Eastern Life. Harriet Martineau

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СКАЧАТЬ of the appearance of the great Valley and of its inhabitants; and details of their lives, customs, manners, history, and opinions. The temptation is strong to present again here, to fill up and illuminate this sketch of the history of old Egypt, some of the material of Herodotus: but his books lie within reach of every hand: and I will use them no further than is necessary to the illustration of what I myself observed in my study of the Monuments.

      Within a hundred years of Herodotus came Plato. It may be questioned whether this visit of Plato to Egypt be not one of the most important events which have occurred in the history of the human mind. – The first thing that strikes us is how much there must have been to be learned in Egypt at this time, since Plato, his friend Eudoxus the astronomer, and Chrysippus the physician, all came – (such men, and from such a distance!) – to study in the schools of Heliopolis. It is related, and was believed in his own age, that Plato lived thirteen years at Heliopolis: and when Strabo was there, 350 years afterwards, he was shown the house where Plato and Eudoxus lived and studied. – Plato had met Socrates, it is believed, at the age of nineteen. After having learned what he could of him, and sustained his death, and been compelled for political reasons to leave Athens, he had gone to Megara, and joined the school of Euclid,²⁷ – also a pupil of Socrates, and one well qualified to cherish what Socrates had sown in the mind of Plato. Though this school was considered one of doubt and denial, its ultimate doctrine was that the Supreme Good is always the same and unchangeable. Thus trained and set thinking, Plato came to Egypt, and sat where Moses had sat, at the feet of the priests, gaining, as Moses had gained, an immortal wisdom from their lips. The methods of learning of these two men, and their acquisitions, differed according to the differing characteristics of their minds. Each took from his teachers what he could best appropriate. Moses was spiritualised to a wonderful degree, considering his position and race; but his surpassing eminence was as a redeeming legislator. Plato had deeply-considered views on political matters; but his surpassing eminence was as a spiritual philosopher. Moses redeemed a race of slaves, made men of them, organized them into a society, and constituted them a nation; while Plato did only theoretical work of that kind – enough to testify to the political philosophy of Egypt, but not to affect the condition of Greece. But Plato taught the Egyptian doctrine (illustrated on the tombs ages before, and, as Proclus declares, derived by Plato from Egypt) of the Immortality of the Soul, and rewards and punishments in an after-life. This was what Plato taught that Moses did not. The great old Egyptian doctrine, extending back, as the Book of Genesis shows us, as far as the Egyptian traditions reached – the great doctrine of a Divine Moral Government, was the soul alike of the practical legislation of Moses and the speculative philosophy of Plato; and this is, as it seems to us now, their great common qualification for bearing such a part as each does in the constitution of the prevalent Christianity. – We shall have to return to this hereafter, when we have seen more of the Egyptian priesthood. Meantime, I may observe that unless there is other evidence that Plato visited the Jews than the amount of Judaism in his writings, it does not seem necessary to suppose such a visit. If he passed thirteen years beside that fountain of wisdom where Moses dwelt till his manhood, it is not extraordinary that they should have great Ideas in common. The wonder would be if they had not. The intellectual might of Moses seems to show that the lapse of intervening ages had not much changed the character of the schools: and the result on the respective minds of the two students may have been much the same as if they had sat side by side in bodily presence, as they ever will do in the reason of all who faithfully contemplate the operation of the Christian religion on the minds of men, from the beginning till now. – That Plato derived and adopted much from his predecessors among Greek philosophers is very evident: and from Pythagoras above all. But many of these Greek philosophers had been trained in Egypt; and especially, as we have seen, Pythagoras, whose abstract ideas would appear to be displayed in a course of illustration on the walls of the Theban tombs, if we did not know that these tombs, with all their pictured mysteries, had been closed many centuries before the philosopher was born.

      During all our review of the old Egyptians, we have not yet considered who they were. Of this there is little to say. It is useless to call them Copts; because all we can say of the Copts is that we must suppose them to be of the same race originally as the old Egyptians: and this throws no light on the derivation of either. Speaking of the origin of the Colchians, Herodotus says that the Egyptians believed them to be descended from followers of Sesostris: and that he thought this probable from (among other reasons) their being black, and having curly hair.²⁸ This blackness was probably only a relative term; for not only do we find the Nubians at this day, with their strong resemblance to the portraits in the tombs, of a dark bronze, but in the tombs there is a clear distinction between the absolute black of negro captives and other dark complexions. On these walls, the colour given to figures generally is a dark red. Where there is a bluish black, or neutral tint on the faces, it is distinctive merely of the priestly caste. The women are sometimes painted yellow; and so are certain strangers, supposed to be Asiatic or European. It is a curious circumstance, related by Sir W. Gell, that in the Tarquinian tombs in Etruria, all the men have the dark red complexion found in the Egyptian tombs. This rather tends to confirm the impression that the red colour may be symbolical, like the blue for the priests, and the yellow for the women. On the whole, it is thought probable that the old Egyptian complexion was of the dark bronze of the Nubians of the present day. – Herodotus says that, except the Libyans, no people were so blessed in point of health and temperament:²⁹ and he repeatedly records traits of their cleanliness, and nicety with regard to food and habits. It does not appear that they were insensible or reconciled to the plague of indigenous insects, as natives usually are, and especially Africans; for he tells us of their sleeping under nets to avoid the mosquitoes.³⁰ Their dress was of linen, with fringes round the legs,³¹ – and over this they wore a cloak of white wool, which must be laid aside before they entered the temples; – or the tomb; for it was not permitted to bury in woollen garments. Every man had but one wife:³² and the women were clearly in that state of freedom which must be supposed to exist where female sovereignty was a matter of course in its turn. Herodotus tells that the women went into the market, and conducted commerce while the men stayed at home to weave cloth.³³ He speaks of them as a serious-minded and most religious people. »They are very religious«, he says, »and surpass all men in the worship they render to the gods.«³⁴ He tells of their great repugnance to the customs of the Greeks and of all other men;³⁵ and everywhere attests the originality of the Egyptians, and their having given truth, knowledge, and customs to others, without having themselves derived from any.

      One of the most interesting inquiries to us is about the language of these people. To form any idea of the labours of modern interpreters of the monuments, we must remember that they have not only to read the perfectly singular cipher of these writers on stone, but to find their very language. Of course, the only hope is in the study of the Coptic: and the Coptic became almost a dead language in the twelfth century of our era, and entirely so in the seventeenth, after having been for ages corrupted by the admixture of foreign terms going on at the same time with the loss of old native ones. Egypt never had any permanent colonies in which her language might be preserved during the ages when one foreign power after another took possession of her valley, and rendered the language of her people compound and corrupt. Without repeating here the long and well-known story of the progress of discovery of the ancient language, it is enough to give the results thus far attained.

      The key, not only to the cipher but to the language, was afforded by the discovery of the same inscription written, as the inscription itself declared, in two languages and three characters – the Greek, the Enchorial or ordinary Egyptian writing, and the old sacred character. The most ancient was found to bear a close relation to the Coptic, as then known: a relation, probably, as has been observed by a recent writer,³⁶ »similar to that which the Latin does to the Italian, the Zend to the modern Persian, or the Sanscrit to many of the vernacular dialects now spoken in India.« This key was applied with wonderful sagacity and ingenuity by Champollion the younger, who proceeded a good deal further than reading the names and titles of the kings and their officers. He ventured upon introducing or deciphering (whichever it may be called) many words not to be found in the later Coptic, except in their supposed roots, nor, of course, anywhere else. The great СКАЧАТЬ