EGYPT.—AN INTRODUCTION. 
9 
and how easily such arts can advance without the aid of science—for the experience 
of three thousand years, and the science of the last three centuries, have added little 
to the skill and taste to be seen in the relics now shown at the British Museum. Of 
the pure sciences they had some knowledge, the parent source of those which have 
been transmitted to us by the philosophers of Greece. Some of the names of the most 
wise and learned of those who visited Egypt even before her first occupation by 
the Persians, are recorded, and among them Thales, Solon, Cleobulus, and Ilecatseus. 
The jealousy of the Persians forbade the Greeks to travel in Egypt during their occupation 
of the country, but as soon as they could venture, we find that Hellanicus, Anaxagoras, 
Herodotus, Eudoxius, Chrysippus, and Plato, were among the most eminent, who some 
time before the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, travelled there to acquire the arts 
and study the learning of the Egyptians, but chiefly their abstract and scholastic 
philosophy. Their arts were useful and elegant, but useful and practical science appears 
to have been almost unknown to them; for few traces exist of their acquaintance 
with natural philosophy. The shadoof for raising water from the Nile, in use in the 
present day, is represented in their pictures three thousand years ago, and shows their 
ignorance of hydraulics. Electricity and magnetism, mechanics, as we apply our 
knowledge of its principles; the power of steam, and the great productions and changes 
effected by chemical agency, are. now so necessary to us that we are led to ask, how 
a state of society, so far advanced as that of the ancient Egyptians, could have existed 
without them. Yet in the earliest history of this interesting people we find them 
in a high state of civilisation—what the condition of the contemporary nations was, 
is almost unknown to us. Moses wrote fifteen centuries b.c., and his narration of 
the first visit of Abraham to Egypt, four centuries earlier, shows the high condition of 
her people. That hieroglyphics were used by the Nomade tribes we may fairly infer 
from the custom of setting up stones to commemorate events, so often mentioned in 
the Bible, and we cannot doubt that such events were inscribed upon them; but 
the social state of these tribes is strikingly contrasted with that of the Egyptians, 
whose greatness, recorded by the sacred historian, is confirmed by the remains which 
still exist, of that period. From the time of Herodotus the written history of Egypt 
is connected, down to her ignorant and degraded condition in the present day, when 
the nations of Europe, in constant communication with her, are in the highest state 
of enlightenment yet attained by any community of the human family. Let us hope 
that „a country so favoured by nature and its position may yet emerge from such 
barbarism, and that the changes already effected by Mehemet Ali may lead to the 
occupation of Egypt by a race and a condition of society worthy of her important 
position and local advantages. 
