TRACES OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF EGYPT.

174 which enabled them to construct these systems by the help of some other language, at any rate. How came they then to lose this language? We leave to those who deny or lightly esteem the revelation of God, the suggestion of any theory they can devise whereby to answer the question. Those who reason rightly upon it, who follow the process of close induction by which the mode of reading hieroglyphics was discovered, will scarcely fail to perceive the conclusive and satisfactory nature of the answer which is afforded by that revelation. The language of the first settlers in Egypt had been miraculously confounded, and in that melancholy condition they had to frame for themselves a new language and system of writing.

CHAPTER IX.

THE MONUMENTAL HISTORY OF EGYPT.

PART I.

THUS far the absolute necessity of the inspired history to explain and reconcile the facts which our examination of the antiquities of Egypt has elicited, is sufficiently apparent. The monumental traces of the first migration of the children of Mizraim into Egypt also fully coincide with the account which is recorded in the Bible.

It is much to be regretted that upon the point which first requires attention, a conclusion entirely opposed to this account has been, nevertheless, very hastily admitted by certain authors, whose laborious researches in this intricate subject are otherwise well entitled to our praises. Some of them belong to a school of which it is not too much to say that their credulity as to every thing in the Greek authors is only equalled by their incredulity as to the Bible.

With them that which is narrated by Herodotus, or Diodorus Siculus, is a fact, unless the monuments prove it to be a falsehood; while that which has no authority but the Bible is deemed untrue, and unworthy of notice, unless the monuments, or the historians, or both, prove it to be a fact. So that on no other authority than that of Diodorus, it is. assumed and reasoned upon as an admitted fact, that

Egypt was first peopled from Ethiopia Proper; that is, from the countries to the south of it: the circumstance that the land of Cush to the east of it was also named Ethiopia, and that the confusion of the two is not uncommon in the Greek writers, being entirely disregarded. It is, however, still more extraordinary, that these authors should also disregard the monumental facts which have been brought to light by their own researches, and which flatly contradict their strange assumption. If the testimony of the monuments is to be admitted, Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia, cannot have been the cradle of Thebes; and the powerful nation of Ethiopians, living under a civil and religious system identical with that of Egypt long before this latter country was inhabited, and afterwards colonizing it, must be a fable for no very early monuments exist in Ethiopia; the most ancient of them having been erected by monarchs, of the 18th dynasty of the kings of Egypt, who reigned long after it had become a settled kingdom. The inscriptions on them also plainly intimate that Ethiopia was then a province or dependency of Egypt; and that it continued to be so apparently until the reign of Psammetichus, about 500 B. C. This is all the support that the monuments of Ethiopia afford to this assumption. If we consider those of Egypt, also, with a view to the same subject, the first fact that occurs to us is equally opposed to it. The pyramids which, by the unanimous tradition of the Egyptian priests, as recorded by all the Greek authors, were the oldest of their monuments, are not in the neighbourhood of Thebes, but of Memphis, just on the crown of the Delta, on the east bank of the Nile; that is, on the first spot of habitable ground at which travellers migrating

across the isthmus of Suez would arrive when the Delta was a marsh.

The history of Egypt is by no means exempt from the chronological difficulties that beset the early records of all other nations. As this subject is still under investigation, and as new facts are continually produced respecting it, we content ourselves with a general indication of the various sources, both in the ancient authors, and on the existing monuments, whence the materials for a more accurate arrangement have been derived, and the very satisfactory results which have already been obtained from the examination of them.

Two ancient authorities have given lists of the dynasties or races of the kings of Egypt. One list is preserved by George Syncellus, a chronological writer of the eighth century, under the name of the Old Chronicle: the other is the work of Manetho, a priest of Sebennytus, a city of Egypt, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about 180 B. C. By the command of that monarch, he translated into Greek the annals of the ancient kings his predecessors as they then existed on the walls of temples and other monumental records of their actions. His work was divided into three volumes, or parts. It is now lost; but extracts from it have been preserved in the writings of Josephus and Eusebius.

Several extracts from the history of Egypt are also preserved by Herodotus and Diodorus: but as they have merely noted the circumstances which they conceived to be interesting, not even following the chronological order of the succession, the facts they have recorded can only be made available as history by the help of the lists of Manetho. Many extraordinary and unexpected confirmations of the

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correctness, both of the lists of Manetho, and of the records preserved by the Greek authors, have been discovered by the recent researches among the monuments of Egyptian antiquity.

1. The tablet of Abydos. This is a series of royal rings, inclosing the inaugural titles of the names of many of the ancient kings of Egypt, in the order of their succession. It was engraved on the wall of one of the vestibules of the temple, which has been excavated in the mountain to the north of the city of Abydos. Three rows of these rings still remain; the lowest consists of nine repetitions of the two rings which contain the name and titles of the Pharaoh who executed this work, Ramses, the great Sesostris. The middle row contains the name of his brother, whom he succeeded; and the inaugural titles of sixteen of his predecessors on the throne of Egypt. The complete names of all of them occur on other monuments, and by arranging them together in the order of the table of Abydos, they agree admirably with those of the predecessors of Sesostris, given in the lists of Manetho. The upper line contains the names of still earlier monarchs, as to whom also some important facts have recently been discovered.

It gives us sincere pleasure to be able to state that this valuable historical document has been removed from the ruinous wall on which it was first discovered, and is now in the British Museum: from thence the engraving on p. 179 has been copied.*

2. Similar lists, though not so extensive, have also been

* In its present state, it is more mutilated than when first discovered, so that the early copies contain rings which are now wanting.