Human Termination

Historical Standard of Time-Short Date inconsistent with Evolution-Laws of Historical Evidence-History begins with Authentic Records-Records of Egypt oldest-Manetho's Lists-Confirmed by Hieroglyphics-Origin of Writing-The Alphabet-Phonetic Writing-Clue to Hieroglyphics-The Rosetta Stone-Champollion-Principles of Hieroglyphic Writing-Language Coptic-Can be read with certainty-Confirmed by Monuments-Manetho's Date for Menes 5004 b.c.

-Old, Middle, and New Empires-Old Empire, Menes, to end of Sixth Dynasty-Break between Old and Middle Empires-Works of Twelfth Dynasty-Fayoum-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties-Hyksos Conquests-Duration of Hyksos Rule-Their Expulsion and Foundation of New Empire-Conquests in Asia of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties-Wars with Hittites and Assyrians-Persian and Greek Dynasties-Summary of Evidence for Date of Menes-Period prior to Menes-Horsheshu-Sphynx-Stone Age-Neolithic and Pal?olithic Remains-Horner, Haynes, and Pitt-Rivers.

In measuring the dimensions of space we have to start from some fixed standard, such as the foot or yard, taken originally from the experience of our ordinary senses and capable of accurate verification. From this we arrive by successive inductions at the size of the earth, the distance of the sun, moon, and planets, and finally at the parallax of the fixed stars. So in speculations as to the origin and evolution of the human race, history affords the standard from which we start, through the successive stages of prehistoric, neolithic, and pal?olithic man, until we pass into the wider ranges of geological time.

Any error in the original standard becomes magnified indefinitely, whether in space or time, as we extend our researches backwards into remoter regions.

Thus whether the authentic records of history extend only for some 4500 years backwards from the present time to the scriptural date of Noah's flood, as was universally assumed to be the case until quite recently; or whether Egyptian and Chald?an records carry us back for 7000 years, and show us then a dense population, powerful empires, large cities, and generally a highly advanced civilization already existing, makes a wonderful difference in the standpoint from which we view the course of human evolution.

To begin with, a short date necessitates supernatural interferences. It is quite impossible that if man and all animal life were created only about 4000 years b.c., and were then all destroyed save the few pairs saved in Noah's ark, and made a fresh start from a single centre some 1500 years later, there can be any truth in Darwin's theory of evolution. We know for a certainty from the concurrent testimony of all history, and from Egyptian monuments, that the different races of men and animals were in existence 5000 years ago as they are at the present day; and that no fresh creations or marked changes of type have taken place during that period. If then all these types, and all the different races and nations of men, sprung up in the interval of less than 1000 years, which is the longest that can by any possibility be allowed between the Biblical date of the Deluge and the clash of the mighty monarchies of Assyria and Egypt in Palestine, the date of which is proved both by the Bible and by profane historians, it is obviously impossible that such a state of things could have been brought about by natural causes.

But if authentic historical records carry us back not for 3000 or 4000, but for 6000 or 7000 years, and then show no trace of a beginning, the case is altered, and we may assume an almost unlimited duration of time, through historical, prehistoric, neolithic, and pal?olithic ages, during which evolution may have operated. It is of the first importance therefore to inquire what these records really teach in the light of modern research, and what is the evidence for the longer dates which are now generally accepted.

Furnished with such a measuring-rod it becomes easier to attempt to bring into some sort of co-ordination the vast mass of facts which have been accumulated in recent years as to prehistoric, neolithic, and pal?olithic man; and the glimpses of light respecting the origin, antiquity, and early history of the human race, which have come in from other sciences such as astronomy, geology, zoology, and philology.

To do this exhaustively would be an encyclop?dic task which I do not pretend to accomplish, but I am not without hope that the following chapters, connected as they are by the one leading idea of tracing human origins backward to their source, may assist inquiry, and create an interest in this most interesting of all questions, especially among the young who are striving after knowledge, and the millions who, not having the time and opportunity for reading technical works, feel a desire to keep themselves abreast of modern thought and of the advanced culture of the close of the nineteenth century.

Before examining these records in detail it is well to begin with the general laws upon which historical evidence is based. History begins with writings. All experience shows that what may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, consists mainly of hymns and portions of ritual, such as the Vedas of the Hindoos; and to a certain extent of heroic poems and ballads in which the historical element is so overlaid by mythology and poetry, that it is impossible to discriminate between fact and fancy. Thus the legend of Hercules is evidently in the main a solar myth, and his twelve labours are related to the signs of the zodiac, but it is possible that there may have been a real Hercules, the actual or eponymic ancestor of the tribe of Heraclides. So, at a later period, the descent of the Romans from the pious ?neas, and of the Britons from another Trojan hero Brute, are obviously fabulous; and at a still more recent date, our own Arthurian legends are evidently a medi?val romance, though it is possible that there may have been a chief of that name of the Christianized Romano-Britons, who opposed a gallant resistance to the flood of Saxon invasion.

But to make real history we require something very different; concurrent and uninterrupted testimony of known historians; absence of impossible and obviously fabulous dates and events; and, above all, contemporary records, written or engraved on tombs, temples, and monuments, or preserved in papyri or clay cylinders.

Another remark is, that these authentic records of early history only begin to appear when civilization is so far advanced as to have established powerful dynasties and priestly organizations. The history of a nation is at first the history of its kings, and its records are enumerations of their genealogies, successive reigns, foundation or repair of temples, great industrial works, and warlike exploits. These are made and preserved by special castes of priestly colleges and learned scribes, and they are to a great extent precise in date and accurate in fact. Before the establishment of such historical dynasties we have nothing but legends and traditions, which are vague and mythical, the mythological element rapidly predominating as we go backwards in time, until we soon arrive at reigns of gods, and lives of thousands of years. But as we approach the period of historical dynasties the mythological element diminishes, and we pass from gods reigning 10,000 years, and patriarchs living to 900, to later patriarchs living 150 or 200 years, and finally to mortal men, living, and kings reigning, to natural ages.

In fact, with the first appearance of authentic records the supernatural disappears, and the average duration of lives, reigns, and dynasties, and the general course of events, are much the same as at present, and fully confirm, the statement of the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, that during the long succession of ages of the 345 high priests of Heliopolis, whose statues they showed him in the great temple of the sun, there had been no change in the length of human life or in the course of nature, and each one of the 345 had been a piromis, or mortal man, the son of a piromis. The first question is how far back these authentic historical records can be traced, and Egypt affords the first answer.

The first step in the inquiry as to Egyptian antiquity is afforded by the history of Manetho. Ptolemy Philadelphus, whose reign began 284 b.c., was an enlightened king. He founded the great Alexandrian library, and was specially curious in collecting everything which bore on the early history of his own and other countries. With this view he had the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, made of the sacred books of the Hebrews, and he commissioned Manetho to compile a history of Egypt from the earliest times, from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information. Manetho was eminently qualified for such a task, being a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebennytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples.

The history of Manetho is unfortunately lost, being probably the greatest loss the world has sustained by the burning of the Alexandrian library, but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus and Syncellus, of whom Eusebius and Africanus profess to give Manetho's lists and dates of dynasties and kings from the first King Menes down to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 b.c. With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian fathers, these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies, and in several instances they have obviously been tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament. But enough remains to show that Manetho's lists comprised thirty-one dynasties, and about 370 kings, whose successive reigns extended over a period of about 5500 years, from the accession of Menes to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 b.c., making the date of the first historical king who united Upper and Lower Egypt, about 5800 b.c. There may be some doubt as to the precise dates, for the lists, of Manetho have obviously been tampered with to some extent by the Christian fathers who quoted them, but there can be no doubt that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 b.c.

The only other historical information as to the history of Ancient Egypt was gleaned from references to it in the extant works of Josephus and of Greek authors, especially Homer, Herodotus, and Diodorus Siculus. Josephus, in his Antiquity of the Jews, quotes passages from Manetho, but they only extend to the period of the Hyksos invasion, the Captivity of the Jews, and the Exodus, which are all comparatively recent events in Manetho's annals. Homer's account of hundred-gated Thebes does not carry us back beyond the echo which had reached Ionian Greece of the splendours of the nineteenth dynasty. Herodotus visited Egypt about 450 b.c., and wrote a description of it from what he saw and heard on the spot. It contains a good deal of valuable information, for he was a shrewd observer. But he was credulous, and not very critical in distinguishing between fact and fable, and it is evident that his sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides, and even the more authentic information is so disconnected and mixed with fable, that it can hardly be accepted as material for history. As far as it goes, however, it tends to confirm Manetho, as, for instance, in giving the names correctly of the kings who built the three great pyramids, and in saying that he saw the statues of 342 successive high priests of the great Temple of Heliopolis, which correspond very well with Manetho's lists of 370 kings.

Diodorus gives us very much the same narratives as those of Herodotus; and, on the whole, we had to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history.

Manetho's dates, however, were so inconsistent with preconceived ideas based on the chronology of the Bible, that they were universally thought to be fabulous. They were believed either to represent the exaggerations of Egyptian priests desirous of magnifying the antiquity of their country, or, if historical, to give in succession the names of a number of kings and dynasties who had really reigned simultaneously in different provinces. So stood the question until the discovery of reading hieroglyphics enabled us to test the accuracy of Manetho's lists by the light of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. This discovery is of such supreme importance that it may be well to begin at the beginning, and lay a solid foundation by showing how it was made, and the demonstration on which it rests.

Reading presupposes writing, as writing presupposes speech. Ideas are conveyed from one mind to another in speech through the ear, in writing through the eye. The origin of the latter method is doubtless to be found in picture-writing. The pal?olithic savage who drew a mammoth with the point of a flint on a piece of ivory, was attempting to write, in his rude way, a record of some memorable chase. And the accounts of the old Empires of Mexico and Peru at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that a considerable amount of civilization can be attained and information conveyed by this primitive method. But for the purpose of historical record more is required. It is essential to have a system of signs and symbols which shall be generally understood, and by which knowledge shall be handed down unchanged to successive generations. All experience shows that before knowledge is thus fixed and recorded, anything that may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, fades off almost immediately into myth, and leaves no certain record of time, place, and circumstance. A few religious hymns and prayers like those of the Vedas, a few heroic ballads like those of Homer, a few genealogies like those of Agamemnon or Abraham, may be thus preserved, but nothing definite or accurate in the way of fact and date. History, therefore, begins with writing, and writing begins with the invention of fixed signs to represent words. A system of writing is possible, like the Chinese, in which each separate word has its own separate sign, but this is extremely cumbrous, and quite unintelligible to those who have not got a living key to explain the meaning of each symbol. It is calculated that an educated Chinese has to learn by heart the meaning of some 15,000 separate signs before he can read and write correctly. We have a trace of this ideographic system in our own language, as where arbitrary signs such as 1, 2, 3, represent not the sounds of one, two, and three, but the ideas conveyed by them. But for all practical purposes, intelligible writing has to be phonetic, that is, representing spoken words, not by the ideas they convey, but by the sounds of which they are composed. In other words there must be an Alphabet.

The alphabet is the first lesson of childhood, and it seems such a simple thing that we are apt to forget that it is one of the most important and original inventions of the human intellect. Some prehistoric genius, musing on the meaning of spoken words, has seen that they might all be analyzed into a few simple sounds. To make this more easily intelligible, I will suppose the illustrations to be taken from our own language. "Dog" and "dig" express very different ideas; but a little reflection will show that the primary sounds made by the tongue, teeth, and palate, viz. 'd' and 'g,' are the same in each, and that they differ only by a slight variation in the soft breathing or vowel, which connects them and renders them vocal. The next step would be to see that such words as "good" or "God," consisted of the same root-sounds, only transposed and connected with a slight vowel difference. Pursuing the analysis, it would finally be discovered that the many thousand words of spoken language could all be resolved into a very small number of radical sounds, each of which might be represented and suggested to the mind through the eye instead of the ear by some conventional sign or symbol. Here is the alphabet, and here the art of writing.

This great achievement of the human intellect appears to have been made in prehistoric times; and where not obviously imported from a foreign source, as in the Ph?nician alphabet from the Egyptian and the Greek from the Ph?nician, it is attributed to some god, that is, to an unknown antiquity.

Thus in Egypt, Thoth the Second, known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus, a fabulous demi-god of the period succeeding the reign of the great gods, is said to have invented the alphabet and the art of writing. The analysis of primary sounds varies a little in different times and countries in order to suit peculiarities in the pronunciation of different races and convenience in writing; but about sixteen primitive sounds, which is the number of the letters of the first alphabet brought by Cadmus to Greece, are always its basis. In our own alphabet it is easy to see that it is not formed on strictly scientific principles, some of the letters being redundant. Thus the soft sound of 'c' is expressed by 's,' and the hard sound by 'k'; and 'x' is an abbreviation of three other letters, 'eks.' Some letters also express sounds which run so closely into one another that in some alphabets they are not distinguished, as 'f' and 'v,' 'd' and 't', 'l' and 'r'; while some races have guttural and other sounds, such as 'kh' and 'sj,' which occur so frequently as to require separate signs, while they baffle the vocal organs of other races, and in some cases syllables which frequently occur, instead of being spelt out alphabetically, are represented by single signs. But these are mere details, the question substantially is this-if a collection of unknown signs is phonetic, and we can get any clue to its alphabet, it can be read; if not it must remain a sealed book.

To apply this to hieroglyphics; it had been long known that the monuments of ancient Egypt were carved with mysterious figures, representing commonly birds, animals, and other natural objects, but all clue to their meaning had been lost. It seemed more natural to suppose that they were ideographic; that a lion for instance represented a real lion, or some quality associated with him, such as fierceness, valour, and kingly aspect, rather than that his picture stood simply for our letter 'l.' The long-desired clue was afforded by the famous Rosetta stone. This is a mutilated block of black basalt, which was discovered in 1799 by an engineer officer of the French expedition, in digging the foundations of a fort near Rosetta. It was captured, with other trophies, by the British army, when the French were driven out of Egypt, and is now lodged at the British Museum. It bears on it three inscriptions, one in hieroglyphics, the second in the demotic Egyptian character employed for popular use, and the third in Greek. The Greek can of course be read, and it is an inscription commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy Epiphanes and his Queen Arsinoe, in the year 196 b.c. It was an obvious conjecture that the two Egyptian inscriptions were to the same effect, and that the Greek was a literal translation of this. To turn this conjecture, however, into a demonstration, a great deal of ingenuity and patient research were required. The principle upon which all interpretation of unknown signs rests may be most easily understood by taking an illustration from our own language. The first step in the problem is to know whether these unknown signs are ideographic or phonetic. Thus if we have two groups of signs, one of which we have reason to know stands for "Ptolemy" and the other for "Cleopatra," if they are phonetic, the first sign in Ptolemy will correspond with the fifth in Cleopatra; the second with the seventh, the third with the fourth, the fourth with the second, and the fifth with the third; and we shall have established five letters of the unknown alphabet, 'p, t, o, l,' and 'e.' Other names will give other letters, as if we know "Arsinoe," its comparison with "Cleopatra" will give 'a' and 'r,' and confirm the former induction as to 'o' and 'e.'

And it will be extremely probable that the two last signs in Ptolemy represent 'm' and 'y'; the first in Cleopatra 'c'; and the third, fourth, and fifth in Arsinoe, 's, i,' and 'n.' Suppose now that we find in an inscription on an ancient temple at Thebes, a name which begins with our known sign for 'r,' followed by our known 'a,' then by our conjectural 'm,' then by the sign which we find third in Arsinoe, or 's,' then by our known 'e,' and ending with a repetition of 's,' we have no difficulty in reading "Ramses," and identifying it with one of the kings of that name mentioned by Manetho as reigning at Thebes. The identification of letters was facilitated by the custom of inclosing the names of kings in what is called a cartouche or oval.

TABLET OF SNEFURA AT WADY MAGERAH.

(The oldest inscription in the world, probably 6000 years old. The king conquering an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.)

This name reads "Snefura," which is the name of the king of the third dynasty who reigned about 4000 b.c., or before the building of the Great Pyramids, which inscription is the earliest contemporary one of an Egyptian king as yet discovered. It was found at the copper mines of Wady Magerah, in the peninsula of Sinai, and represents the victory of the king over an Arabian or Asiatic enemy.

The first step towards the decipherment of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone was made in 1819 by Dr. Young, who was one of the most ingenious and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, and is also famous as the first discoverer of the undulatory theory of light. But in both cases he merely indicated the right path and laid down the correct principles. The development of his theories was reserved for two Frenchmen; Fresnel in the case of Light, and Champollion in that of Hieroglyphics. The task was one which required immense patience and ingenuity, for the hieroglyphic alphabet turned out to be one of great complexity. Not only were many of the signs not phonetic, but ideographic or determinative; and some of them standing for syllables and not letters; but the letters themselves were not represented, as in modern languages, each by a single sign or at most by two signs, as A and a, but by several different signs. The Egyptian alphabet was in fact constructed very much as young children often learn theirs, by-

A was an apple-pie,

B bit it,

C cut it;

with this difference, that several objects, whose names begin with A and other letters, might be used to represent them. Thus some of the hieroglyphic letters had as many as twenty-five different signs or homophones. It is as if we could write for 'a,' the picture either of an apple, or of an ass, archer, arrow, anchor, or any word beginning with 'a.'

However, Champollion with infinite difficulty, and aided by the constant discovery of fresh inscriptions, solved the problem, and succeeded in producing a complete alphabet of hieroglyphics comprising all the various signs, thus enabling us to translate every hieroglyphic sign into its corresponding sound or spoken word.