526 



NATURE 



\_April T, 1 88 1 



zamindar collects rents from his ryots and pays to the 

 superior holder, or the Crown, living on the difference. 

 Singhalese villagers may do suit and service either to a 

 feudal chieftain or a Buddhist monastery, much as in 

 England the fief might have been held either by a fighting 

 baron or a praying abbot. It is interesting to find in 

 Ceylon the notion that the existing tenure of land comes 

 from the king having granted it subject to service, whereas 

 its real history seems just the opposite, that the village- 

 community came first, which the sovereign made himself 

 paramount over and levied land-tax from. This reminds 

 us of the theory of English law, that a cottager pastures 

 his donkey on the common by sufferance of the lord of 

 the manor, whose waste it is; the fact being that the 

 peasant is exercising a relic of his old village-rights which 

 has escaped the usurpation of the feudal system, and 

 outlived it. 



Though the village-community is much broken down 

 in the districts so well described by Sir John Phear, it 

 still shows the old framework in the division of the tilled 

 land in allotments to each ryot, and the equitable settle- 

 ment of rights and duties by the viandal or headman and 

 \x\s pancliayat or village-council, which is one of the most 

 admirable features of the ancient patriarchal system. But 

 on the whole the village commune here shows practical 

 results by no means admirable, and the husbandman's 

 life on the roadless mud-flats of Bengal, minutely drawn 

 by the author in all its details of dreary poverty and 

 ignorance and hatred of improvement, is about as de- 

 pressing a social picture as can be met with. 



Edward B. Tylor 



NILE GLEANINGS 



Nile Gleanings. By Villiers Stuart of Dromana, M.P. 



(London : John Murray, 1879.) 



THE land of Egypt has of late caused the issue of a 

 multitude of books, and that in consequence of the 

 increased knowledge which half a century of Eg)ptian 

 research has produced. Classical authorities no longer 

 avail the traveller ; he requires translafions from the 

 original hieroglyphic inscriptions, an insight into the 

 discovery of a new world of antiquity and an acquaintance 

 with the recent excavations which have revealed to the 

 eye of the traveller an unveiled city of the dead. Scrip- 

 tural texts alone garnished the older voyages. Above all 

 the accomplished traveller should be acquainted with the 

 various sciences which enable him to detect what is new 

 or salient in the country that he visits, and its develop- 

 ment, political institutions, progress, or decay should be 

 seen at a glance even if it demands pages to describe 

 them. The grand Egj-ptian tour is however a promenade 

 of the land of monuments. Mr. Villiers Stuart's " Nile 

 Gleanings" follow the usual track, and offer to the archaeo- 

 logist, besides the usual discussions on art, hieroglyphs, 

 and language, and an occasional notice on the fauna and 

 flora of Egypt, several new facts of archaeological interest. 

 At the description of Meidoum, the period of which is 

 now known to be that of Senofrou, the tomb of Nofre 

 Maat, with its strange figures inlaid with incrustations of 

 red ochre, is new and interesting for its peculiar art and 

 its remote age of the third dynasty ; nor less important is 

 the discovery of the flint flakes, the at'bris of the old chisels 



which sculptured it. Other tombs at the spot were 

 remarkable for their gigantic masonry. These belong 

 indeed to the more recent discoveries, but the traveller 

 paid his respects to the dog mummy pits at Babe, and the 

 sites of Minieh and Dayr-el-Nakel. Considerable interest 

 attaches to the heretical worshippers of the sun's disk, 

 who flourished about the close of the eighteenth dynasty, 

 and who endeavoured to remove the capital of Egypt from 

 Thebes with " its hundred gates," to Tel-el- Amarna or 

 Psinaula. The idea fashionable amongst Egyptologists 

 has been that Amenophis III of that line, the king, one 

 of whose statues is the celebrated vocal Memnon, com- 

 menced an attempted religious reform and tried to sub- 

 stitute the worship of the sun's disk or orb, the Aten as it 

 is called, for that of the god Amen-Ra, or the hidden sun. 

 To this it is supposed that he was invited by the undue 

 influence of his wife, Tai or Taiti. After his death it is 

 conjectured that he was succeeded by hib brother, Amen- 

 ophis IV., and that this Amenophis IV. was a convert of 

 the most pronounced zeal for the worship of the solar orb 

 or pure Sabaanism. For this purpose, from the Amen- 

 hept, or the Peaceful Amen, he changed his name to 

 Khuenaten, the Light or Spirit of the Sun. The chief data 

 for this arrangement of the monarchs of the period of the 

 eighteenth dynasty were the stones used for the construc- 

 tion of the Pylon or gateway of Haremhebi or Horus 

 of the same dynasty, which were found to have been 

 taken from an edifice of the so-called disk worshippers at 

 Thebes, and built with their faces inside the wall, exhibit- 

 ing the erasure of the name of Amenophis IV. and the 

 substitution of Khuenaten in the cartouches for Ameno- 

 phis. Some objections indeed might have been taken 

 from the fact that the features of Amenophis and Khuen- 

 aten were different, it being of course facile to adopt a 

 new faith, impossible to secure fresh features, even such un- 

 enviable ones as those of Khuenaten. Mr. Villiers Stuart 

 discovered a new tomb at Thebes, with .Amenophis IV. and 

 his queen on one side of the door and Khuenaten with his 

 queen on the other, both dissimilar in features, arrange- 

 ment, and condition — one perfect, the other mutilated. 

 As both sovereigns could hardly have occupied the same 

 sepulchre, evidently one of the two appropriated the con- 

 struction of his predecessor. The theory of Mr. Villiers 

 Stuart is that Khuenaten was a foreigner, which has been 

 always asserted, although it is more difficult to decide to 

 which of the races of mankind he belonged ; there are 

 however some reasons to believe that after all he may 

 come from Nubia or the South. The discovery of this 

 tomb is in fact the principal new point of the work, and is 

 the one new and important contribution to the obscure 

 history of the heretical division which took place about 

 the thirteenth century B.C. 



The various sites of Esneh, Dendera, Assouan, Philas, 

 and the Nubian temples are well known, but are described 

 in a light and graceful way, and much old material repro- 

 duced in a polished and not pedantic form. Necessarily 

 a great deal is already well known to the student, and no 

 inconsiderable portion to the general public. As to 

 chronology the numerous systems and theories which 

 have been started, amounting in all to above 200, allow 

 any choice which suits best the proclivities of the inquirer. 

 The present work has a new date for Rameses II., and 

 throws his reign back to B.C. 1567, but it is difficult if not 



