104 THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 



LECTURES. 



Monday, Nov. 17, 1890. Eev. G. T. Flanders, D.D., 

 of New Bedford, lectured on "Ancient Egypt" which he 

 called the "land of mystery." After all that has been done 

 by Egyptologists to effect a reliable history of its people, 

 civilization and religion, it is to-day comparatively a 

 sealed book. There are difficulties in its chronology and 

 strange system of hieroglyphics, which make it almost 

 impossible to construct the history of that people. 



In the old inscriptions Egypt is called "the black land," 

 the name Karn or Kern having reference to the almost black 

 color of the soil, and the King is often mentioned as "the 

 lord of the black country and of the red country," in other 

 words, cultivated Egypt and the Arabian Desert. For 

 twenty-five hundred years the history and the mysteries 

 of Egypt were locked up in a strange, unknown tongue, 

 the key to which had been lost. Fifty years ago the key, 

 seemingly by accident, was found. This was near Rosetta 

 in Egypt, where in 1799 was found a stone bearing inscrip- 

 tions in three distinct characters Hieroglyphic, Coptic 

 and Greek. This stone is in the British Museum, while a 

 plaster of it is among the treasures of the Essex Institute. 



Beyond King Mena there is no real Egyptian history. 

 The seals of asserted continuous history from Mena run 

 from 7000 to 2400 B. C. Babylon and Egypt would be 

 in origin as kingdoms about contemporary. The pyra- 

 mids would have an antiquity of about 4000 years. Civ- 

 ilization would have taken its rise in Egypt in the course 

 of the third millennium before Christ, and would have rap- 

 idly advanced in certain directions as it did in Babylon. 

 The earth would at no time present the spectacle of one 

 highly civilized community standing alone for thousands 

 of years in the midst of races rude and unpolished. 



