CHAP. XIX. AND ITS DATES. 381 thousand years ago, as lost in the night of ages, we may form some estimate of the minimum of time which a people such as the Egyptians must have required to emerge slowly from primeval barbarism, and reach, long before the first Olympiad, so high a degree of power and civilisation. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in his recent Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients,' says, that 'taking into consideration all the evidence respecting the buildings and great works of Egypt extant in the time of Herodotus, we may come to the conclusion that there is no sufficient ground for placing them at a date anterior to the building of the temple of Solomon, or 1012, B.C.' The same author has reminded us that Homer, in the Iliad, speaks of Egyptian Thebes, with its hundred gates, through each of which two hundred chariots went forth to battle,' and that we may form an idea of the size which the great poet intended to ascribe to Thebes in Egypt, from the fact that Thebes in Boeotia was supposed to have only seven gates. Homer is believed to have flourished about eight centuries before the Christian era. At so early a period, therefore, the magnificence of Thebes had attracted the attention of the Greeks. But in the opinion of Egyptologists, there were great cities of still older date than Thebes; as, for example, Memphis, which, from the names of the kings on the oldest monuments now extant there as compared with those in Thebes, is inferred to go back to remoter times. As to the speculations of Aristotle, in his Meteorics' (1, 14), that Memphis was probably the less ancient of the two, because the ground on which it stood was nearer the Mediterranean, and would therefore, at a later period, be first redeemed from a watery and marshy state, this argument, if it were available, would give an extremely high antiquity to both cities, seeing the small progress which the delta and alluvial deposits of the Nile * London, 1862, p. 440. 382 EARLY EGYPTIAN DATES CHAP. XIX. have made in the last two or three thousand years. It is only in bays like that of Menzaleh, that any great amount of new land has been gained, the general advance of the delta being checked by a strong current of the Mediterranean, which, running from the west, sweeps eastward the sediment brought down by the great river, and prevents the land from encroaching farther on the sea. The slow subsidence also of the land may be another cause checking the advance of the delta, and the desiccation of the inland country. Aristotle remarks, that as Homer does not mention Memphis, the city either had no existence in the time of the poet, or was less considerable than Thebes. This observation is no doubt just, so far as regards the comparative splendour of the two cities, the one the metropolis of Upper and the other of Lower Egypt in former times. But it has no bearing whatever on the question of the existence of Memphis, for Thebes is only alluded to incidentally as the grandest city known to Homer. Achilles is made to exclaim, "Not though you were to offer me the wealth of Egyptian Thebes, with its hundred gates,' &c. &c., would I stir;'* and the allusion to Thebes in the Odyssey is equally a passing one. † If a work like Strabo's 'Geography,' compiled in the days of Homer, had come down to us, and Thebes had been fully described without any mention being made of Memphis, we might then have inferred the nonexistence of the latter city at that period. 6 Great cities, says Sir G. C. Lewis, and temples, and pyramids may be erected during a small number of centuries, when despotic monarchs can command the services of large armies in peace, and some Oriental monarchs are known in historical times to have been possessed with a mania for constructing huge edifices to please their own fancies. But making every allowance for such occasional displays of † Odyssey, iv. 127. * Ilíad, ix. 381. CHAP. XIX. COMPARED WITH THOSE OF STONE PERIODS. 383 caprice and magnificence, we cannot contemplate the average size and number of the pyramids now extant (upwards of forty large and small), to say nothing of the monuments and inscriptions, without supposing them to have been the work of a long succession of generations. Long before the time of Homer, when Thebes had already attained such wealth and consequence, an indigenous civilisation must have been slowly matured, with its peculiar forms of worship, splendid religious ceremonial, the practice of embalming the dead, a peculiar style of sculpture and architecture, hieroglyphics, and the custom of embanking the great river to prevent the sites of towns and cities from being overflowed by the annual inundation. In the temples are found pictorial representations of battles and sieges, processions in which trophies are carried and prisoners led captive; and if it be true, as Sir G. C. Lewis contends, that throughout the historical period the Egyptians were a peaceful and never a conquering people,* the wars to which these monuments would then refer must be so ancient as to confer on the Egyptians far higher claims to antiquity than those advanced by Bunsen and Lepsius. Nevertheless, geologically speaking, and in reference to the date of the first age of stone, these records of the valley of the Nile may be called extremely modern. Wherever excavations have been made into the Nile mud underlying the foundations of Egyptian cities, as, for example, sixty feet below the peristyle of the obelisk of Heliopolis, and generally in the alluvial plains of the Nile, the bones met with belong to living species of quadrupeds, such as the camel, dromedary, dog, ox, and pig, without, as yet, the association in any single instance of the teeth or bone of a lost species. In like manner in all the countries bordering the Medi* Lewis, Historical Survey, &c., p. 351. 384 EARLY EGYPTIAN DATES. CHAP. XIX. terranean, whether in Algeria, Spain, the south of France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, or the islands of the Mediterranean generally, wherever the bones of extinct mammalia, such as the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, have been found, it is not in the modern deltas of rivers or in the alluvial plains, now overflowed when the waters are high, that such fossil remains present themselves, but in situations corresponding to the ancient gravels of the valley of the Somme, in which the bones of the mammoth and the oldest type of flint implements occur. If therefore, the Egyptian monarch Necho, who sent an expedition to circumnavigate Africa, or some earlier king than he, had commanded his admiral to sail past the Pillars of Hercules, and then northwards as far as he could penetrate, leaving, before he set out on his return, some monument to commemorate to after ages the Ultima Thule of his expedition at the most northern point reached by him, and if we had now discovered an obelisk of granite left by him at that era on the platform of St. Acheul, near Amiens, its foundations might well have occupied the precise position which the Gallo-Roman tombs now hold, as shown in fig. 21 a (p. 138). If they had dug deep enough to exhume some teeth of the elephant, they might easily have seen that they differed from the teeth of their African species, and were distinct, like many other accompanying bones, from the animals then inhabiting the valley of the Somme, or that of the Nile. The flint implements would then have lain buried in the old gravel as now, and the only geological distinction between those times and ours would be a diminished thickness of peat bordering the Somme, the upper layers of which would not contain, as now, Roman antiquities, and some beds below, in which hatchets called Celts now occur, would have been wanting; but, with this slight exception, the valley would have worn the same aspect as at the era when the Romans subdued Gaul. CHAP. XX. ANTIQUITY OF EXISTING RACES OF MANKIND. CHAPTER XX. THEORIES OF PROGRESSION AND TRANSMUTATION. 385 - ANTIQUITY AND PERSISTENCY IN CHARACTER OF THE EXISTING RACES WHEN HEN speaking in a former work of the distinct races of mankind,* I remarked that, if all the leading varieties of the human family sprang originally from a single pair,' (a doctrine, to which then, as now, I could see no valid objection,) a much greater lapse of time was required for the slow and gradual formation of such races as the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro, than was embraced in any of the popular systems of chronology.' In confirmation of the high antiquity of two of these, I referred to pictures on the walls of ancient temples in Egypt, in which, a thousand years or more before the Christian era, * Principles of Geology, 7th ed., p. 637, 1847; see also 9th ed., p. 660. C C |