into the laws which regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies. Nor was it only the learning and mythological doctrines which characterized the brightest periods of Greece and Rome that were borrowed from the Egyptians. On the contrary, we can trace to the same source those more valuable sciences which exercised the talents of the most ancient and renowned among European sages. Pythagoras submitted to study the elements of mathematics in the schools of the priests; while Hecatæus and Herodotus collected the materials of history among the same class of men, who had carefully preserved the knowledge of former generations.

The Greeks, it has been frequently remarked, were the only nation in Europe who had any pretensions to antiquity. But the wisest even among that ambitious people considered themselves as of yesterday compared to the Egyptians. Plato confessed that his countrymen had no memorial of any event beyond a thousand, or at most two thousand years before his own time; whereas, in the days of Moses, the wisdom of Egypt had already become proverbial, and that, too, among the Syrian tribes who bordered upon the original seats of primeval knowledge. Phenicia, which appears to have set the first example of commercial intercourse to the rude colonies on the northern shores of the great sea, proved the medium through which the learning, the laws, and the religion of the Nile were conveyed to the ancestors of those brave and ingenious nations who have since associated an imperishable fame with the memory of Athens and Lacedemon. The names of Cadmus, Cecrops, and Danaus continue to represent those missions or voluntary migrations which, at a remote period, transported from Africa to Europe the treasures of oriental wisdom.

It has long been an object of inquiry among scholars to discover the channel through which civilization, science, and an acquaintance with the liberal arts first reached the valley which is watered by the Nile. Without analyzing the numerous hypotheses which have been successively formed and abandoned, or repeating the various conjectures which have, age after age, amused the ingenuity of the learned, we shall state, at once, as the most probable of the opinions that have been entertained on this subject, that the stream of knowledge accompanied the progress of commerce along

the banks of those great rivers which fall into the Persian Gulf, and thence along the coast of Arabia to the shores of the Red Sea. There is the best reason to believe that those passes or lateral defiles which connect the sea just named with the river of Egypt witnessed the earliest migration of colonists from Asia; who, in the pursuits of commerce, or in search of more fertile lands, or of mountains enriched with gold, found their way into Nubia and Abyssinia. Meantime, it is probable, a similar current set eastward across the mouths of the Indus, carrying arts and institutions of a corresponding character into the countries which stretch from that river to the great peninsula of Hindoostan.

The most obvious confirmation of the opinion now stated may be drawn from the striking resemblance which is known to subsist between the usages, the superstitions, the arts, and the mythology of the ancient inhabitants of Western India, and those of the first settlers on the Upper Nile. The temples of Nubia, for example, exhibit the same features, whether as to the style of architecture or the form of worship which must have been practised in them, with the similar buildings which have been recently examined in the neighbourhood of Bombay. In both cases they consist of vast excavations hewn out in the solid body of a hill or mountain, and are decorated with huge figures which indicate the same powers of nature, or serve as emblems to denote the same qualities in the ruling spirits of the universe.

As a further proof of this hypothesis, we are informed that the sepoys who joined the British army in Egypt under Lord Hutchinson imagined that they found their own temples in the ruins of Dendera, and were greatly exasperated at the natives for their neglect of the ancient deities, whose images are still preserved. So strongly, indeed, were they themselves impressed with this identity, that they proceeded to perform their devotions with all the ceremonies practised in their own land. There is a resemblance, too, in the minor instruments of their superstition, -the lotus, the lingam, and the serpent,-which can hardly be regarded as accidental; but it is, no doubt, in the im-. mense extent, the gigantic plan, the vast conception which appear in all their sacred buildings, that we most readily discover the influence of the same lofty genius, and the en

deavour to accomplish the same mighty object. The excavated temple of Guerfeh Hassan, for instance, reminds every traveller of the cave of Elephanta. The resemblance, indeed, is singularly striking; as are, in fact, all the leading principles of Egyptian architecture to that of the Hindoos. They differ only, it has been observed, in those details of the decorative parts, which trifling points of difference in their religious creeds seem to have suggested to each; but many even of the rites and emblems are precisely the same, especially those of the temples dedicated to Iswara, the Indian Bacchus. In truth, in most respects they are so much alike that the same workman might almost be supposed to have superintended the execution of them in both countries. In India and in Egypt the hardest granite mountains have been cut down into the most striking, if not the most beautiful, fronts of temples adorned with sculpture. In both countries large masses of rock have been excavated into hollow chambers, whose sides are decorated with columns and statues of men and animals carved out of the same stone; and in each are found solid blocks of many hundred tons weight, separated from the adjoining mountain and lifted up into the air. By whom and by what means these wonderful efforts have been accomplished is a mystery sunk too deep in the abyss of time ever to be revealed. To Greece neither country is indebted for any part of its architecture, while she has evidently taken many hints from them. Except at Alexandria and Antinoë, no edifice strictly Grecian appears in Egypt. But we need only compare the monolithic temples of Nubia with those of Mahabulipoor, the excavations of Guerfeh Hassan with those of Elephanta, and the grottoes of Hadjur Silsili, as described by Pococke, with the caverns of Ellora, to be convinced that these sacred monuments of ancient days derived their origin from the same source.*

A resemblance of a corresponding nature has been discovered in the religious usages of the Chinese, compared with those of the Egyptians, particularly in what is called the feast of lamps,-a festival annually observed by the latter people, and graphically described by Herodotus in his

* See Legh's Journey in Egypt and Nubia, and Quarterly Review, vol. xvi. p. 18.

second book. This coincidence in a ceremony so little likely to suggest itself to the minds of men who had no intercourse with one another, led M. de Guignes to conclude that the first inhabitants of China must have been a colony from Egypt. But it is easy to account for all such facts upon a much more obvious as well as a more rational hypothesis. No one can have failed to remark, that among the most ancient nations there is a great similarity in point of tradition, habits, opinions, knowledge, and history. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Hindoos, and the descendants of Abraham held many things in common respecting the creation of the world, the great deluge, the dispersion of the human race, and the first institution of laws and religious worship. Hence we may conclude that the general agreement in these particulars, which we contemplate among the more primitive tribes of mankind, ought to be ascribed to the instruction which they had received while as yet they were but one family, or to the traditionary tenets which had spread with the diverging lines of their generations, though derived originally from the same primeval source.

But by far the most striking point of resemblance between the inhabitants of Egypt and of India is the institution of castes, that singular arrangement which places an insuperable barrier between different orders of men in the same country, and renders their respective honours, toils, and degradation strictly hereditary and permanent. Before the invention of letters, indeed, mankind may be said to have been perpetually in their infancy; whence arose the expedient, founded in a view of the public good, of compelling sons to cultivate the arts which had originated in their family, and to follow the professions whereby their fathers had acquired distinction. In allusion to the four classes into which the natives are divided, the Hindoos maintain that, of their god, Nara-Yana, the mouth became a priest, the arm was made a soldier, the thigh was transformed into a husbandman, and from his feet sprang the servile multitude. The narrative of Herodotus bears evidence to the same institution at an early period among the Egyptians. He indeed divides the fourth caste into several subordinate sections, tradesmen, shepherds, interpreters, and pilots, and thereby presents the appearance of a still more minute

distinction than prevails in the East; but his statement, when compared with that of Diodorus Siculus at a later epoch, removes every shadow of doubt in regard to the identity of the principle from which this political arrangement must have originally proceeded. The last-named historian reduces the orders to three,-priests, including men of rank; the military; and artisans. It is obvious, however, that as husbandmen and labourers are omitted, we must comprehend in the third grade all the classes who practise those arts which are necessary to the subsistence, the comfort, and the ornament of human life.

We may also mention, as in some degree connected with the division of labour now described, that medical science, even before the days of Herodotus, must have been very carefully studied, if we may draw such a conclusion from the fact that, at the period when he wrote, one physician was confined to one disease. There are, he adds, a great many who practise this art; some attend to disorders of the eyes, others to those of the head; some take care of the teeth, others are conversant with all diseases of the intestines; while many attend to the cure of maladies which are less conspicuous.* The historian could not have mentioned a circumstance more characteristic of a people advanced to a high degree of civilization. Of the Babylonians, among whom he also travelled, he relates that they have no professors of medicine, but that they carry their sick into some public square, with the view of getting advice from any one who may happen to have been afflicted with the same illness. The passengers in general, says he, interrogate the sufferer in regard to the nature of his malady, in order that, if any one of them has been attacked with a similar disease himself, or seen its operation on a third person, he may communicate the process by which his own recovery was effected, or by which, in any other instance, he has known the distemper to be removed. No one may pass by a diseased individual in silence, or without inquiry into the symptoms of his complaint.t

But, to return to the main subject now before us, we may take leave to express our conviction that, in proportion as the antiquities of Egypt shall be brought into a clearer

* Herodotus, Euterpe, chap. 84.

Ib. Clio, chap. 197.