmus of Suez is geologically a recent bridge between Asia and Africa; it was completed at the newer Miocene period. Recent, however, as this period is in geology, it was sufficiently long ago to allow the forces originating species to establish such specific grade of distinction between large classes of animals dwelling respectively in the two seas which the Isthmus divides. No shell, no fish, for example, native of the Red Sea, is met with in the Mediterranean, and reciprocally. Only the zoological mind can conceive, or attempt to grasp, the lapse of historical time so indicated. It is amply sufficient for the rise of such a race as the photographs exemplify.

If Egyptian civilization sprang from an Asiatic colony, whether at Squire's date or an earlier period, the route by land must have been by the Isthmus. We have evidence that Asiatic immigrants did take that route to Egypt, and, subduing the northern autochthones, established themselves in the delta, and there founded their capital Tanis (Sân=Zoan), in the delta, in a position eastward of the Bubastic branch, strategically chosen as against succeeding immigrants and invaders. Here is a condition which throws some light upon the question, and more directly, I think, than the linguistic evidence. The proved immigrants were Syro-Aramæans, perhaps migratory shepherd sheiks, typified by Lot and Abram, with their fighting

followers, or, it may be, of more northern origin. They came in, at or after the Fourteenth Dynasty, about 2500 years after Menes.

Where were the capitals of the ancient Pharaohs? The earliest one might not be far from the country of the mythical or pre-historic race of Osiris, of Horus. Its site should indicate, as in the case of the Hycksos, the nearest point of contact with the Fatherland. Is it in the delta? By no means. Is it in Nubia? No. It is about midway between the northern and southern extremity of the oldest empire, at the locality to which the Greeks gave the name of Abydos, as they converted the Egyptian Taba into their Baotian Thebes. If Mariette-Bey perseveres in his explorations of the mounds of Abydos which mark the site of ancient Thinis, the capital of the Pharaohs of the First and Second Dynasties, we may expect more light on that most ancient, and therefore most interesting, chapter in the Manethonian history of Egypt.

Subsequently, and apparently in connexion with hydrostatic works regulating the bed of the Nile and recovering land, at that time nearer to the sea than now, the capital is moved northward to within ten miles of the present Cairo, on the Lybyan bank. It becomes the far-famed city of Memphis, with its great graveyards at Ghizeh and Sakkara. After three dynasties have reigned there, the sixth goes further south than the primitive capital, and chooses the Isle of Elephantine.

I confess that these large, patent, indisputable facts do not encourage the adoption of any hypothesis of immigration under present knowledge. I do not say that they establish Egypt to be the locality of the rise and progress of the earliest civilization known in the world, but they justify an expectant attitude and beget a determination to persevering and continued research.

Assuming that learned Rabbis best know what their ancient writers meant in penning their cosmogony, chronology, and history, and that we have just entered upon the 5635th year of the world's age, and, furthermore, that the human species started afresh from the three sons of one Aramaan patriarch 2000 years after, there arises the ethnological question in what period of time the varieties of such species and subjects of our studies were established. What is the earliest date, on scientific grounds, of their existence?

Now here, as in most other scientific problems, we get the first

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help from Egypt. If I were to select from ancient history a founder of ethnological science, I should take Thotmes III., of the Eighteenth Dynasty. He was the first and greatest collector of ethnological specimens, unconscious, of course, of their relation to our science. The last of Mariette-Bey's pregnant discoveries is a record (by Thotmes), in more detail than any other, of the countries, localities, and cities from which, in the course of his victorious campaigns, he obtained, for service, his examples of human races as at that date established. Thotmes may thus claim to be the oldest geographer as well as ethnologist. What were those races? In what degree had the human characters deviated from the Noachian or SyroAramæan type? This founder of ethnology shows us both the kinds and degrees of such variations. "How so?" you may ask. By coloured figures of his captives, suppliants, tribute-bearers. The walls of temples at Thebes are enriched with such frescos. British Museum possesses parts of one at least 3000 years old, with its colours seemingly as fresh as when laid on. You may have contemplated that priceless ethnological testimony when you honoured us with your presence on Tuesday last. You would there see, first, the Egyptian subjects of Thotmes, his own people, bronzed and tanned, conventionally ochreous in tint, with well-developed muscular legs, in form and features repeating the ethnic characters in the contiguous magnificent sculptured representations of the monarch himself. Secondly, before him bow the Rutennou tributaries, with lighter complexion and hair, with a prominent hooked nose, with the full beard and other characters marking them as cognates of the Hycksos, of the Philistine or Palestine family, represented by modern Jews, and by the people whose features are preserved in our Assyrian sculptures. Thirdly, there is the unmistakable typical negro-black skin, retreating forehead, flat squab nose, prominent thick lips, receding chin, legs slightly bowed, poor calf, long tendo achilles, projecting heel, crisp woolly hair, short scanty beard. These bear the gold, ivory, leopard skins and other characteristic productions of the Soudan. In them you see the veritable progenitors of the enslaved and slave-hunting tribes of late subjected to the wholesome discipline of Sir Samuel Baker.

With this evidence of extreme varieties of mankind 1500 years B.C., which subsequently have undergone little or no amount of

change, the probability is great that in the time of Thotmes, 3000 years ago, there existed also red men in America, Maories in the Pacific, Mongols in China, Ainos in Japan, Papuans in New Guinea, Tasmanians, not then extinct, nearer the Antarctic circle, Esquimaux at the opposite pole, and on the African continent darkskinned people with Egyptian features, and a wide dispersion of sub-varieties of the Negro race. Physiology compels a retrospect far beyond historical periods of time for the establishment of these varieties. Geology lends her aid in expanding our conceptions of time past in relation to the existence of the source of these varieties-the last, highest organic form that "naked and on two legs" trod the earth. What evidence, not merely faith-exciting but knowledge-giving, have we of the earliest manifestation of Assyrian or Semitic civilization—that is to say, of literature, architectural and sculptural art, established ritualistic religion, priest and warrior castes, administrative officials-parallel in time with the evidence of such which Egypt has yielded? The Hycksos kings, in the course of their 500 years' usurpation of the delta, accepted the civilization, the arts, and, in part, the religion, of the higher race which they had partially subdued. When finally driven out-and they were pursued by the victorious Amosis as far as Palestine, as that pregnant contemporary record translated by M. Chabas teaches - they took with them such accession of ideas as they had acquired in Egypt. One invasion and conquest is the parent of another; the subjugated in turn becomes the subduer. The Amenophises, the Thotmes, extended the conquests of Amosis, the founder of their Dynasty; they overran Palestine and pushed onward, through Colo-Syria and by Carchemis, to the plains watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris, bringing back from the confederation of tribes of the subdued "Naharina," 'Kanana," and "Rutennou," such slaves as they wanted for their mighty works in Egypt. In that hard school were trained additional teachers of the Assyrian and neighbouring populations. But how far above and beyond these glimpses of possible outward courses of the stream of Egyptian civilization stands its native source, brightly flowing through the first Twelve Dynasties, three thousand years before the time of Menepthah, the Pharaoh, probably, of the Exodus. The commencement of the Twenty-second Dynasty is contemporaneous with the reign of Jeroboam.

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To come down to that better determined period of Hebrew history. In the reign of Sesac, or Sheshonk, of the Twenty-second Dynasty, about 1000 B.C., the kingdom of Judæa, through the conquests of David and the administrative capacity of the son (Solomon), who had secured the succession, with usual results in Eastern semi-civilized states to the rightful heir, was at its apogee.

What was the neighbouring nation or state most advanced in religion, letters, arts, administration, at that period? This becomes a question for the ethnologist of eastern races. To answer it on the grounds on which a geologist, a century ago, interpreted his phenomena, would be futile-could have no better result.

Of Chaldæa, of Assyria, at this period, little is contemporaneously recorded in response to our question, as to relative rise in civilization. For the builders, perhaps architects, of his Temple and palaces Solomon has recourse to Phoenicia. Hiram supplies his powerful neighbour. The explorers of the "Palestine Fund" have found Phoenician characters, not Cuneiform ones, on stones of the First Temple.

Does Solomon seek a foreign alliance by marriage? His embassy to that end is not to any Assyrian court-if such then existed— but to an Egyptian one. So highly did he esteem this alliance, that a royal palace, or hareem, was expressly built for the Egyptian bride. The collateral testimonies to events in the next reign of Hebrew history, such as the bas-reliefs at Karnak supply, justify scientific acceptance of the Biblical records of the respective conditions of Palestine, Tyre and Egypt in the time of Solomon. To the ethnologist it affords significant evidence of the relative antiquity of Assyrian and Egyptian civilization and status at the time of Solomon and Rehoboam.

The subjugation and heavy taxation of the Ten Clans of Samaria, or "Tribes of Israel," was the achievement of their near and powerful neighbour, seated on his rock-fortress, which his father David had wrested from the Edomites.

The revolt of Israel was not fomented by Assyria, but by Egypt. To that land fled Jeroboam, and to him the wily usurper of the throne of that Pharaoh whose daughter Solomon had married, assigned an Egyptian princess, and secured the co-operation, or neutrality at least, of Israel in the raid which Sheshonk meditated upon Jerusalem.

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