I.  THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY.





In the great ranges of investigation which bear most directly

upon the origin of man, there are two in which Science within the

last few years has gained final victories.  The significance of

these in changing, and ultimately in reversing, one of the

greatest currents of theological thought, can hardly be

overestimated; not even the tide set in motion by Cusa,

Copernicus, and Galileo was more powerful to bring in a new epoch

of belief.



The first of these conquests relates to the antiquity of man on

the earth.



The fathers of the early Christian Church, receiving all parts of

our sacred books as equally inspired, laid little, if any, less

stress on the myths, legends, genealogies, and tribal, family,

and personal traditions contained in the Old and the New

Testaments, than upon the most powerful appeals, the most

instructive apologues, and the most lofty poems of prophets,

psalmists, and apostles.  As to the age of our planet and the

life of man upon it, they found in the Bible a carefully recorded

series of periods, extending from Adam to the building of the

Temple at Jerusalem, the length of each period being explicitly

given.



Thus they had a biblical chronology--full, consecutive, and

definite--extending from the first man created to an event of

known date well within ascertained profane history; as a result,

the early Christian commentators arrived at conclusions varying

somewhat, but in the main agreeing.  Some, like Origen, Eusebius,

Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria, and the great fathers

generally of the first three centuries, dwelling especially upon

the Septuagint version of the Scriptures, thought that man's

creation took place about six thousand years before the Christian

era.  Strong confirmation of this view was found in a simple

piece of purely theological reasoning:  for, just as the seven

candlesticks of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the

existence of seven heavenly bodies revolving about the earth, so

it was felt that the six days of creation prefigured six thousand

years during which the earth in its first form was to endure;

and that, as the first Adam came on the sixth day, Christ, the

second Adam, had come at the sixth millennial period.

Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, in the second century clinched

this argument with the text, "One day is with the Lord as a

thousand years."



On the other hand, Eusebius and St. Jerome, dwelling more

especially upon the Hebrew text, which we are brought up to

revere, thought that man's origin took place at a somewhat

shorter period before the Christian era; and St. Jerome's

overwhelming authority made this the dominant view throughout

western Europe during fifteen centuries.



The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronology is

especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius.  In these,

Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,--Deborah, Orpheus, and the

Amazons,--Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as

personages equally real, and their positions in chronology

equally ascertained.



At times great bitterness was aroused between those holding the

longer and those holding the shorter chronology, but after all

the difference between them, as we now see, was trivial; and it

may be broadly stated that in the early Church, "always,

everywhere, and by all," it was held as certain, upon the

absolute warrant of Scripture, that man was created from four to

six thousand years before the Christian era.



To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk

damnation.  St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antipodes

and in the longer duration of the earth than six thousand years

were deadly heresies, equally hostile to Scripture.  Philastrius,

the friend of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, whose fearful

catalogue of heresies served as a guide to intolerance throughout

the Middle Ages, condemned with the same holy horror those who

expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years since the

beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to be

the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the

plurality of the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God

brings out the stars from his treasures and hangs them up in the

solid firmament above the earth every night.



About the beginning of the seventh century Isidore of Seville,

the great theologian of his time, took up the subject.  He

accepted the dominant view not only of Hebrew but of all other

chronologies, without anything like real criticism.  The

childlike faith of his system may be imagined from his summaries

which follow.  He tells us:



"Joseph lived one hundred and five years.  Greece began to

cultivate grain."



"The Jews were in slavery in Egypt one hundred and forty-four

years.  Atlas discovered astrology."



"Joshua ruled for twenty-seven years.  Ericthonius yoked horses

together."



"Othniel, forty years.  Cadmus introduced letters into Greece."



"Deborah, forty years.  Apollo discovered the art of medicine and

invented the cithara."



"Gideon, forty years.  Mercury invented the lyre and gave it to

Orpheus."



Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under the longer

date; and, the great theological authority of southern Europe

having thus spoken, the question was virtually at rest throughout

Christendom for nearly a hundred years.



Early in the eighth century the Venerable Bede took up the

problem.  Dwelling especially upon the received Hebrew text of

the Old Testament, he soon entangled himself in very serious

difficulties; but, in spite of the great fathers of the first

three centuries, he reduced the antiquity of man on the earth by

nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of mutterings against him

as coming dangerously near a limit which made the theological

argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of the

world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did much

to fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general system

laid down by Eusebius and Jerome.



In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of

thought from a very different quarter.  Rabbi Moses Maimonides

and other Jewish scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text,

arrived at conclusions diminishing the antiquity of man still

further, and thus gave strength throughout the Middle Ages to the

shorter chronology:  it was incorporated into the sacred science

of Christianity; and Vincent of Beauvais, in his great Speculum

Historiale, forming part of that still more enormous work

intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the ages of

faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand years

before our era.[182]



[182] For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the

building of the Temple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see

the admirable paper on The Pope and the Bible, in The

Contemporary Review for April, 1893.  For the date of man's

creation as given by leading chronologists in various branches of

the Church, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, Paris, 1819, vol. i,

pp. 27 et seq.  In this edition there are sundry typographical

errors; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World, London,

1844.  As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers

of the Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291.

For the sacred significance of the six days of creation in

ascertaining the antiquity of man, see especially Eichen,

Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung; also Wallace,

True Age of the World, pp. 2,3.  For the views of St. Augustine,

see Topinard, Anthropologie, citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi,

c. viii, c. x.  For the views of Philastrius, see the De

Hoeresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne, tome xii.  For

Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's Egyptian

Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829.  For Bede, see Usher's

Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the World, p.

35.  For Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39;

also lib. iii, in Migne, tome lxxxii.





At the Reformation this view was not disturbed.  The same manner

of accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanchthon, and

the great Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the Copernican

theory, fixed them firmly in this biblical chronology; the

keynote was sounded for them by Luther when he said, "We know, on

the authority of Moses, that longer ago than six thousand years

the world did not exist."  Melanchthon, more exact, fixed the

creation of man at 3963 B.C.



But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavour to

make the time of man's origin more precise:  there seems to have

been a sort of fascination in the subject which developed a long

array of chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in

our sacred books, until the Protestant divine De Vignolles, who

had given forty years to the study of biblical chronology,

declared in 1738 that he had gathered no less than two hundred

computations based upon Scripture, and no two alike.



As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by

authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and this,

both as originally published and as revised in 1640 under Pope

Urban VIII, declared that the creation of man took place 5199

years before Christ.



But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological studies,

the man who exerted the most powerful influence upon the dominant

nations of Christendom was Archbishop Usher.  In 1650 he

published his Annals of the Ancient and New Testaments, and it at

once became the greatest authority for all English-speaking

peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide theological learning,

powerful in controversy; and his careful conclusion, after years

of the most profound study of the Hebrew Scriptures, was that man

was created 4004 years before the Christian era.  His verdict was

widely received as final; his dates were inserted in the margins

of the authorized version of the English Bible, and were soon

practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text

itself:  to question them seriously was to risk preferment in the

Church and reputation in the world at large.



The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had influenced

Usher brought leading men of the older Church to the same view:

men who would have burned each other at the stake for their

differences on other points, agreed on this:  Melanchthon and

Tostatus, Lightfoot and Jansen, Salmeron and Scaliger, Petavius

and Kepler, inquisitors and reformers, Jesuits and Jansenists,

priests and rabbis, stood together in the belief that the

creation of man was proved by Scripture to have taken place

between 3900 and 4004 years before Christ.



In spite of the severe pressure of this line of authorities,

extending from St. Jerome and Eusebius to Usher and Petavius, in

favour of this scriptural chronology, even devoted Christian

scholars had sometimes felt obliged to revolt.  The first great

source of difficulty was increased knowledge regarding the

Egyptian monuments.  As far back as the last years of the

sixteenth century Joseph Scaliger had done what he could to lay

the foundations of a more scientific treatment of chronology,

insisting especially that the historical indications in Persia,

in Babylon, and above all in Egypt, should be brought to bear on

the question.  More than that, he had the boldness to urge that

the chronological indications of the Hebrew Scriptures should be

fully and critically discussed in the light of Egyptian and other

records, without any undue bias from theological considerations.

His idea may well be called inspired; yet it had little effect

as regards a true view of the antiquity of man, even upon

himself, for the theological bias prevailed above all his

reasonings, even in his own mind.  Well does a brilliant modern

writer declare that, "among the multitude of strong men in modern

times abdicating their reason at the command of their prejudices,

Joseph Scaliger is perhaps the most striking example."

Early in the following century Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History

of the World (1603-1616), pointed out the danger of adhering to

the old system.  He, too, foresaw one of the results of modern

investigation, stating it in these words, which have the ring of

prophetic inspiration:  "For in Abraham's time all the then known

parts of the world were developed....Egypt had many magnificent

cities,...and these not built with sticks, but of hewn

stone,...which magnificence needed a parent of more antiquity

than these other men have supposed."  In view of these

considerations Raleigh followed the chronology of the Septuagint

version, which enabled him to give to the human race a few more

years than were usually allowed.



About the middle of the seventeenth century Isaac Vossius, one of

the most eminent scholars of Christendom, attempted to bring the

prevailing belief into closer accordance with ascertained facts,

but, save by a chosen few, his efforts were rejected.  In some

parts of Europe a man holding new views on chronology was by no

means safe from bodily harm.  As an example of the extreme

pressure exerted by the old theological system at times upon

honest scholars, we may take the case of La Peyrere, who about

the middle of the seventeenth century put forth his book on the

Pre-Adamites--an attempt to reconcile sundry well-known

difficulties in Scripture by claiming that man existed on earth

before the time of Adam.  He was taken in hand at once; great

theologians rushed forward to attack him from all parts of

Europe; within fifty years thirty-six different refutations of

his arguments had appeared; the Parliament of Paris burned the

book, and the Grand Vicar of the archdiocese of Mechlin threw him

into prison and kept him there until he was forced, not only to

retract his statements, but to abjure his Protestantism.



In England, opposition to the growing truth was hardly less

earnest.  Especially strong was Pearson, afterward Master of

Trinity and Bishop of Chester.  In his treatise on the Creed,

published in 1659, which has remained a theologic classic, he

condemned those who held the earth to be more than fifty-six

hundred years old, insisted that the first man was created just

six days later, declared that the Egyptian records were forged,

and called all Christians to turn from them to "the infallible

annals of the Spirit of God."



But, in spite of warnings like these, we see the new idea

cropping out in various parts of Europe.  In 1672, Sir John

Marsham published a work in which he showed himself bold and

honest.  After describing the heathen sources of Oriental

history, he turns to the Christian writers, and, having used the

history of Egypt to show that the great Church authorities were

not exact, he ends one important argument with the following

words: "Thus the most interesting antiquities of Egypt have been

involved in the deepest obscurity by the very interpreters of her

chronology, who have jumbled everything up (qui omnia susque

deque permiscuerunt), so as to make them match with their own

reckonings of Hebrew chronology.  Truly a very bad example, and

quite unworthy of religious writers."



This sturdy protest of Sir John against the dominant system and

against the "jumbling" by which Eusebius had endeavoured to cut

down ancient chronology within safe and sound orthodox limits,

had little effect.  Though eminent chronologists of the

eighteenth century, like Jackson, Hales, and Drummond, gave forth

multitudes of ponderous volumes pleading for a period somewhat

longer than that generally allowed, and insisting that the

received Hebrew text was grossly vitiated as regards chronology,

even this poor favour was refused them; the mass of believers

found it more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to

them by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created about

four thousand years before our era.



To those who wished even greater precision, Dr. John Lightfoot,

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great

rabbinical scholar of his time, gave his famous demonstration

from our sacred books that "heaven and earth, centre and

circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and

clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was

created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C.,

at nine o'clock in the morning."



This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the

eighteenth century, swollen by the biblical researches of leading

commentators, Catholic and Protestant, until it came in much

majesty and force into our own nineteenth century.  At the very

beginning of the century it gained new strength from various

great men in the Church, among whom may be especially named Dr.

Adam Clarke, who declared that, "to preclude the possibility of a

mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in the

selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates."



All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, and as

late as 1835--indeed, as late as 1850--came an announcement in

the work of one of the most eminent Egyptologists, Sir J.  G.

Wilkinson, to the effect that he had modified the results he had

obtained from Egyptian monuments, in order that his chronology

might not interfere with the received date of the Deluge of

Noah.[183]



[183] For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of

the world at the birth of Christ; see also in the edition of his

works, London, 1822, vol. 4, pp. 64, 112.  For Scaliger, see in

the De Emendatione Temporum, 1583; also Mark Pattison, Essays,

Oxford, 1889, vol. i, pp. 162 et seq.  For Raleigh's misgivings,

see his History of the World, London, 1614, p. 227, book ii of

part i, section 7 of chapter i; also Clinton's Fasti Hellenici,

vol. ii, p. 293.  For Usher, see his Annales Vet. et Nov. Test.,

London, 1650.  For Pearson, see his Exposition of the Creed,

sixth edition, London, 1692, pp. 59 et seq.  For Marsham, see his

Chronicus Canon Aegypticus, Ebraicus, Graecus, et Disquisitiones,

London, 1672.  For La Peyrere, see especially Quatrefarges, in

Revue de Deux Mondes for 1861; also other chapters in this work.

For Jackson, Hales, and others, see Wallace's True Age of the

World.  For Wilkinson, see various editions of his work on Egypt.

For Vignolles, see Leblois, vol. iii, p. 617.  As to the

declaration in favor of the recent origin of man, sanctioned by

Popes Gregory XIII and Urban VIII, see Strachius, cited in

Wallace, p. 97.  For the general agreement of Church authorities,

as stated, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates, as above.  As to

difficulties of scriptural chronology, see Ewald, History of

Israel, English translation, London, 1883, pp. 204 et seq.









II.  THE NEW CHRONOLOGY.





But all investigators were not so docile as Wilkinson, and there

soon came a new train of scientific thought which rapidly

undermined all this theological chronology.  Not to speak of

other noted men, we have early in the present century Young,

Champollion, and Rosellini, beginning a new epoch in the study of

the Egyptian monuments.  Nothing could be more cautious than

their procedure, but the evidence was soon overwhelming in favour

of a vastly longer existence of man in the Nile Valley than could

be made to agree with even the longest duration then allowed by

theologians.  For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like

Wilkinson, it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural

chronology was adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing

civilization at a period before the "Flood of Noah," and that no

such flood had ever interrupted it.  This was bad, but worse

remained behind:  it was soon clear that the civilization of

Egypt began earlier than the time assigned for the creation of

man, even according to the most liberal of the sacred

chronologists.



As time went on, this became more and more evident.  The long

duration assigned to human civilization in the fragments of

Manetho, the Egyptian scribe at Thebes in the third century B.C.,

was discovered to be more accordant with truth than the

chronologies of the great theologians; and, as the present

century has gone on, scientific results have been reached

absolutely fatal to the chronological view based by the universal

Church upon Scripture for nearly two thousand years.



As is well known, the first of the Egyptian kings of whom mention

is made upon the monuments of the Nile Valley is Mena, or Menes.

Manetho had given a statement, according to which Mena must have

lived nearly six thousand years before the Christian era.  This

was looked upon for a long time as utterly inadmissible, as it

was so clearly at variance with the chronology of our own sacred

books; but, as time went on, large fragments of the original

work of Manetho were more carefully studied and distinguished

from corrupt transcriptions, the lists of kings at Karnak,

Sacquarah, and the two temples at Abydos were brought to light,

and the lists of court architects were discovered.  Among all

these monuments the scholar who visits Egypt is most impressed by

the sculptured tablets giving the lists of kings.  Each shows the

monarch of the period doing homage to the long line of his

ancestors.  Each of these sculptured monarchs has near him a

tablet bearing his name.  That great care was always taken to

keep these imposing records correct is certain; the loyalty of

subjects, the devotion of priests, and the family pride of kings

were all combined in this; and how effective this care was, is

seen in the fact that kings now known to be usurpers are

carefully omitted.  The lists of court architects, extending over

the period from Seti to Darius, throw a flood of light over the

other records.



Comparing, then, all these sources, and applying an average from

the lengths of the long series of well-known reigns to the reigns

preceding, the most careful and cautious scholars have satisfied

themselves that the original fragments of Manetho represent the

work of a man honest and well informed, and, after making all

allowances for discrepancies and the overlapping of reigns, it

has become clear that the period known as the reign of Mena must

be fixed at more than three thousand years B.C.  In this the

great Egyptologists of our time concur.  Mariette, the eminent

French authority, puts the date at 5004 B.C.; Brugsch, the

leading German authority, puts it at about 4500 B.C.; and

Meyer, the latest and most cautious of the historians of

antiquity, declares 3180 B.C. the latest possible date that can

be assigned it.  With these dates the foremost English

authorities, Sayce and Flinders Petrie, substantially agree.

This view is also confirmed on astronomical grounds by Mr.

Lockyer, the Astronomer Royal.  We have it, then, as the result

of a century of work by the most acute and trained Egyptologists,

and with the inscriptions upon the temples and papyri before

them, both of which are now read with as much facility as many

medieval manuscripts, that the reign of Mena must be placed more

than five thousand years ago.



But the significance of this conclusion can not be fully

understood until we bring into connection with it some other

facts revealed by the Egyptian monuments.



The first of these is that which struck Sir Walter Raleigh, that,

even in the time of the first dynasties in the Nile Valley, a

high civilization had already been developed.  Take, first, man

himself:  we find sculptured upon the early monuments types of

the various races--Egyptians, Israelites, negroes, and

Libyans--as clearly distinguishable in these paintings and

sculptures of from four to six thousand years ago as the same

types are at the present day.  No one can look at these

sculptures upon the Egyptian monuments, or even the drawings of

them, as given by Lepsius or Prisse d' Avennes, without being

convinced that they indicate, even at that remote period, a

difference of races so marked that long previous ages must have

been required to produce it.



The social condition of Egypt revealed in these early monuments

of art forces us to the same conclusion.  Those earliest

monuments show that a very complex society had even then been

developed.  We not only have a separation between the priestly

and military orders, but agriculturists, manufacturers, and

traders, with a whole series of subdivisions in each of these

classes.  The early tombs show us sculptured and painted

representations of a daily life which even then had been

developed into a vast wealth and variety of grades, forms, and

usages.



Take, next, the political and military condition.  One fact out

of many reveals a policy which must have been the result of long

experience.  Just as now, at the end of the nineteenth century,

the British Government, having found that they can not rely upon

the native Egyptians for the protection of the country, are

drilling the negroes from the interior of Africa as soldiers, so

the celebrated inscription of Prince Una, as far back as the

sixth dynasty, speaks of the Maksi or negroes levied and drilled

by tens of thousands for the Egyptian army.



Take, next, engineering.  Here we find very early operations in

the way of canals, dikes, and great public edifices, so bold in

conception and thorough in execution as to fill our greatest

engineers of these days with astonishment.  The quarrying,

conveyance, cutting, jointing, and polishing of the enormous

blocks in the interior of the Great Pyramid alone are the marvel

of the foremost stone-workers of our century.



As regards architecture, we find not only the pyramids, which

date from the very earliest period of Egyptian history, and which

are to this hour the wonder of the world for size, for boldness,

for exactness, and for skilful contrivance, but also the temples,

with long ranges of colossal columns wrought in polished granite,

with wonderful beauty of ornamentation, with architraves and

roofs vast in size and exquisite in adjustment, which by their

proportions tax the imagination, and lead the beholder to ask

whether all this can be real.



As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of Gizeh, so

marvellous in its boldness and dignity, dating from the very

first period of Egyptian history, but we have ranges of sphinxes,

heroic statues, and bas-reliefs, showing that even in the early

ages this branch of art had reached an amazing development.



As regards the perfection of these, Lubke, the most eminent

German authority on plastic art, referring to the early works in

the tombs about Memphis, declares that, "as monuments of the

period of the fourth dynasty, they are an evidence of the high

perfection to which the sculpture of the Egyptians had attained."

Brugsch declares that "every artistic production of those early

days, whether picture, writing, or sculpture, bears the stamp of

the highest perfection in art."  Maspero, the most eminent French

authority in this field, while expressing his belief that the

Sphinx was sculptured even before the time of Mena, declares that

"the art which conceived and carved this prodigious statue was a

finished art--an art which had attained self-mastery and was sure

of its effects"; while, among the more eminent English

authorities, Sayce tells us that "art is at its best in the age

of the pyramid-builders," and Sir James Fergusson declares, "We

are startled to find Egyptian art nearly as perfect in the oldest

periods as in any of the later."



The evidence as to the high development of Egyptian sculpture in

the earlier dynasties becomes every day more overwhelming.  What

exquisite genius the early Egyptian sculptors showed in their

lesser statues is known to all who have seen those most precious

specimens in the museum at Cairo, which were wrought before the

conventional type was adopted in obedience to religious

considerations.



In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as the

fourth and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other

vessels showing exquisite beauty of outline and a general sense

of form almost if not quite equal to Etruscan and Grecian work of

the best periods.



Take, next, astronomy.  Going back to the very earliest period of

Egyptian civilization, we find that the four sides of the Great

Pyramid are adjusted to the cardinal points with the utmost

precision.  "The day of the equinox can be taken by observing the

sun set across the face of the pyramid, and the neighbouring

Arabs adjust their astronomical dates by its shadow."  Yet this

is but one out of many facts which prove that the Egyptians, at

the earliest period of which their monuments exist, had arrived

at knowledge and skill only acquired by long ages of observation

and thought.  Mr. Lockyer, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, has

recently convinced himself, after careful examination of various

ruined temples at Thebes and elsewhere, that they were placed

with reference to observations of stars.  To state his conclusion

in his own words:  "There seems a very high probability that

three thousand, and possibly four thousand, years before Christ

the Egyptians had among them men with some knowledge of

astronomy, and that six thousand years ago the course of the sun

through the year was practically very well known, and methods had

been invented by means of which in time it might be better known;

and that, not very long after that, they not only considered

questions relating to the sun, but began to take up other

questions relating to the position and movement of the stars."



The same view of the antiquity of man in the Nile valley is

confirmed by philologists.  To use the words of Max Duncker:

"The oldest monuments of Egypt--and they are the oldest monuments

in the world--exhibit the Egyptian in possession of the art of

writing."  It is found also, by the inscriptions of the early

dynasties, that the Egyptian language had even at that early time

been developed in all essential particulars to the highest point

it ever attained.  What long periods it must have required for

such a development every scholar in philology can imagine.



As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, which,

although of a later period, refers with careful specification to

a medical literature of the first dynasty.



As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions point to

still earlier events and buildings, indicating a long sequence in

previous history.



As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man of

fair and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the Louvre

or the British Museum and look at the monuments of those earlier

dynasties without seeing in them the results of a development in

art, science, laws, customs, and language, which must have

required a vast period before the time of Mena.  And this

conclusion is forced upon us all the more invincibly when we

consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier stages of

civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth

which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that

earliest civilization to this hour.  To this we must add the fact

that Egyptian civilization was especially immobile:  its

development into castes is but one among many evidences that it

was the very opposite of a civilization developed rapidly.



As to the length of the period before the time of Mena, there is,

of course, nothing exact.  Manetho gives lists of great

personages before that first dynasty, and these extend over

twenty-four thousand years.  Bunsen, one of the most learned of

Christian scholars, declares that not less than ten thousand

years were necessary for the development of civilization up to

the point where we find it in Mena's time.  No one can claim

precision for either of these statements, but they are valuable

as showing the impression of vast antiquity made upon the most

competent judges by the careful study of those remains:  no

unbiased judge can doubt that an immensely long period of years

must have been required for the development of civilization up to

the state in which we there find it.



The investigations in the bed of the Nile confirm these views.

That some unwarranted conclusions have at times been announced is

true; but the fact remains that again and again rude pottery and

other evidences of early stages of civilization have been found

in borings at places so distant from each other, and at depths so

great, that for such a range of concurring facts, considered in

connection with the rate of earthy deposit by the Nile, there is

no adequate explanation save the existence of man in that valley

thousands on thousands of years before the longest time admitted

by our sacred chronologists.



Nor have these investigations been of a careless character.

Between the years 1851 and 1854, Mr. Horner, an extremely

cautious English geologist, sank ninety-six shafts in four rows

at intervals of eight English miles, at right angles to the Nile,

in the neighbourhood of Memphis.  In these pottery was brought up

from various depths, and beneath the statue of Rameses II at

Memphis from a depth of thirty-nine feet.  At the rate of the

Nile deposit a careful estimate has declared this to indicate a

period of over eleven thousand years.  So eminent a German

authority, in geography as Peschel characterizes objections to

such deductions as groundless.  However this may be, the general

results of these investigations, taken in connection with the

other results of research, are convincing.



And, finally, as if to make assurance doubly sure, a series of

archaeologists of the highest standing, French, German, English,

and American, have within the past twenty years discovered relics

of a savage period, of vastly earlier date than the time of Mena,

prevailing throughout Egypt.  These relics have been discovered

in various parts of the country, from Cairo to Luxor, in great

numbers.  They are the same sort of prehistoric implements which

prove to us the early existence of man in so many other parts of

the world at a geological period so remote that the figures given

by our sacred chronologists are but trivial.  The last and most

convincing of these discoveries, that of flint implements in the

drift, far down below the tombs of early kings at Thebes, and

upon high terraces far above the present bed of the Nile, will be

referred to later.



But it is not in Egypt alone that proofs are found of the utter

inadequacy of the entire chronological system derived from our

sacred books.  These results of research in Egypt are strikingly

confirmed by research in Assyria and Babylonia.  Prof. Sayce

exhibits various proofs of this.  To use his own words regarding

one of these proofs:  "On the shelves of the British Museum you

may see huge sun-dried bricks, on which are stamped the names and

titles of kings who erected or repaired the temples where they

have been found....They must...have reigned before the time

when, according to the margins of our Bibles, the Flood of Noah

was covering the earth and reducing such bricks as these to their

primeval slime."



This conclusion was soon placed beyond a doubt.  The lists of

king's and collateral inscriptions recovered from the temples of

the great valley between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the

records of astronomical observations in that region, showed that

there, too, a powerful civilization had grown up at a period far

earlier than could be made consistent with our sacred chronology.

The science of Assyriology was thus combined with Egyptology to

furnish one more convincing proof that, precious as are the moral

and religious truths in our sacred books and the historical

indications which they give us, these truths and indications are

necessarily inclosed in a setting of myth and legend.[184]



[184] As to Manetho, see, for a very full account of his

relations to other chronologists, Palmer, Egyptian Chronicles,

vol. i, chap. ii.  For a more recent and readable account, see

Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, English edition, London, 1879,

chap. iv.  For lists of kings at Abydos and elsewhere, also the

lists of architects, see Brugsch, Palmer, Mariette, and others;

also illustrations in Lepsius.  For proofs that the dynasties

given were consecutive and not contemporeaneous, as was once so

fondly argued by those who tried to save Archbishop Usher's

chronology, see Mariette; also Sayce's Herodotus, appendix, p.

316.  For the various race types given on early monuments, see

the coloured engravings in Lepsius, Denkmaler; also Prisse

d'Avennes, and the frontpiece in the English edition of Brugsch;

see also statement regarding the same subject in Tylor,

Anthropology, chap. i.  For the fulness of development of

Egyptian civilization in the earliest dynasties, see Rawlinson's

Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xiii; also Brugsch and other works

cited.  For the perfection of Egyptian engineering, I rely not

merely upon my own observation, but on what is far more

important, the testimony of my friend the Hon. J. G. Batterson,

probably the largest and most experienced worker in granite in

the United States, who acknowledges, from personal observation,

that the early Egyptian work is, in boldness and perfection, far

beyond anything known since, and a source of perpetual wonder to

him.  As to the perfection of Egyptian architecture, see very

striking statements in Fergusson, History of Architecture, book

i, chap. i.  As to the pyramids, showing a very high grade of

culture already reached under the earliest dynasties, see Lubke,

Gesch. der Arch., book i.  For Sayce's views, see his Herodotus,

appendix, p. 348.  As to sculpture, see for representations

photographs published by the Boulak Museum, and such works as the

Description de l'Egypte, Lepsius's Denkmaler, and Prisse

d'Avennes; see also a most small work, easy of access, Maspero,

Archeology, translated by Miss A. B. Edwards, New York and

London, 1887, chaps. i and ii.  See especially in Prisse, vol.

ii, the statue of Chafre the Scribe, and the group of "Tea" and

his wife.  As to the artistic value of the Sphinx, see Maspero,

as above, pp. 202, 203.  See also similar ideas in Lubke's

History of Sculpture, vol. i, p. 24.   As to astronomical

knowledge evidenced by the Great Pyramid, see Tylor, as above, p.

21; also Lockyer, On Some Points in the Early History of

Astronomy, in Nature for 1891, and especially in the issues of

June 4th and July 2d; also his Dawn of Astronomy, passim.  For a

recent and conservative statement as to the date of Mena, see

Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, London, 1894, chap. ii.  For

delineations of vases, etc., showing Grecian proportion and

beauty of form under  the fourth and fifth dynasties, see Prisse,

vol. ii, Art Industriel.  As to the philological question,

and the development of language in Egypt, with the hieroglyphic

sytem of writing, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap. xii;

also Lenormanr; also Max Duncker, Geschichte des Alterthums,

Abbott's translation, 1877.  As to the medical papyrus of Berlin,

see Brugsch, vol. i, p. 58, but especially the Papyrus Ebers.  As

to the corruption of later copies of Manetho and fidelity of

originals as attested by the monuments, see Brugsch, chap. iv.

On the accuracy of the present Egyptian chronology as regards

long periods, see ibid, vol. i, p. 32.  As to the pottery found

deep in the Nile and the value of Horner's discovery, see

Peschel, Races of Man, New York, 1876, pp. 42-44.  For succinct

statement, see also Laing, Problems of the Future, p. 94.  For

confirmatory proofs from Assyriology, see Sayce, Lectures on the

Religion of the Babylonians (Hibbert Lectures for 1887), London,

1887, introductory chapter, and especially pp. 21-25.  See also

Laing, Human Origins, chap. ii, for an excellent summary.  For an

account of flint implements recently found in gravel terraces

fifteen hundred feet above the present level of the Nile, and

showing evidences of an age vastly greater even than those dug

out of the gravel at Thebes, see article by Flinders Petrie in

London Times of April 18th, 1895.