as great a length of time (probably five times as long) to account for the variations of race now apparent.

Professor Owen who replied to Professor Huxley is forced to admit that "The large, patent, indisputable facts of the successive sites of capitals of kings of the ancient race, from the first to the fourteenth dynasties, do not support any hypothesis of immigration; they are adverse to the Asiatic one by the Isthinus. They indicate rather, that Egypt herself, through her exceptionally favourable conditions for an easy and abundant sustenance of her inhabitants, had been the locality of the rise and progress of the earliest civilisation known in the world." 1

It will be maintained in this book that the oldest mythology, religion, symbols, language, had their birth-place in Africa, that the primitive race of Kam came thence, and the civilisation attained in Egypt emanated from that country and spread over the world.

The most reasonable view on the evolutionary theory-and those who do not accept that have not yet begun to think, for lack of a starting point-is that the black race is the most ancient, and that Africa is the primordial home. It is not necessary to show that the first colonisers of India were negroes, but it is certain that the black Buddha of India was imaged in the negroid type. In the black negro god, whether called Buddha or Sut-Nahsi, we have a datum. They carry in their colour the proof of their origin. The people who first fashioned and worshipped the divine image in the negroid mould of humanity must according to all knowledge of human nature, have been negroes themselves. For the blackness is not of Buddha belong to the The genetrix represented

merely mystical, the features and the hair black race, and Nahsi is the negro name. as the Dea Multimammæ, the Diana of Ephesus, is found as a black figure, nor is the hue mystical only, for the features are as negroid as were those of the black 2 Isis in Egypt.

We cannot have the name of Kam or Ham applied ethnologically without identifying the type as that of the black race.

True, the type on the earliest monuments had become liker to the later so-called Caucasian, but even the word Caucasian tells also of an origin in the Kaf or Kaffir. Philology will support ethnology in deriving from Africa, and not from Asia.

The type of the great sphinx, the age of which is unknown, but it must be of enormous antiquity, is African, not Aryan or Caucasian. The Egyptians themselves never got rid of the thick nose, the full lip, the flat foot, and weak calf of the Nigritian type, and these were not additions to any form of the Caucasian race. The Nigritian elements are primary, and survive all modifications of the old Egyptians made in the lower land. The single Horus-lock, the Rut, worn as a divine sign by the child-Horus in Egypt, is a 2 Montfauçon, pl. 47.

1 Journ. of Anthrop. Soc. 1874, p. 247.

distinguishing characteristic of the African people, among whom were the Libyans who shaved the left side of the head, except the single lock that remained drooping down. This was the emblem of Horus the Child, continued as the type of childhood from those children of the human race, the Africans. Yet the Egyptians held the Libyans in contempt because they had not advanced to the status of the circumcised, and they inflicted the rite upon their conquered enemies in death, by excising the Karunata.

The African custom of children going undressed until they attained the age of puberty, was also continued by the Egyptians. Princesses went as naked as commoners; royalty being no exception to the rule. At that age the children assumed the Horus-lock at the left side of the head as the sign of puberty and posterity.

The Egyptians were pre-eminent as anointers. They anointed the living and the dead, the persons of their priests and kings, the statues of their gods; anointing with unguents being an ordinary mode of welcome to guests on visiting the houses of friends. This glorifying by means of grease is essentially an African custom. Among some of the dark tribes fat was the grand distinction of the rich man. According to Peter Kolben, who wrote a century and a half ago, the wealthier the Hottentot the more fat and butter he used in anointing himself and family. A man's social status was measured by the luxury of butter and fat on his body. This glory of grease was only a grosser and more primitive form of Egyptian anointing.1

The custom of saluting a superior by going down on the knees and striking the earth with the head is not limited to Africa, but is widely spread in that land. The king of the Brass people never spoke to the king of the Ibos without acknowledging his inferiority by going down on his knees and striking his head against the ground. On the lower Niger, as a mark of supreme homage, the people prostrated themselves and struck their foreheads against the earth. The Coast Negroes are accustomed to fall on their knees before a superior and kiss the earth three times.2 It is etiquette at Eboe for the chief people to kneel on the ground and kiss it thrice as the king goes by. In the Congo region prostration on the knees to kiss the earth is a mode of paying homage. The custom is Egyptian, and was designated "Senta," for respect, compliment, congratulation, to pay homage; the word signifies literally, by breathing the ground.

Of the Congos, Bastian says, “When they spoke to a superior they might have sat as models to the Egyptian priests when making the representations on the Temple walls, so striking is the likeness between what is there depicted and what actually takes place here.” 3 Theirs were the primitive sketches, the Egyptians finished the pictures.

1 Kolben, State of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. i. pp. 50, 51: London, 1731. 2 Cited by Spencer, Ceremonial Institutions, 116, 121-4.

3 Bastian, Africanische Reisen, 143.

C 2

The oldest and most peculiar images in the Ideographs point backward toward the equatorial land of the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, ostrich, camelopard, ibis, various cranes, the serau, or goat-kind of sheep, the khebsh and oryx, the rock snake and great serpent of the Libyan desert, the cobra, the octocyon, a small primitive fox-like dog of South Africa, which has forty-eight teeth, the fox-like type of Anup, the Fenekh, a type of Sut; the caracal lynx and spotted hyena, the kaf-monkey, or clicking cynocephalus, that typified the word, speech, and language on the monuments, which is now found in Upper Senegal,—as the old home of the aborigines.

The symbolism of Egypt represented in the hieroglyphics has its still earlier phase extant amongst the Bushmen, whose rock-pictures testify to their skill as hieroglyphists, and show that they must have been draughtsmen from time immemorial.

But, beyond this art, just as they have pre-human clicks assigned to the animals, so they have a system of typology of the most primitive nature; one in which the animals, reptiles, birds and insects are themselves the living, talking types, by the aid of which the earliest men of our race would seem to have" thinged" their thoughts in the birthplace of typology. In the "fables" of the Bushmen, the hieroglyphics are the living things that enact the representations. These point to an art that must have been extant long ages on ages before the likenesses of the animals, birds, and insects could be sculptured in stone or pictured in colours on the papyrus and the walls of the tombs and temples of Egypt, or drawn on the rocks by the Bushmen, Hottentots, and Kaffirs.

1

It was confidently declared by Seeley that the cobra capella, or hooded snake, was unknown to Africa, and that as it appeared amongst the hieroglyphics, these must have been adopted by the Egyptians from some country where the cobra was native. Seeley was wrong, the cobra is African also. The latest testimony is that of Commander Cameron who walked across Africa, and who records the fact of snakes not being numerous and the "greater portion are not venomous, but the cobra capella exists and is much dreaded." 2

The Egyptians marked the solstices as being in the horizon. The solstices, says Lepsius, "were always considered as in the horizon, and the vernal equinox as up in the sky." There is reason to think this may be the result of astronomical observation made in the equatorial lands. When at the equator the poles of the heaven are both on the horizon, and the North Pole star would furnish there a fixed point of beginning which answers to the starting-point in the north; this would be retained after they had migrated into higher latitudes and the pole of the heaven had risen thirty degrees. The mythology of Egypt as shown in the Ritual, obviously originated in a land of lakes, the lake being and continuing to a late time to be the typical 1 Caves of Ellora, p. 216. 2 Across Africa, vol. ii. p. 289.

of seas.

great water which dominated after they were aware of the existence The water, or rather mud of source is a lake of primordial matter placed in the north. Another hint may be derived from the fact that aru is the river in Egyptian, and the anterior form of the word, karu, is the lake or pond.

No geological formation on the whole surface of this earth could have been better adapted for the purpose of taking the nomads as they drifted down from the Ethiopic highlands, into the valley that embraced them, to hold them fast, and keep them there hemmed in by deserts and mountains with no outlet except for sailors, and compressed them until the disintegrating tendencies of the nomadic life had spent their dispersing force and gave them the shaping squeeze of birth that moulded them into civilised men. Divinest foresight could have found no fitter cradle for the youthful race, no more quickening birth-place for the early mind of man, no mouthpiece more adapted, for utterance to the whole world. It was literally a cradle by reason of the narrow limits. Seven hundred miles in length, by seven wide, fruitful and fertile for man and beast. Life was easy there from the first.

They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labour than other people, for they have not the toil of breaking up the soil with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work which all other men must labour at to obtain a crop of corn; but when the river has come of its own accord and irrigated their fields, and having irrigated them subsided, then each man sows his own land and turns swine into it, and when the seed has been trodden in by the swine, he waits for harvest time." But the land was a fixed quantity on the surface, however much it increased in depth, and the supply of food was therefore limited by boundaries, as stern as Egypt's double ranges of limestone and sandstone hills. Lane calculated the extent of land cultivated at 5,500 square geographical miles, or rather more than one square degree and a half.2 And this appears to be a fair estimate in round numbers, of its modern limits.

Such a valley would soon become as crowded with life as the womb of a twin-bearing woman in the ninth month, and as certain to expel the overplus of human energy. It was as if they had gradually descended from the highlands of Africa with a slow glacier-like motion and such a squeeze for it in the valley below as should launch them from the land altogether and make them take to the waters. There was the water-way prepared to teach them how to swim, and float, and sail, offering a ready mode of transit and exit and when overcrowded at home, free carriage into other lands. The hint was taken and acted upon. Diodorus Siculus declares that the Egyptians claimed to have sent out colonies over the whole world in times of the

1 Herodotus, ii. 14.

2 Encyclopædia Brit. 8th edition, vol. viii. p. 421.

remotest antiquity. They affirmed that they had not only taught the Babylonians astronomy, but that Belus and his subjects were a colony that went out of Egypt. This is supported by Genesis in the generations of Noah. By substituting Egypt for the mythical Ark we obtain a real starting point from which the human race goes forth, and can even utilise the Hebrew list of names.

Diodorus Siculus was greatly impressed with the assertions of the priests respecting the numerous emigrations including the colonies of Babylon and Greece, and the Jewish exodus, but they named so many in divers parts of the world that he shrank from recording them upon hearsay and word of mouth, which is a pity, as they may have been speaking the truth. He tells us they had sacred books transmitted to them from ancient times, in which the historical accounts were recorded and kept and then handed on to their successors.

In the inscription of Una belonging to the sixth dynasty, we find the earliest known mention of the Nahsi (negroes) who were at that remote period dominated by Egypt, and conscribed for her armies. In this, one of the oldest historical documents, the negroes from Nam, the negroes from Aruam, the negroes from Uaua (Nubia), the negroes from Kau, the negroes from the land of Tatam are enumerated as being in the Egyptian army. Una, the governor of the south, and superintendent of the dock, tells us how the Pharaoh commanded him to sail to some locality far south to fetch a white stone sarcophagus from a place named as the abode of the Rhinoceros. This is recorded as a great feat.

"

"It came thence, brought in the great boat of the inner palace with its cover, a door, two jambs, and a pedestal (or basin). Never before was the like done by any servant. (Lines 5, 6, 7.) The place named Rumakhu, or Abhat, is an unknown locality. But the performance is considered unparalleled.3

The Egyptians literally moved mountains and shaped them in human likeness of titanic majesty. "I dragged as hills great monuments (for statues) of alabaster (for carving) giving them life in the making" says Rameses III., he who built a wall 150 feet in depth, 60 feet below ground, and 90 feet above. They carried blocks of syenite by land and water, weighing 900 tons. It was said by Champollion that the cathedral of Notre Dame might be placed in one of the halls of the Temple at Karnac as a small central ornament; so vast was the scale of their operations. They painted in imperishable colours; cut leather with our knife of the leather-cutters ; wove with the same shuttles; used what is with us the latest form of blow-pipe, for the whitesmith. It is the height of absurdity or the profoundest ignorance to suppose they did not build ships and launch navies. The oar-blade or paddle, called the kherp, is the emblem of 1 Book i. 28, 29, 81. 2 Book i. 44. 3 Records of the Past, vol. ii. p. 3.