Chapter XII: Concluding Summary of Egyptian History

In thus following the course of Egyptian history as outlined in the pages of such ancient authorities as Herodotus, Manetho, and Diodorus, and such recent students as Brugsch Pasha, Mariette Pasha, and Professors Erman, Maspero, and Petrie, we have been enabled to gain a tolerably clear picture of the life of the most celebrated nation of antiquity.

There is one feature of that life, however, which this story leaves quite in the dark; namely, its beginnings. The ancients, beyond vaguely hinting at an Ethiopian origin of the Egyptians, confessed themselves in the main totally ignorant of the subject. And it must be confessed that the patient researches of modern workers have not sufficed fully to lift the veil of this ignorance. Theories have been propounded, to be sure. It was broadly suggested by Heeren that one might probably look to India as the original cradle of the Egyptian race. Hebrew scholars, however, naturally were disposed to find that cradle in Mesopotamia, and some later archæologists, among them so great an authority as Maspero, believe that the real beginnings of Egyptian history should be traced to equatorial Africa. But there are no sure data at hand to enable one to judge with any degree of certainty as to which of these hypotheses, if any one of them, is true.

The whole point of view of modern thought regarding this subject has been strangely shifted during the last half century. Up to that time it was the firm conviction of the greater number of scholars that, in dealing with the races of antiquity, we had but to cover a period of some four thousand years before the Christian era. Any hypothesis that could hope to gain credence in that day must be consistent with this supposition. But the anthropologists of the past two generations have quite dispelled that long current illusion, and we now think of the history of man as stretching back tens, or perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years into the past.

Applying a common-sense view to the history of ancient nations from this modified standpoint, it becomes at once apparent how very easy it may be to follow up false clews and arrive at false conclusions. Let us suppose, for example, that, as Heeren believed and as some more modern investigators have contended, the skulls of the Egyptians and those of the Indian races of antiquity, as preserved in the tombs of the respective countries, bear a close resemblance to one another. What, after all, does this prove? Presumably it implies that these two widely separated nations have perhaps had a common origin. But it might mean that the Egyptians had one day been emigrants from India, or conversely, that the Indians had migrated from Egypt, or yet again, that the forbears of both nations had, at a remoter epoch, occupied some other region, perhaps in an utterly different part of the globe from either India or Egypt. And even such a conclusion as this would have to be accepted with a large element of doubt. For, up to the present, it must freely be admitted that the studies of the anthropologists have by no means fixed the physical characters of the different races with sufficient clearness to enable us to predicate actual unity of race or unity of origin from a seeming similarity of skulls alone, or even through more comprehensive comparison of physical traits, were these available.

More than this, any such comparison as that which attempts to link the Egyptians with Indians or Hebrews or Ethiopians is, after all, only a narrow view of the subject extending over a comparatively limited period of time. If it were shown that the first members of that race which came to be known as the Egyptians came to the valley of the Nile from India or Mesopotamia or Ethiopia, the fact would have undoubted historic interest, but it would after all only take us one step farther back along the course of the evolution of that ancient civilisation, and the question would still remain an open one as to what was the real cradle of the race. For in the modern view, as has just been said, when one speaks of the evolution of civilisation, his mind must grasp the idea of tens of thousands of years, during which, the most casual reflection will make it clear, races may have migrated this way and that, northward, eastward, westward, southward, and may have reversed their course of migration over and over again, leaving few traces through which the historian of a later time could follow them in imagination.

There is indeed a tradition, which Diodorus has preserved to us, that the Egyptian of an early day made a great conquering tour through Greece and all of western Asia to India, and back again to the region of the Nile. We have already pointed out that such vague traditions as this probably represent a racial memory of actual historical events, distorted of course as to all details. But all this, it must be repeated over and over again, is only conjecture.

Anthropology is the newest of sciences, and it will scarcely in our day attain a knowledge that will enable the historian to solve the problem of the origin of any one of the remoter races of antiquity. The history of such relatively newer races as the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans may indeed be, at least conjecturally, made out at no distant day; but we must expect that the probably far remoter civilisation of China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt will long continue to baffle the investigator.

But even present knowledge suffices to change utterly the point of view with which the modern historian regards these so-called ancient races. So long as one regarded the history of the world as comprising only some four thousand years before the Christian era, it was quite clear that in speaking of the earliest historical ages of Egypt, one was dealing with time that might properly be called the childhood of our race. One came to speak trippingly of the “Dawn of Civilisation” as illustrated by the events of the time of the Pyramid Builders. But now all that has changed, and it has become clear that we know nothing of the dawn of civilisation.

The earliest records of Egypt that have come down to us, as illustrated, for example, in the document known as the Prisse papyrus, which is sometimes spoken of as the oldest book in the world, show that, at a time which probably preceded the building of the Pyramids, namely, as early as the IInd Dynasty, the Egyptians regarded the civilisation of their day as already past its prime. Men of that time were already tiring of the degenerate epoch in which they lived, and looking back to the good old days when, as it seemed to them, the Egyptians were a great people. As Dr. Taylor has remarked, it was a curious irony of fate that should have preserved to us such thoughts as these in the oldest written document which has been spared for our inspection. But the moral is quite clear. Professor Mahaffy has well outlined it when he says that one is perhaps justified in feeling that, in point of fact, the old Egyptian who traced the words of the Prisse papyrus was right, and that that ancient time was really not the spring-time of humanity, but the veritable autumn of civilisation. Such a thought as this would have been incomprehensible to the student of any generation before our own, but the long vistas of time that have been opened up to our eyes through the investigations of the last half century make such a strange estimate seem more than plausible. For, after all, what is the sweep of, say, six or eight thousand years which is opened to us as the truly historic period of man’s existence, compared to the tens of thousands of years that preceded?

Almost at the beginning of Egyptian history, as we have seen, a race was in the field which constructed the most gigantic monuments that human ingenuity has even yet conceived. Surely it was no dawn of civilisation that could achieve such works as these. In the broadest view, then, there is no such thing as ancient history open to the observation of the modern historian. All history that we can know from the time of the Pyramid Builders to our own day is in this view properly but recent history, and, as has just been suggested, perhaps only the history of an oscillating decline through the period of the senility of our race. But, however fascinating such a view as this may be, for practical purposes one must look a little more narrowly. Still, the broad view which regards the ancient Egyptian as a brother in blood to the modern European will be the surest ground on which to build a record of universal history.

Professor Mahaffy has pointed out, in the same connection just quoted, that, not merely in practical civilisation, but in the appreciation of all the moral bearings of an advanced life, the Egyptian of two or three, or perhaps five, thousand years before the Christian era, was on a plane differing in no essential from the plane of modern Christendom; and this thought is the one that should perhaps be the most prominently borne in mind by any one who will gain the truest lesson from the study of the sweep of universal history.

So long as the ancient Egyptian is regarded as playing the part of a weird strange member of a civilisation utterly alien to the modern, so long the modern is shut out from the best lessons of that ancient history. But when, on the other hand, one considers the ancient resident of the valley of the Nile as a human being, with desires, emotions, and aspirations almost precisely like our own; a man struggling to solve the same problems of practical socialism that we are struggling for to-day,--then, and then only, can the lessons of ancient Egyptian history be brought home to us in their true meaning and with their true significance. And clearest of all will this significance be, perhaps, if we constantly bear in mind the possibility that the whole sweep of Egyptian history, during the three or four thousand years that separated the Pyramid Builders from the contemporaries of Alexander, was a time of national decay--a dark age, if you will, in Egyptian history.

It is probably because such a view as this is justified that the current conception has arisen which regards the Egyptian as a mystic, a religion-haunted person; for, in point of fact, it is true that, during the greater part of the period of this Egyptian history, their race was a priest-ridden one. To turn once more to a phrase of Professor Mahaffy’s, “The priesthood of Egypt perhaps embalmed the civilisation of the Nile, but they surely killed it.” Yet there must have been a time when the nation was young and aspiring, when its mixed population--no matter whence derived--had that vigour which is only known to mixed races. There were giants in these days, not in stature, but in ideas; the great Pyramids, the mighty Sphinx, attest their existence. Then there came that development of culture, accompanied of course by a degree of weakened virility, which made the great literature of the XIIth Dynasty possible, and then priestcraft throttled the nation with a grip which, despite severe and heroic struggles, was never altogether shaken off. Just what it means when the clammy hand of a fixed theology clutches at the throat of progressive civilisation, we have a near-at-hand illustration in the European Dark Ages, out of which we, at the beginning of the twentieth century, are only just striving to emerge, after some fourteen or fifteen centuries of combat. Our own experience, then, prepares us well to understand the Egyptian history.

It will doubtless be at least another century, perhaps two or three centuries, before the inhabitants of Christendom can look out upon the world with as rational a view as that which Plato attained in the fifth century B.C., or Cicero in the first, or Marcus Aurelius some two or three centuries later, just as the storm-cloud of Oriental superstition was thickening. So it need not surprise us that Egypt should have suffered in a like manner for a like period.

In the last analysis, then, it would seem that it is the likeness of Egyptian history to our own history, rather than its mysterious differences, that gives it the greatest charm. The differences are the surface details; the resemblances are as deep as human nature itself. In obtaining this conviction, we curiously reversed the old estimate of the strange weird people of the Nile, but in so doing we prepare ourselves far better than we otherwise could to grasp the import of universal history.[a]