tured sentiments by forms of animals; their | (Euseb. and Salmas.) It must probably ever hieroglyphics were wrought in stone, (Ann. xi. 14). The Egyptians claim also, he adds, the invention of letters, and say that the Phoenicians found legible characters in use there, which they bore to Greece. It is remain doubtful whether Thoth compiled his History from mere pictures alone; but if otherwise, he could not have invented hieroglyphic or alphabetic writing. Was Thoth really an Egyptian? evident that the accurate historian holds their The Syro-Phoenicians, then, had the repuclaims to hieroglyphics and to letters in two tation of the alphabet, not the Egyptians; different degrees of credibility. We shall but the Egyptian literati or priests used refer to the second point hereafter. pictures figuratively, symbolically, and phoLucan affirms that, by tradition, the Phoe-netically; and their progress towards letters nicians first assumed to fix sounds by rude is unquestionable. So far as we see, howeletters; adding, that the Egyptians up to that ver, these modes were imperfect, voluminous, time had merely sculptured animals on stone and clumsy in the last degree, and employed preserving a mystic tongue (magicas lin- only in religious and state documents, public guas) Pharsal. I. i. c. 12. edicts, contracts, &c. originally. The Nabathæans and Brahmins furnish somewhat parallel cases. The Phoenicians, says Athenæus, were the inventors of letters, (l. 2. Deipn.): Cadmus was a Phoenician, as stated by Clemens Alexandrinus (Str. 1. 1.): Herodotus calls the Phoenicians the bearers of letters; Diodoras calls them Pelasgian: i. e. from Eastern Coasts. Plato, as we have noticed elsewhere, speaks of the invention as reputed Syrian; and the Phoenicians were Syrians, as settled in that country. Pliny calls the invention Assyrian; and these were the lords of Syria, and used its language in common life. The passage in Justin, "Imperium Assyrii qui postea Syri dicti sunt," and the converse reading of Scaliger, "Syrians called afterwards Assyrians "-(Solin.), together with the distinction made by Herodotus, "called Syrians by the Greeks, by the bar. barians Assyrians," leave no doubt here. We are farther to observe, that our gene ral notion of the Assyrians, as Heeren observes, is drawn from the Jews, as one, and a conquering nation; whereas the Greeks applied the name to various nations on the Euphrates and Tigris; but his remark must be received with limitations, as Dionysius, KEP. KE; and as not extending to the Latins, for Justin after Trogus Pompeius, L. 1. 2, 3, and Velleius Paterculus, L. 1. 6, 7, refer to the Assyrians proper. κεί The whole, then, of these historical testimonies are perfectly reconcileable with each other, and all unite against the Egyptian claim as to the original letters. Of these hieroglyphics such infinite varie. ties exist as to make us suspect the necessity of infinite numbers of systems. Des Guig. nes, it is true, pretended to have found a key of 214 characters in those, as in the Chinese; but his work, however curious, has never been published, though it might be worth bringing forward now; and he wrote in ignorance of recent discoveries. We cannot wonder then that the infinity of signs produced infinite confusion; and if moderns, as Kircher and others, have read the philosophy of life and the psalms of David in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, it is consoling to know or suppose that the vulgar of Egypt were no better informed. But we have no trace at all of approximation between the Phoenician letters and the Egyptian picture-writing, or the letters immediately derived from this. The origin of letters therefore is not traceable to a system of picture-writing. Farther, as presumptions, Admitting the stone in Athanasi's collec. tion to the antiquity claimed for it, we have there proof of hieroglyphics in the time of Joseph at oldest. The oldest proof of Letters is of the time of Cadmus, i. e. in round numbers, 200 years later; and Job, who wished his words written down, engraved with a pen of iron in lead and on the rock, is admitted of superior antiquity to Moses and the Exodus. He was a borderer of Chaldea, where Egyptian hieroglyphics are not pretended to have been used, but where Letters, if not really invented there, were, from the very circumstance of this attribution, in early use. The Assyrian letters, according to Herodotus, were used monumentally by Darius the Persian, and his predecesThe σroxton yoap of Sanchoniatho, in re- sors' monumental inscriptions in Persia are cording Thoth's invention, though rendered in the cuneiform character; no way resem by Mr. Cory-Letters, might refer equally bling the old hieroglyphic pictures and picto signs in arrangement, as of the Zodiac. ture-writings, but proceeding on a different Moses, apparently without a miracle, since he has not recorded it, could read the Tables of the Law. He might have learned them either in Egypt or in Syria; in Midian with Jethro, or else after the Exodus in the desert. Mahommed acquired them similarly. system entirely; for they unite aspirates with archives, nor writing! and were, at that time, vocals, rudely but ingeniously, to produce behind even the Greeks in this branch of sounds, and combine elements into alphabetic art! How then could they invent Letters, words. unless they meant only their own demotic? The words of Job, ch, xix. are indicative and this perhaps is the invention which they only of a public inscription; as in lead, on claimed according to Tacitus, and in igno the rock but his wish that his adversary rance confounded those with the Phoenician would write a register, or book, of his errors, letters, which they also claimed, as we find (and Job alone could have borne the reading elsewhere. Egyptian literature was un. of it,) intimates that letters were then suffi- krown to antiquity as to ourselves, and the ciently common to be applied to private Coptic MSS. are evidently, from the characpurposes; and this holds even on the suppo. ter, as above shown, late. Had they then sition that the imaginary adversary of this any literature after those early traditions? (presumed Arabian) prince was a prince We may presume not. also. The imperfections of the Egyptian system Admitting, then, Thoth's invention of become obvious to us in its earliest extant hieroglyphics, the above shows that Letters and known contact with foreigners-the time were freely in use out of Egypt within about of Herodotus. It was then such, that we a century and a half after Thoth's invention; have only to choose between wilful falsifica. and it is not unreasonable to suppose that a tion by the priests, or ignorance in these of considerable time in those early ages elapsed their own historical events. This last is the between the first formation; and the free use, conclusion of Herodotus and Heeren; and of an alphabetic system-possibly the cunei- the increase of their symbolical characters, form, as we have shown, and perhaps others probably designed to remedy the evil, has also. (Diodorus, 1. 5.) If there is any probably aggravated it. We doubt not they truth in the tradition of centuries between the deceived themselves as well as others. Egyptian and Phoenician inventions, the It is soundly remarked (Edinb Rev. Oct. cuneiform, or some such, must have been 1836), that the Egyptians and the Chinese, almost or quite cotemporary with the hiero- having proceeded to a certain point, went no glyphic system. Had this last been long farther in their improvement of written cha. previous to the other, it must have spread; racters. But the causes of this stoppage for other nations would have borrowed the we suspect to be essentially different in the idea, even if the key of the existing system two cases. Upon Egypt we have dwelt had been withheld from them, and they would have made something resembling, if not identical with it. But the alphabetic system, if discovered soon after, would naturally prevent its diffusion. Picture-writing therefore was not, so far as appears, the prototype of the alphabetic writing in Phoenicia, in Persia, or in China. Consequently it is not the primary, and first essentially necessary modification of pictures into writing. How then came it so in Egypt? We answer-For the essential purposes of mysticism and concealment only; to uphold the power of the priests, by incapaci tating rivalry in the knowledge of archives and documents; to render their knowledge a miracle, their rites and ceremonies awful; their origin, hopelessly obscure; their influence, universal and supreme. largely. In China, where the doctrines of Confu cius were found so essentially servicable to the state, that the government embraced and interlaced itself with his moral system, as others have done with religious—and where in consequence, as Mr. Davis well observes, (China, vol. ii. p. 47, &c.) no change or improvement, however slight, is permitted in that moral system; it is but extending, we submit, the same principle, to suggest, that the written medium of those morals is for the same reason unchangeably retained. If the more refined age and superior intellect of Mencius was confined to illustrating rather than enlarging on Confucius; and the sus picious internal policy of China long after the death of Mencius, hesitated to grant him the due honours of his career; we can wel! imagine how sacredly they would maintain their written barrier against all innovation from succeeding mental efforts, both at home and from other countries. The absence of all literature is a suspicious fact. Hermes or Thoth set the example; 36,000 volumes of the Hermesians followed, we are told. Yet the priests could tell He. One scriptural word, tending to establish rodotus nothing of their 330 kings, because the Christian church, has been extended to they left no monuments, as Moeris and others support also the extravagances of modern did. Then the hieroglyphic system was not priesthood and assumption. One scriptural so old as the 330 kings; a ridiculous conse-word, tending to establish the authority of the quence; and also, the priests could have no ancient dispensation, has been misunderstood And what, we would fain know, was the as giving also the sanction of Deity to the explained them as to be mistaken by manextravagance of Egyptian priesteraft. The kind. NO, or wisdom, of Egypt-does it signify the real wisdom of that land in all those object of all this secresy, unless the Egyptian denunciations that mark only her tendency priests were ashamed to own the truth? to long established and besotted corruption? How could they, like the Brahmin, devote Is it, can it be, from a thousand texts, in any themselves to science, yet trample out, like way understood to refer to more than her ac- him, every spark of the torch of history. quisitions, perverted and abominable, of Every gleam of the truth has been thrown knowledge and skill? Yet the word has for but by the stranger; and the bare registered ages, perhaps unconsciously, given a sort of chronology of the last trusting votary of their divine sanction to the exaggerated adminis- race makes loyalty infinite, and elongates antration of antiquity. There is enough on the tiquity into the impossible. Manetho is soil of Egypt to impress the mind, enough in placed on one horn of this dilemma; he did her memorials to bewilder thought. Her not understand his own labours, or he has relics are as fragments of eternity; her tem-left it unintelligible to us. ples the home of infinitude. Time has toiled The alphabetic characters were co-existthere vainly for ages only to confess the ent in the land with their own hieroglyphpower of Man; and nature has heaped for ics--and from one to two centuries is the centuries the boundless sands of the desert utmost of exception:-yet the Priests of upon her bosom but to preserve and deve. Egypt preferred the latter. This preferlope his mightier works. The history of ence of the complicated to the simple, of the earth may sleep beneath, but its acts are bu- inefficient to the effective, arraigns their ried, its language unknown to the ear; the judgment if not their honesty and see the voice of Egyptian knowledge is an unbroken, empty details even thus, and so carefully unbounded silence; and her pregnant hiero- recorded. Their adherence to this pictureglyphics but the painted shroud of the Past. writing evidently arose from its concealment Her being, like that of her own pyramids, and mysticism; and because this, and no stands vast and objectless; the mountain- other, in all its varieties and derivations was inansion of a vacant cell; framed for blind essentially the Priestly character, the sole awe, or admiring science, to eternize a mon. HIERO-glyphic in the world. It will probaarch by enshrouding a beast. Modern dar- bly never afford any thing beyond a mere ing has lifted the veil of that Holiest Holy, document or collateral fact. and found Deity fled, though the shrine of glory remains; the empty presence of a nameless worship, whose rites are mockery and its signs unmeaning! Admit the magnificence of Egypt: yet what was Egypt itself? A trampled slave, the living footstool of every conquerer. She was the vacant womb, the of the Hebrew, the Yang of Chinese creation, void, passive, and shapeless, for foreign energies alone to act upon: "a servant of servants" was the doom of the child of Ham; and even Wilkinson, an enthusiastic but a candid and sagacious scholar, rejects, in his splen did and eloquent, and almost rival labours, the wild vision of her native glories. Egypt with all her splendours has never benefited mankind: her existence was selfish, as a conquered colony. The toil of her subjects raised those masses for the stranger; and her sciences, commerce, conduct, and foreign intercourse, were all created and perfected by these or else lan. guished, unimproved and unnourished, on her barren breasts. Her genius for war and warlike array was rivalled, if not first infused, by the barbarous Scythian: her commerce was Tyrian; her merchandize Arabian: her letters Syrian, if not her hie roglyphics also; her astronomy was Chaldean; her reformed calendar Persian; her architecture Ethiopic; her anatomy and But for her intellectual powers: the wis- medicine, alike Babylonian: but these were dom of Egypt was secresy; her Philosophers a dubious guess and an arrogated ignorance; sought concealment from the world. Did the former was only of exterior form, the Greece and Persia, did Israel or China, latter guarded from improvement under pain Moses, Thales, Pythagoras, Confucius, or of death. Her art of design was but formal Zoroaster hide, like the Brahmins, their measurement; her colouring, of brilliant, knowledge from others, and from them selves? The reservations of Herodotus' time became mystiscism and priestcraft in the days of Plutarch and Horapollo; and Manetho, the priest, himself either mistook his native and priestly symbols, or but so half-impossible hues. A stranger taught her need to re-mete the flooded soil by geometry; to fix quantities; to note the cardinal points; divide the calendar; and calculate the rising of the stars; a stranger too and beyond her soil, carried mathematics Granting then to Egypt, as all must grant, the possession of every marvel of her wonder-fraught realities, still we must not We are aware that this low appreciation of Egyptian intellect may appear extravagant or paradoxical; but, it must be recol lected that the Egyptians have been viewed imperfectly, with a feeling that the unknown was sublimity; and stand enlarged to superhuman proportions, like the shadow on the Brocken, even by the first, far, misty rays that fall upon them. The preservation to this day of those monuments, the praise of antiquity, and the very improvements other nations upon parts of their system, conspire to present them as through a haze to our imagination, and elevate them, if we may carry on the simile, by the consequen! refraction. Credit might be due to them had they originated the sources of those improvements; but, since the labour was not theirs, the light it affords sheds a false lustre upon them. of all to perfection. Her skill in sculpture and led from the day. Thus, all they sought the goldsmith's craft were surpassed by was resuscitation, not resurrection; and Etruria and even India; and her distinctive this was all they made of the sublime docboast of the Pyramid itself was eclipsed by trine of an eternal and immaterial existence, the labour of the Pali shepherd. which they borrowed to debase, dowu to the Of what then can the Egyptians boast? | level of their own comprehensions, unable -They who regarded fire as a devouring to grasp this purer tenet of the Assyrian's animal were no better in their stored ages creed. of traditionary wisdom than the first savage ignorance of Terra del Fuego. If such was their natural philosophy, could their genius, their morals, their worship, or their and cannot grant her the praise of wisdom psychology raise them higher? and intellectual eminence, due, not to her, Their very literature was either borrowed but to her masters from every age. We or unimproved in the land that brought it judge from what is before us: of that which forth; their picture symbols repelled the is concealed we can frame no conclusion, two Syrian inventions of syllabic writings beyond the stigma justly attached to the and alphabetic characters. Their divisions ignorance that hid itself in systematic con of hieroglyphic and hieratic were, first to cealment. record, and the next to conceal, themselves. Their morals were but laws; their philosophy, a deeper darkness; their theology, a confused phrensy of material and immaterial; their worship, a debasement of humanity; their revelations, mystery. Even their priests were, not the guides, but the masters of the people. Religion with them was the golden chaos of their craft; the human form was but a barrier against worms; the human soul, the navigator of a dismal swamp; the aim of human hopes, to resuscitate a beast; and the shrine erected to the worship of Deity itself, was deemed honoured and sanctified by the residence of a brute. With such notions as these, and who can wonder that their subterraneous chambers were one delusion more? or who can doubt that their ideas of futurity clung to Be ing with an intensity proportioned to its dark, if not dreaded incertitude? Why should we Greece, that in ignorance claimed every then foudly persist in believing that the im- earthly fiction as her own, in equally vain mortality of the soul was their doctrine; and ignorance has pandered to the historic agcolour this with our own impression of that grandisement of Egypt. She listened to truth, when it is clear that its durability was the voice of tradition till she deemed it inall they contended for; that they held its spired, and gazed upon splendours till she migration and return to the body after three raised them to divine Her vanity first appro thousand years; and to prevent its disap. priated for her proper antiquity what she had pointment, embalmed the body, lest it should received from others, but received in legiti perish from the worms. They furnished mate descent; her royal gods and godlike the chambers of the dead more carefully abominations, her own especial deluge and than the houses of the living; and this, it autocthonic dreams. When this theme is thus evident from the act itself, in a doubt- was exhausted, she flew to marvelize Egypt: ful and dark-uncertain but trembling-the tale of mysteries has at length had its hope; a hope too, which the earth-worm day, and more sober evening approaches to might mock, and a reptile annihilate immor- dissipate the parhelion's beams. Preceded tality! It was clearly, then, not a belief of by the torch of Arabian curiosity, the inves. futurity-a place for souls-but a mere tigation of Europe has penetrated the Pyra yearning after life itself, in the body, even mid, copied the inhumed images of the royal amidst chambers of sempiternal gloom. chambers, and sought out the mummy from Existence was their want, prolonged or re- its catacomb: and what is the development? newed-stil dear to their earthly aspira- A broken coffin, a contracted dynasty, mitions, whether sunk to the brute or shroud. Inute and inane triflings of feebly consecrated ! superstition! With all that has filled our soon after the Vandals and Gepida. The ears and bowed our sight down, even to Burgundians, in Gaul, became Christians earth, we shall find, to reward our abject at the beginning of the fifth century, and belief, that the forms of Greece were but the Suevi, in Spain, about fifty years later. a glowing phantasy, and Egypt one mighty At the conclusion of this century and the and magnificent LIE! beginning of the next, the Franks were converted, and they were followed by the Alamanns and the Langobards. In the seventh and eigth centuries followed the conversion or the Bavarians; in the eighth, that of the Frieslanders, the Hessians, and the Thuringians; and towards the ninth, that of the Saxons. In Britain, the Anglo-Saxons had received the Gospel about the conclusion of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century. In the tenth century the Danes became Christians; at the beginning of the eleventh, the Norwegians: in the second half of the eleventh, the Swedes and the Icelanders. An EGYPTIAN SOCIETY has lately been formed at Cairo, and their first Report is already published. Fer the particulars we refer the reader to our Literary Notices, under the head of Egypt. ART. IV.-Deutsche Mythologie, von Jacob The period of the establishment of Christianity among the Slavic and Hungarian tribes varied from the eighth to the eleventh century. The Lithuanians were not converted till the beginning of the fifteenth ; and the Laplanders are scarcely more than half Christians at the present day. Just as in our island we have districts THERE is no subject of inquiry relating to the history of a people more interesting than its popular mythology and supersti tions. In these we trace the early formation of nations, their identity or analogy, their changes, as well as the inner texture of the national character, more deeply than in any other circumstances, even than in language itself. Not many months have passed by where the people are much more ignorant since our attention was called to one division than in others, and where the popular superof this subject by the curious work on the stitions still retain their hold on the peasan. old legend of Friar Rush, by Ferdinand try, so was it with the Teutonic tribes in the Wolf and Dr. Endlicher.* We have much earlier ages of their Christianity. In the pleasure in being able to state that these midst of the Christian peoples, there were two distinguished scholars have now nearly still districts where the light of the Gospel ready for publication a much more com- had not penetrated. Thus in Neustria, the plete work on the same class of the beings banks of the Loire and the Seine-in Burof this popular creed, including all the gundia, the Vosges-in Austrasia, the Arlegends of the German Rush and the Eng. dennes were inhabited in the sixth and selish Robin Goodfellow. But the subject venth centuries by people who were mere has been brought before us in all its gener- Pagans. Similarly their dwelt pagan tribes ality by the arrival of the long-expected towards Friesland and in Flanders, long af Mythologie of Dr. James Grimm. Our ter the surrounding tribes had been convertopinion of Dr. Grimm's work may be stated ed. From this circumstance it arises, that in a few words-we consider it to be one of among some of the earlier monkish writers the most admirable books that Germany has we have notices of heathen customs which ever sent us. But it is in itself too exten- they had had an opportunity of witnessing, sive, and at the same time by far too compact, and allusions to articles of the older creed to allow of our attempting to give an analy. which still in their time survived partially, and which now throw great light on the history of Teutonic Mythology. sis of its contents. Christianity was first introduced among the Teutonic tribes about the beginning of the fourth century, when a few missionaries carried it to the banks of the Rhine and to the Alamanns and Goths. Among the latter people it obtained a permanent establish. ment during that century, being first adopted by the West-Goths, and afterwards by the East-Goths. In their footsteps followed There were cer However, when Christianity was fully established, in their conversion the old pagans had received a new belief, without quitting altogether their old one. tain beings of the ancient creed who were worshipped as gods, and with whom the people were only acquainted through their priests; and with these Christianity of course clashed at its first introduction. But there *See Foreign Quarterly Review, Part XXXV. was a much larger class of beings of the po pular belief, with whom the people supposed P. 180. |