HISTORY OF ANCIENT NATIONS. 



were employed in public works, such as the 

 Pyramids. In the construction of these works, 

 no degree of labour for any length of time seems 

 to have intimidated the Egyptians. The huge 

 blocks of stone, sometimes weighing 1000 tons 

 each, were dragged for hundreds of miles on 

 sledges, and their transport, perhaps, did not 

 occupy less time than a year ; in one case which 

 is known, 2000 men were employed three years in 

 bringing a single stone from a quarry to the 

 building in which it was to be placed. Usually, 

 the sledges were drawn by men yoked in rows to 

 separate ropes, all pulling at a ring fixed to the 

 block. See INLAND CONVEYANCE. Where it 

 was possible, the blocks were brought from the 

 quarries on flat-bottomed boats on the Nile, But 

 the transport of these masses was much more 

 easily accomplished than the placing of them in 

 elevated situations in the buildings. They were 

 raised by the power of levers and inclined planes 

 at immense trouble and cost. The waste of 

 human life in these gigantic works must have been 

 enormous. About 120,000 men are said to have 

 perished in the digging of a canal, which was left 

 unfinished, between the Red Sea and an arm of 

 the Nile ; and according to Herodotus, the Egyp- 

 tian priests of his day described the building of 

 the Pyramids as a time of extreme exhaustion 

 and hardship to the whole country. 



The religion of the Egyptians seems to have 

 been, in its popular form at least, a mere gross 

 Fetichism, whose principal characteristic was a 

 worship of teeming animal life the bull, the cat, 

 the ibis, the crocodile, &c. ; different animals in 

 different nomes. Whatever profounder meaning 

 lay hid under this gross ceremonial the priest- 

 caste reserved to themselves, as one of the mys- 

 teries the possession of which severed them from 

 the rest of the population. Among these mysteries 

 was the art of writing, which was practised both 

 in the alphabetic and the hieroglyphic form ; the 

 latter being used for special purposes. Some 

 vague notion of the immortality of the soul, resem- 

 bling the Hindu tenet of transmigration, seems to 

 have pervaded the Egyptian religion ; and this 

 belief appears to have lain at the foundation of 

 the Egyptian practice of embalming the dead. 

 The business of embalming was a very dignified 

 one, and was aided by a host of inferior function- 

 aries, who made and painted coffins and other 

 articles which were required. The bodies of the 

 poorer classes were merely dried with salt or natron, 

 and wrapped up in coarse cloths, and deposited in 

 the catacombs. The bodies of the rich and great 

 underwent the most complicated operations, being 

 wrapped in bandages dipped in balsam, and labo- 

 riously adorned with all kinds of ornaments. Thus 

 prepared, they were placed in highly decorated 

 cases or coffins, and then consigned to sarcophagi 

 in the catacombs or pyramids. Bodies so pre- 

 pared have been called mummies, either from the 

 Arabian word momta, or the Coptic mum, sig- 

 nifying bitumen or gum-resin. 



Although the 'manners and customs' of the 

 early Egyptians have, in recent times, been dis- 

 interred, and set vividly before us in the sculp- 

 tures, paintings, and embalmed monuments pre- 

 served in their tombs (see following wood-cut), 

 we know little of the details of their history, 

 properly so called, anterior to the time when the 

 country was thrown open to the Greeks. Herod- 



otus and Manetho, indeed, have given us retro- 

 spect.ve lists of the Egyptian kings, extending 

 back into the primitive gloom of the world ; but 

 portions of these lists are evidently constructed 

 backwards on mythical principles. Thus Ma- 

 netho, preserving, doubtless, the traditions of the 

 sacerdotal Egyptian caste to which he is supposed 

 to have belonged, carries back the imagination 

 as far as 30,000 years before the birth of Christ 

 From this date, till 5702 B.C. great divine person- 

 ages ruled in Egypt ; then (5702 B.C. or, accord- 

 ing to others, 3553 B.C.) it came into the posses- 

 sion of human kings, the first of whom was Menes. 

 From the accession of Menes down to the incor- 

 poration of Egypt with the Persian empire (525 



B.C.), Herodotus assigns 330 kings, or, as they are 

 called in Scripture, Pharaohs, whose names, he 

 informs us, were read to him out of a papyrus 

 manuscript by the Egyptian priests, who pledged 

 themselves to its accuracy ; and Manetho reckons 

 up twenty-six dynasties, some of them native and 

 others foreign, which divided the long period into 

 portions of different lengths. The earlier of these 

 dynasties were for long looked upon as purely 

 imaginary ; but the names of many of the alleged 

 Pharaohs from the fourth dynasty (3000 B.C.) 

 downwards, have been recently identified with 

 names actually existing, in hieroglyphics, on monu- 

 ments believed to be as old as the times they 

 refer to. Thus, Manetho ascribes the building of 

 the greatest pyramid to Souphis (the Cheops of 

 Herodotus), of the fourth dynasty ; and in the 

 interior has been found a royal name which 

 scholars agree in reading Shufu. Between 2700 

 and 2000 B.C. occurred the invasion of the Hyksos, 

 or ' Shepherd-kings/ a conquering people from 

 the east, probably of Arabian or Phoenician 

 lineage. It was in one of the three dynasties of 

 these Shepherd-kings the fifteenth in Manetho's 

 list that Abraham is supposed to have visited 

 Egypt (1920 B.C.), and they were still reigning 

 when Jacob and his sons settled in the country 

 (1706). At length they were expelled by a native 

 dynasty of Thebans, which ranks as the eight- 

 eenth, and the head of which is supposed to have 

 been the Pharaoh 'who knew not Joseph.' The 

 exodus of the Israelites from Egypt is believed to 

 have taken place 1491 B.c. under the reign of the 

 Pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, named Thoth- 

 mes III. the Pharaoh whose heart was hardened, 

 and who was drowned in the Red Sea. This 

 Theban dynasty produced many able sovereigns ; 

 and of almost all of them records have been dis- 

 covered on existing monuments. One of them, 



