DERIVED FROM ANATOMY, HISTORY, AND THE MONUMENTS. 129 
scale, is intermediate between the Pelasgic and Semitic forms. We may add, that this 
conformation is the same which Prof. Blumenbach refers to the Hindoo variety in his 
triple classification of the Egyptian people.* And this leads us briefly to inquire, who 
were the Egyptians? ; 
It is in the sacred writings only that we find any authentic records of the primeval 
migrations of our species. “In the general allotment of territories to the offspring of 
Noah,” observes Mr. Gliddon, “ Egypt, by the concurrent testimony of all Biblical com- 
mentators, was assigned to Mizraim, the son of Ham, as a domain and for an inheritance ;” 
whence Egypt has, from the remotest times, been called by the names of Mizraim and 
Ham, or Khemé. . Mr. Gliddon adds, that “although the name of Mizraim has not yet 
been found in hieroglyphic legends, there is abundant scriptural evidence to prove that 
the country was called Mizraim and Mitzar by the Jews; while at the present day 
throughout the east, Egypt and Cairo are universally known by the cognate appellation 
of Muss’r.’+ 
Entering Africa by the Isthmus of Suez, the children of Ham were ushered into the 
fertile valley of the Nile, a region prepared by nature for settled communities and a 
primeval civilization. In a country bounded by the Red Sea on the one side, and by a 
wilderness on the other, and presenting but a narrow strip of land for its inhabitants, 
laws would at once become necessary for mutual protection; and we may suppose that 
. . . . . y ] 4 . . J PI . 
while one portion of the Mizraimites embraced these social restrictions, another, impatient 
of control, passed beyond the desert barrier on the west, and spreading themselves over 
the north of Africa, became those nomadic tribes to which the earliest annals give the 
name of Lisyans.§ It follows from this view of the question, that we suppose the 
Egyptians and. Libyans to have been cognate people; that the former were the abori- 
ginal|| inhabitants of the valley of the Nile; and that their institutions, however modified 
by intrusive nations in after times, were the offspring of their own minds. 
It will, however, be very naturally objected that among the Egyptians no gradations 
are apparent between barbarism and refinement. “It is a remarkable fact,” says Sir G, 
Wilkinson, “that the first glimpse we obtain of the history and manners of the Egyptians, 
shows a nation already advanced in the arts of civilized life; and the same customs and 
inventions that prevailed in the Augustan era of that people, after the accession of the 
eighteenth dynasty, are found in the remote age of Osortasen, the contemporary of 
* Trans. Royal Society of London, 1794, passim, and Plate 16, Fig. 2, of that work. 
+ Ancient Egypt, p. 46, 47. 
{ The learned Dr. Beke reverses the route, and supposes that the “‘Cushite descendants of Ham” first settled on the 
western side of the Arabian Peninsula, crossed thence into Ethiopia, and descending the Nile, became the Egyptians of 
after times.—Origines Biblice, 1, p. 162. 
I use the terms Libyan and Ethiopian as they are handed down to us from antiquity. “Speaking with all the pre- 
cision I am able,” says Herodotus, ‘the country I have been describing is inhabited by four nations only; of these two 
are natives and two are strangers. The natives are the Libyans (Ai¢vec) and the Ethiopians, (A,@somec); one of which 
possesses the northern, the other the southern parts of Africa, The strangers are the Phenicians and the Greeks.”— 
Melpomene, 197. In the days of Herodotus nomad Libyans still inhabited the vicinity of Avaris. : 
|| Tuse the word aboriginal in this place with some reservation. It has been supposed by learned authorities that Africa 
ag peopled by Negroes before the Humitic tribes entered that country. I do not suppose Ham to have been the pir 
genitor of the Negro race; and, with Dr. Wiseman, Mr. Lawrence and many others, I regard as a “conjecture “ in Sci- 
ence, that, doctrine which would attribute the physical gradations between the white man and the Negro to any other 
natural process than that of direct amalgamation.—Lawrence, Lectures on Zoology, 8th edit. p. 264. Wiseman, Lec- 
tures, 2d edit. p. 158. Beke, Origines Biblicw, Tom. I., p. 162. 
VOL. IX.—36 
