XII.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 477 



North Africa since pleistocene man wandered from Indo- Malaysia 

 into that region. 



It might seem therefore that the question of Egyptian origins 

 was settled by the mere statement of the case, and 



... Origins. 



that there could be no hesitation in saying that the 

 Egyptian Hamites were evolved on Egyptian soil, consequently 

 are the true autochthones in the Nile valley. Yet there is no 

 ethnological question more hotly discussed than this of Egyptian 

 origins and culture, for the two seem inseparable. There are 

 broadly speaking two schools : the African, whose fundamental 

 views are above briefly set forth, and the Asiatic, which brings 

 the Egyptians with all their works from the neighbouring con- 

 tinent. But, seeing that the Egyptians are now admitted to be 

 Hamites, that there are no Hamites to speak of (let it be frankly 

 said, none at all) in Asia 1 , and that they have for untold ages 

 occupied many millions of square miles in Africa, the more 

 moderate members of the Asiatic school now allow that, not the 

 people themselves, but their culture only came from western Asia 

 (Mesopotamia). If so, this culture would of course have its roots 

 in the delta, which is first reached by the Isthmus of Suez from 

 Asia, and spread thence, say, from Memphis up the Nile to 

 Thebes and Upper Egypt, and that is the assumption. But at 



1 The Kushite ghost should have been laid after Sir R. Burton wrote that 

 to postulate a Kushite immigration to account for the Caucasian type and the 

 Aryan 'miscegenation' in the races and languages of Egypt, was "one of 

 the wildest theories ever propounded by mortal man." The Egyptologist of 

 the Asiatic school, who holds, despite Herodotus, that art had no infancy in 

 Egypt, and has a personal aversion to a prehistoric Stone Age (which he denies 

 a priori), "begins by inventing a people settled somewhere near India. 

 Having passed through the preliminary stages and reached the 'apogee of 

 its civilization,' this people emigrates bodily westward, leaving no trace of 

 itself in the old home, no signs of its exodus, no notice in history. It reaches 

 Egypt, and falls to making pyramids and other masterpieces of the highest art, 

 which afterwards begin to decay and become Egyptian. Marvellous to relate, 

 this is the belief of sound and ripe scholars ; ' (Stones and Bones from Egypt 

 and Midian, in Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Nov. 1878, p. 296). The case is per- 

 fectly analogous to that of the American "Asiatics," who in the same wild way 

 refuse an indigenous culture to the New World, and bring everything bodily 

 from the Old. 



