1850.] Br&hminical Conquerors of India. 3 



habits, almost identical with those that constituted the painted records 

 of the extinct people, — we may with justice speculate upon an earlier 

 time that saw the common origin of both. 



It was in making some cursory enquiry into the early military history 

 of nations, that I gradually accustomed my mind to admit the possible 

 truth of a speculation, which I had inclined towards some years previ- 

 ously, regarding the eastern tributaries (recognizable as such by the 

 animals and offerings they bring) represented in the Egyptian kings' 

 tombs of the eighteenth dynasty.* The early mythic fable of the 

 Indian expedition of the Egyptian Bacchus ; the history of Ramaf 

 with its Bacchic character which so struck Bishop Heber, when first he 

 saw it represented in action, J — the visible affinities of custom, the 

 similarity of religious types, the painted caves rivalling the graphic 

 picture-records of Egypt, — all stimulate a dweller in India, at all inter- 

 ested in searching for the material of history, to approximate to some 

 idea of the point of annexation, at which the Egyptian and the Indian 

 element in it give evidence of union. But it has been exceedingly 

 difficult to devise up to this time the direction, in which that possibility 

 of union is to be looked for. The opinion that " there is no other 

 people of the ancient world whose form and fashion bear so strongly 

 the impress of locality as the Egyptian ; or who is bound to his country 

 by so many ties, or who so identified it with himself," § — was all which 

 had distributed itself very largely : its learned and sagacious pro- 

 pounder maintained as late as the year 1826 1| that the dominant 

 Egyptian castes, were descended from an aboriginal African people, 

 with a curious disregard of the internal evidence of their institution as 

 pointing to a different origin : and the idea of a maritime intercourse 

 with India, founded on the known facts as to the external commerce 



* Wilkinson's Manners and Customs, Vol. I. in loc. 



f An old Egyptian word. " Pyramid is according to him (Tgnazio di Rossi) Pa- 

 ram, ' the high.' The root ram for high, similar with the Semitic, is assured; 

 rama for high seems also to have warrant. The pronounciation of the article is as 

 with the pi-romis of Herodotus for pe-rdmi, the man." Bunsen's ./Egypt's Place. 

 Book II. Sec. VI. (a note is appended to this in the original with a cloud of philo- 

 logical authorities). — H. T. 



% Heber's Journal in loc. 



§ Heeren's Researches, Vol. V. ch. 1. 



|| Bunsen's Egypt's Place. B. I. Sect. III. B. VII. 



B 2 



