THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 35 



give up her secret. Ethnologists and philologers do not agree as to 

 the affinities in race and speech of the ancient Egyptians. The 

 linguists maintain that no African race oppressed by tropical heat, 

 has ever developed a civilization like that of Egypt ; and that the 

 structure of the Egyptian language ig Asiatic, and close akin to the 

 Semitic languages. One philologer points out its analogies to the 

 Aryan tongues. The word Chaini^ ' black,' used by the Egyptians to 

 designate their country in contradistinction to the white sands of the 

 desert, resembles, it is said, the old Indian sydma, having the same 

 meaning ; and gupta or kopte, the chief element in the word Egypt, 

 is akin to gupta, used as a suffix to vazsya, the designation of the 

 Indian agricultural caste. Ethnologists perhaps incline to the views 

 of the Egyptians themselves, who believed they were the offspring of 

 the Gods, and indigenous to the soil. However that may be, it is 

 certain that in the XVIII dynasty Thothmes the third sculptured 

 types of races tributary to his arms; and defined several types of the 

 Asiatic and African races as sharply as they could be portrayed 

 to-day. When the structural affinities of the Egyptian language are 

 thoroughly compared with those of other tongues, clearer light will 

 be thrown on the subject ; for if language be not an infallible racial 

 test, it generally decides a nation's ancestry, as fairly as the Ephrai- 

 mite was detected by his sibboleth, and as Peter the Galilean was 

 bewrayed by his speech. 



It is remarkable that Egypt bursts on our view at once as a 

 highly civiUzed country. Like the fabled goddess who sprang 

 perfect from the brain of Jupiter at her birth, Egyptian civilization 

 first manifests itself at almost its highest pitch of perfection. The 

 reign of Menes, the founder of the ist dynasty, is placed at about 

 4000 years before the Christian Era, and only a few hundred years 

 before the building of the great pyramid. But behind him there 

 must be a background of ages of unrecorded growth to bring Egypt 

 to that stage of national life. For our oldest history of Egypt, apart 

 from the monuments and papyri, we are indebted to Alexandria 

 Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second of the Grseco-Egyptian Kings, who 

 was a liberal patron of art and literature. He gathered at his court the 

 most famous men of his time. Amongst them was at least one — 

 Euclid the Geometrician — who is better known in the world to-day 

 than he was then. Ptolemy filled the famous Alexandrine 

 Library with the treasures of antiquity, and caused to be 



