From the commencement of the Egyptian monarchy under Menes to the death of Alexander the Great, when it was finally extinguished, the Chevalier's theory requires 3,000 years at least in uninterrupted sequence; and this portion of time must be farther, and even indefinitely, enlarged, if we consider that before the union of the upper and lower countries, under that sovereign, Egypt was not a newly planted region, but had been long settled, and, though divided into separate provinces, was governed by a race of native princes, who possessed vast landed property, and aspired to dy. nastic honours. Now, Alexander the Great died at Babylon, in the year 325, B.C., in the year of the world 3681, as we commonly calculate, and by ordinary computation, 2025 years after the flood; if we take, therefore, the 3000 years required by the hypothesis, from his death to the accession of Menes, we shall reach the year of the world 975, and thus make the commencement of the united Egyptian monarchy to fall about 45 years after the time assigned to the death of Adam, in the scriptural lists, and 81 years before the birth of Noah, and, as a consequence, 681 years before the deluge. How far beyond this we should go in order to plant a people in the valley of the Nile, and to allow time for the growth of those "princely families who were the great landowners of the provinces, and who called themselves Egyptian kings" (ii. 183), we are not told; but from what we have stated it will be seen that it is impossible to accommodate M. Bunsen's chronology to the system in ordinary use, since the necessities of his theory would oblige us to transcend the era of the creation of man. Some of the more obvious difficulties might be removed, perhaps, by the substitution of any of the three Oriental epochs, which are all more extensive than our own, and would widen the area of time sufficiently to admit of the colonisation of Egypt after the flood; but as none of them would give what the Chevalier insists upon having, viz., 2000 years in a consecutive series, and without the intervention of the flood, before Moses, it would manifestly serve no practical purpose to adopt them, instead of the vulgar and more limited canon in common use. The very terms of his proposition, indeed, forbid the attempt

to reconcile his views respecting the date of the commencement of the Egyptian Empire, to the opinions hitherto received upon that head, for we are not only not troubled with Mizraim, the second son of Ham, and the grandson of Noah, who, in less ambitious histories, is said to have planted Egypt, and to have bestowed his name upon both the country and the people, but we are expressly told that the establishment of the age of Menes is merely the settlement of a particular point in Egyptian chronology, and not the determination of the date of the arrival in Egypt of an Asiatic horde from the East, and, consequently, of the common history of the people known to the world in aftertimes as Egyptians. On the contrary, it is assumed throughout, and is even a neces sary condition of the Chevalier Bunsen's thesis, that Egyptian society did not begin with Menes, the first king, but that the elements of political life must have existed long before his day to enable him to do what he did do; but how long is the difficulty, which he can only remove by disregarding what has been hitherto received as truth, and substituting for it certain bold conjectures which, in the present state of our knowledge, are absolutely incompatible with any system of chronology admitted among men, learned or unlearned. The Chevalier has somewhere said that in inquiries of this kind a thousand years more or less are of very little consequence; and as he tells us in his first volume, that the history of the Egyptians "shows them to belong to the great middle age of mankind" (Introduction, p. xxxii.) we need not further embarrass ourselves by an attempt to elucidate a subject that only becomes darker and more perplexed, the more it is meddled with. The flood is in great disfavour in Germany at this moment, and is particu. larly disliked by the whole brood of Egyptologers in that country. The Chevalier Bunsen discards it altogether; but we would not be doing justice to him or to ourselves, if we did not allow him to state, in his own words, how he proposes to deal with this little impediment to the establishment of his chronological deduction :

"People are ashamed of being ignorant in matters of research, with which the sound common sense of mankind might long ago

have grappled; but professed scholars even, especially in Germany, do not blush to parade before all Europe a scandalous ignorance of Egyptian reseach, and to talk with castearrogance of so-called contemporary monuments,' and 'pretended explanations of the hieroglyphics. When, however, this will not answer their purpose any longer, they come forward, especially in England, with theological suspicions, and charges of infidelity-men who never gave a single proof of being able to read and critically explain the records of their own faith in the original. . .

Yet these are the fairest opponents amongst those who doubt the correctness of Egyptian archæology. What will become, they ask first of all, of the Bible dates? And what becomes of the flood? exclaim the zealots. Two thousand years' history and chronology before Moses! and that from one for whom the Bible chronology prior to Solomon is not good enough! And here a wide door is opened for sarcasm and scoffing; for there are many zealous souls who desire nothing better than to prove that the 'scoffer,' 'the God-despiser,' 'the infidel critic,' himself deals uncritically. In such persons' eyes, however, every man is naturally a scoffer who declares he does not believe anything (i. e., whatever) they assert, however devoid it may be of sound foundation, and however insignificant in itself. Opponents of this class will naturally consider us prejudiced throughout in favour of the Egyptian authorities, of which we were the first to prove the historical authenticity. The affair, however, is no affair of ours. right, or be we wrong, it is truth of which we are in search. What we contend against is, indifference to the discovery of truth in the old traditions. It is the deceitful pretence of real knowledge which we have zealously laboured, and that not for a short time, to expel, even in the domain of the oldest chronology, from its prescriptive strongholds, to offer it up to the manes of Eratosthenes, of Scaliger, and of Niebuhr."-(Vol. ii. pp. 417-19.)

....

Be we

We say nothing of the enthusiasm which induces a man of learning to offer incense to the "manes of Eratosthenes, Scaliger, and Niebuhr," nor of the scholastic affectation that leads him to disregard the testimony of Moses, who certainly knew more about Egypt than any of them; for we feel that it is no business of ours to quarrel with the Chevalier Bunsen's tastes; but we would venture to remark on these not very decently-worded sentences, that the men whom he derides as zealots, and treats as fools, are as much in earnest about the truth as he can be. They may differ from him as to what the truth is, or should be in

the estimation of responsible beings, but he has lived long enough in England to know, that to believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures is no proof of either ignorance or fatuity, and that individuals whose erudition is little less profound than his own would not be thought the worse of amongst us if they considered it an exercise of talent as useful to mankind to strengthen the bulwarks of the religion they profess, as to elucidate, by conjectural emendations, the monumental records of a people whose vanity on the subject of their ancestry was notorious and ridiculous, and whose best mental qualities were clouded by credulity, superstition, and blindness. We have no desire to undervalue the labours of so distinguished a man on a field that he has made almost his own, and who has established so many claims upon our generosity; but we must state, in plain terms, that if his conclusions offer a positive violence to the religious convictions of the people of this country, they will be rejected without hesitation, and will deserve to be so. It can signify very little to the great mass of mankind in Christian countries when Menes reigned, who preceded or who succeeded him, or even whether there was ever such a man at all; but it does concern them intimately to be assured that the great lawgiver of the Hebrews was what he represented himself to be, and not an impostor. Whatever comes of the monuments, the inscriptions, and the dynasties, we cannot afford, as yet, to put them in the place of Moses and his writings. If the modern German scholars will not allow us to consider him an inspired man, who was under the guidance of a heavenly power, and must be indulged with the liberty of sneering at our simplicity when we do so, they cannot prevent us from asking where, in that case, he got that collection of strange and varied knowledge which he communicated to others, and which distinguishes him so remarkably from all the profane writers of antiquity. The story which he tells it is impossible he could have invented. It is too complicated and too multifarious for that; and if he has only bequeathed to posterity a series of old legends which had been preserved among the descendants of the Noachida, can any good reason be assigned why we should not put as much

credence in them as in the infinitely more apocryphal traditions preserved in Egyptian papyri, or engraved on Egyptian tablets, stele, and tombs? We know of none; and it seems to us to be unwise, to say the least, to treat one species of ancient testimony as worthless, which has long enjoyed the reverence of mankind, and to exalt another upon its discredit, which has no greater claim upon our confidence, in order that a chronological theory may be established, which, were it corroborated to-morrow, would add little to our positive knowledge, and nothing to our positive happiness. We must be allowed to doubt, also, the expediency of reviving those claims to a fabulous antiquity that distinguished all the nations of the old world before the rise of the Greeks, and of leading us back to that state of helpless ignorance and stupid wonder, from which a more correct knowledge of their annals had enabled us to escape. Egyptology is not only a fashionable study at present but a fascinating one; and we are bound to add, that amongst ourselves it has been heretofore prosecuted in a spirit of becoming respect for the paramount authority of the Hebrew writings, from Prichard (“Mythology," 1817), with whom a scientific analysis of Egyptian philosophy and literature, properly speaking, began, down to Mr. Osburn, whose very interesting treatise ("Ancient Egypt, her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible," 1846) is devoted to the confirmation of the Mosaic narrative; and it will be a subject of sincere regret to those who entertain a rational desire to see the history of Egypt cleared of that mystery which has so long enshrouded it, should the mistaken zeal, and the misdirected enthusiasm of a few learned foreigners, succeed in surrounding it with incredible properties, and in identifying it with repulsive theories. It is for this reason that we have dwelt at such length on the Chevalier Bunsen's system of chronology. His high personal character and his wonderful attainments necessarily impress much weight on his individual opinions; and many unreflecting persons will adopt his views, without considering that if they were to prevail over those which have been received unsuspectingly by the great body of Christians, for 1850 years, they would leave the modern man in a worse

condition than the ancient man, by sapping the foundations of his reli gious belief, and replacing his positive faith by an objectless pantheism.

We must pass over with a mere reference the remarks on the pyramids, which are decided to be works of the old empire, and demonstrated to have been the rock sepulchres of the kings, enclosed in enormous cases of masonry. Colonel Howard Vyse's labours have been of great service here, and have enabled the author to give a description of those stupendous struc tures, which is perfect in all its details. The drawings and illustrations are likewise very distinct, and we learn with some interest that a word which has been long naturalised in every European language, and has so perfect a Greek look and sound, as pyramid, is, after all, pure Coptic, being a compound of the definite article pe and rama, height. the lofty (ii. 389), just as Herodotus's piromis (ii. 143, Πιρωμις δε εστι κατ' Ελλαδα γλώσσαν, καλός καγαθος) is resolvable into pe rome, the man. We must also be contented with a mere allusion to the admirable dissertations on the Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth, both of which display in a marked manner M. Bunsen's analytical talent, and proceed to offer a few general remarks on the Hyksos, or middle period, according to our author, of the Egyptian monarchy, on which he entertains opinions that are in a great measure proper to himself.

At a period in the history of Egypt, the precise date of which cannot now be ascertained, but which Prichard places hypothetically in the year of the world 2071, or about 11 years before the call of Abraham, the old empire, under the successors of Menes, fell into decline, and was subdued by a body of foreign invaders, known as the Hyksos, or Royal Shepherds-for such is the meaning of the words Hyk and sos, of which the designation is composed. It is in a quotation from Manetho, given by Josephus, that the first mention of these people is made, and the Jewish historian obviously borrowed it, with the design of applying it to his ancestors (govor), whose Egyptian career, he thought, would be thus made to look more honourable in the eyes of the Gentile nations, for whom he wrote. This pious fiction, however, has been long exploded, as

39

it is quite impossible to reconcile the condition of the captive Hebrews with that of the triumphant and dominant Hyksos, who held Egypt in subjection for centuries, and made her princes tributary. That this is a very intricate piece of history cannot be denied; but unless we suppose the Hyksos rule to have ended a considerable time before the settlement of the Israelites in Egypt, instead of being, as many believe, contemporaneous with that event, we cannot understand why it should be said, when the children of Jacob went down there, that "shepherds were an abomination unto the Egyptians.' The cruelties perpetrated by these strangers on the native population were great, and will account for this feeling; but it is not easy to see why, if the reigning Pharaoh in Joseph's time was a shepherd prince, he should put into the mouths of his brethren a speech that could not fail to be highly offensive to him. We confess, then, that without overlooking the chronological difficulties that arise from the adoption of such an opinion, our own impression is, that the Hyksos must have preceded the Hebrew shepherds by many years, perhaps by half a century; and that Mr. Bryant's view of the matter that to the Israelites was assigned the district they had latterly occupied—has always appeared to us an exceedingly probable one. That the royal shepherds were not Hebrews is certain; but who they were it is not so easy to tell. They have been called Arabs, Scythians, and even Assyrians; but M. Bunsen affirms that they were, according to the testimony of the Egyptians themselves, "neighbouring Semitic tribes from the north-east of Egypt-that is, Canaanites, associated possibly with the Bedouins of Northern Arabia and the peninsula of Sinai" (vol. ii. p. 421). We know not how this positive statement is to be established, as all that Manetho says of them is, that they were an obscure race of men (avlewwo το γενος ατιμοι), and that they came from the east (εκ των προς ανατολην μερων); but however this may be, it seems certain that they established themselves in lower Egypt, and having chosen a king, that they fixed his residence at Memphis, the ancient royal city of the native Pharaohs, from which convenient locality they governed the whole country. We learn, however,

"The notion of a total subversion of life and manners is wholly unwarranted—a pure fancy. Although tributary, the greater part of the land of the Pharaohs obeyed its native princes. The seat of the shepherd sovereignty was a fortified camp. They held possession of Memphis, but their residence was a vast fortress on the frontiers of the Syrian desert, not far from old Pelusium, the very spot, probably, where, in the latter centuries of the old empire, the Heracleopolitan princes founded an empire of their own. The southernmost point they occupied was the primeval royal residence in lower Egypt, Memphis. From hence, says Manetho, they held the Egyptians in subjection, and took tribute of their princes. Not only did the Thebans then continue to exercise the sovereignty in the Thebaid as princes of a tributary Egyptian empire, but also the Xoites in the Delta. Manetho expressly mentions several tributary princes; and had he not done so we should have been obliged to assume the existence of a northern Egyptian dynasty."-vol. ii. p. 422.

Everything connected with the Hyksos dominion in Egypt is obscure and intricate, and has been felt to be so by all the writers who have treated of it; but the commonly received opinion is, that the shepherds were mere intruders on the Egpytian soil, the possession of which they held by the power of the sword alone-a body of foreign military governors, in fact, who had forcibly seized the country and usurped the supreme authority-and that they continued to be wholly distinct from the native Egyptian population, though their kings, whose names appear in the regal lists, reigned collaterally with the native Theban, but tributary princes, by whose exertions they were ultimately expelled. The duration of their rule it is diffi cult if not impossible to fix accurately;

and it is upon this point that M. Bunsen differs most widely from his predecessors. Their stay in Egypt has been generally assumed to have been about 250 years; but though this number would be undoubtedly more convenient, in all respects, than one materially lower or higher, it must be confessed that it rests on no satisfactory grounds. Manetho, in the passage already referred to as being preserved by Josephus, gives 511 years; but this also is rejected by M. Bunsen, whose view of the matter, if we take it up correctly, is this:—

The Egyptian monarchy, from Menes to Alexander, is divisible into three periods the old, the middle, and the new empires-making in all a period of 3555 years; and the middle period is that of the shepherd rule, which lasted for at least five full centuries, perhaps nine" (ii. 416). Ultimately, and after much critical discussion, the period of 922 years is adopted, and Manetho's number of 3555 years for the duration of the entire empire is thus made up :

It would thus appear that the character of the shepherd sovereignty in Egyrt has been wholly misunderstood heretofore, chiefly from the desire of the older Christian writers, and especially Eusebius, to accommodate the figures of the Alexandrian chronologists to the limits of the Hebrew computation of time. But all this is now corrected the shepherds take their proper place in Egyptian history, not as the temporary occupants of the Egyptian territory, but as its permanent lords for nearly a thousand years. And it is in the "General Introduction to the Middle and New Empires," at the beginning of the third book, and which is prefatory to the announcement of this discovery, that those bitter reflections will be found to which we have before alluded, and which contrast so strongly with the habitually calm tone of the Chevalier Bunsen's writings. Upon this conjectural restoration of a history and a chronology, we do not feel that we are called upon to add anything to

what we have already said on the subject of M. Bunsen's chronology generally; but it will now be seen why he requires that extension of time which would carry him beyond the Flood, and why he has been compelled to disown that event altogether. If the middle empire, or shepherd period, needed a thousand years, or thereby, it was necessary to get them somewhere; and if this period of a thousand years be interposed between the old and the new empires, it must, of necessity, push the commencement of the first empire far beyond any date in the world's history, which a postdiluvian calculation will allow. It is this necessity, then, which has led the Chevalier to quarrel so loudly with the received opinions; to put himself and Lepsius against Moses; and to ask, more haughtily we think than the doubtful nature of his conclusions will justify, an acquiescence in his views, which, in this country at least, will certainly not be granted. Those who can command the necessary leisure, and who desire to know on what grounds our author rests his hypothesis respecting the Hyksos, we must refer to the work itself, where they will find a multiplicity of curious and minute details of which it is not practicable to give any account in such a notice as this; and we shall now close our remarks on a volume of extraordinary erudition, by the statement of a few general reasons, unconnected altoge. ther with chronology, which lead us to question the truth of those bold historical assumptions on the shepherd rule in Egypt, which the Chevalier Bunsen believes that he has invested with the immoveable characters of substantial and documentary history.

Wherever the shepherds came from, and whoever they were, it is agreed that they were not Egyptians, but strangers who invaded the land, and who neither understood the language, nor practised the rites, of the people. It is impossible now to ascertain their number when they took possession of Egypt, and reduced its princes to a state of vassalage, though Mr. Bryant, upon what authority we know not, makes it 240,000 (vi. p. 165); but it was probably not greater than a nomadic tribe could contrive to feed and keep together; and it is generally admitted, that the ease and rapidity with which they effected their conquests,