MR. ZINCKE ON EGYPT.*

WE have in this volume a very thoughtful, almost exhaustive, treatment of a subject too often handled by mere dilettante writer*, who dismiss as unworthy of notice the problems with which they are unable to cope. " 'Tis the taught alone that profit by teaching," says a keen observer ; and we think it is Jean Paul Richter who asks, if the thousand and one earthquakes which have upheave& his soul have not left the soil the richer. It is with a mind deeply impressed by considerations of this character that Mr. Zineke approaches his subject, and though every chapter in the volume is. a distinct essay, the whole book is on a uniform plan, with a leading purpose throughout. That purpose is to solve the whole- problem of the ancient civilization of Egypt and of its * Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Eedird. By F. Barham Zincke. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1871. present state of decadence,—to take into consideration the relation of the Hebrew to the Egyptian economy, and the relation of both to the dispensation under which we live. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy features in this certainly re- markable book is the fearlessness with which the author looks facts in the face. It is refreshing to find an English clergy- man devoted to the highest interests of humanity utterly un- trammelled by professional fetters. We may demur to some of his conclusions, but that they are the result of much close study and honest conviction the reader cannot for an instant doubt. Beginning as far as possible at the beginning of things, Mr. Zincke occupies himself in the first place with the original forma- tion of the land, the source of whose mighty and life-giving river has been an unsolved problem for at least six thousand years. "The first question which will force itself upon the traveller in Egypt," writes our author, is,—" how was the valley he is passing through formed ?" And he proceeds to investigate the answers given to that question since the time of Herodotas, giving the results of his own research.

"Egypt is the gift of the Nile," be writes, in a much larger sense than any which Herodotus had in his mind when he wrote those words. It is the gift of the Nile in a double sense. The Nile, in the first place, cut out the valley, and then filled it with alluvium ; the valley filled with alluvium is Egypt. And he then supports this statement, which at first sight may appear simple enough, but on which much depends, by indubitable geological evidence, and from the testimony written on granite in remote ages. The whole chapter on this subject is full of interest. Mr. Zincke con- cludes, "For myriads of years this mighty river has been bring- ing down from the highlands of Abyssinia and Central Africa its freight of fertile soil, the sole means of life, and of all that embellished life, to those who invented letters and built Karnak." He then proceeds to investigate the manner in which in Egypt man was affected by nature. "The environment of the land by the desert," he observes, "gave it that security which alone in early days could have en- abled nascent civilisation to germinate and grow." It possessed, moreover, a soil and climate which enabled its inhabitants to de- vote themselves to a variety of pursuits, instead of their being tied down to the single task of producing food ; and in this respect he contrasts the difficult growth of civilisation in Europe, "where the struggle for bare existence so taxed the energies of the people, that long centuries after Egypt was at the zenith of its greatness, the mental culture of the few was possible only at the cost of the degradation and misery of the many." Mr. Zincke traces how the early hindrances to advance- ment, which arose to most nations out of the difficulties of com- munication, were hindrances of which Egypt practically knew little, nature having conferred on her ready-made means of com- munication so absolutely complete and perfect, "that she was enabled at some remote pre-historic period to emerge from a poli- tically embryonic condition, and to form a well-ordered and homo- geneous State, embracing a population of several millions." Another point, by no means an insignificant one, which struck Mr. Zincke's imagination while studying the effect of their natural surroundings upon the Egyptian mind, was the absence of all mountain scenery. "We may," he says, "be absolutely certain that had they lived in an alpine country, though they might have commanded the requi- site materials on easier terms, they would never have built the Pyramids, for then an Egyptian pyramid would have been a pigmy monument by the side of nature's pyramids ;" but he argues, built as they were in Egypt, and seen from the neighbourhood • of Memphis and Haliopolis, they were veritable mountains. Man had entered into rivalry with Nature, and had outdone her. flow the simple, unchanging forms of Nature around them influ- enced their habits as a social community and their character as a people is thoughtfully worked out, as also the manner in which their religions belief was evolved, in which belief the old Aryan thought of a life beyond the present held so conspicuous a place. And here, we may observe, there are two chapters in this work we could wish to commend to the attention of every honest clergy- man. In them Mr. Zincke, himself a clergyman, does not hesi- tate boldly to face and, as we think, account for the difficulty which must have occurred to all students of the Mosaic dispen- sation,—namely, its absolute silence on the subject of a future life. That silence could not be accidental or unpremeditated, since clearly the office Moses held was to form a nation out of a mass of men whose strongest hopes and fears under their Egyptian taskmasters must have been associated with another life. It was the governing idea of every branch of the Aryan family, "occupying," says Mr. Zincke, "in their organized thought the position the vertebrate skeleton does to the animal organization,"—

“ Those races of animals which have not arrived at vertebration are the lowest forms, with the fewest specialized organs ; still they appear to have a kind of tendency or virtual capacity for it. Just so of the mental condition of some portions of our race with respect to this idea of a future life. There are some whose thought is so rudimentary that it has never yet grown into this form ; but they are the lowest minds ; still, even they have a kind of tendency towards it, and of capacity for it—though, indeed, several such tribes and people have died out without ever having attained to it. And so will it be with many of those who, at the present day, are in this condition. They will be swept away by those who possess the higher form of organized thought, without their ever reaching this point in the progress of moral and intellectual being. If the question be asked—Why we do ourselves believe in a future life ? The answer is—That we believe in it for the same reason that Homer, and Virgil, Oheops, and Darius, Perna, Arminius, and Galgacus believed in it—that is to say; because our remote, but common ancestors, had passed out of the state in which thought is chaos, and had reached the state in which thought has begun to organise itself ; and because the vertebral column of the form in which it had with them begun to organise itself was belief in a future state. None of all of us, whether dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, the Thames, or the Nile, could any more get rid of, or dispense with, or act independently of that formative column of thought, than our animal constitution could of its formative column of bone. Belief in God, in moral distinctions, in personal re- sponsibility, in the supremacy of intelligence—that is to say, that it is intelligence which orders, and co-ordinatea God, the universe, and man, would all be powerless and unmeaning, were it not for this belief in a future life. These, and other beliefs may feed and support it ; but it acts in, and through them, and gives them their chief value. It puts man in permanent relation with God, and the universe. Hitherto nothing else has done this. Without it these other beliefs would have been mere chaotic elements of thought."

Then since clearly the mission of Moses was to establish a' people, and also to declare a revelation, the lightest sentence of which should outlive the accumulated wisdom of Egypt, why was this central thought absent? We have not space to follow Mr. Zincke in his masterly solution of the difficulty. To select isolated passages would be to spoil the entire thread of his argu- ment. We must content ourselves with commending it in its entirety to the thoughtful reader, merely observing that cleverly and thoughtfully as the whole subject is treated, we think Mr. Zincke has injured his position by overstating his case. The Mosaic dispensation as such doubtless ignored the doctrine of a future life. But when Mr. Zincke states that the idea was steadily ignored in the whole course of a national litera- ture, embracing history, legislation, philosophy, poetry, morals, and above all religion, through a range of a thousand years, we think he has altogether overshot his mark. After all, those reci- pients of a creed whose mental calibre is the highest and their insight keenest are its truest exponents. And the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was clearly a master in the faith it was no longer his desire to defend when he says incidentally of his forefathers, yet distinctly, and with no thought of the idea being controverted, "many were tortured, not accepting deliverance,

that they might obtain a better resurrection." Clearly he was not writing to a people to whom that idea would come with any sense of novelty.

To return to the subject more immediately before us. Mr. Zincke traces the intimate connection between the Egyptian belief in a future life and Egypt's greatest achievement, the art of writing, and the influence of this discovery on the other nations of the earth. We have a good deal of light thrown on the whole subject of Egyptian belief by knowledge gleaned from the "Book of the Dead," one of the Egyptian

sacred scriptures, which our author compares to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the purpose in both books, though with an interval of some six thousand years between them, being the same. Each, says Mr. Zincke, presents a picture of the hindrances

and difficulties both from within and from without, and of the requirements and aids of the soul in its struggle to attain to the higher life. But before going into the subject of their belief, ob- servances, discoveries, and general civilization, there arises the ques- tion, Where did these Egyptians come from originally? This people, once so high, now sunk so low, to whom the world owes so much, at what period and from whence did they people the Valley of the Nile? That they were of Aryan origin Mr. Zincke brings the most crucial tests to prove. Their religion, morals, science, architecture, all point in that direction. He inclines to the belief that they entered Egypt by way of the Red Sea, and that the balance of historical argument is in favour of Abydos having been the first centre of Egyptian power. At all events, this entrance into Egypt must have taken place, he considers, at so remote date, "that the physical features of the world might have been somewhat different to what they now are. The Dead Sea might not then have been thirteen hundred feet below the level- of the

Mediterranean, and the isthmus we have just seen canalised might then have been navigable water." Mr. Zincke proceeds :— "But it will make the point in question more distinct if I endeavour to speak more precisely about it. The immigration into Egypt could not possibly have been an off4tet of the Aryan immigration into India, which resulted in the formation of the Hindoo, or of its westward out- flow which resulted in the formation of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. These dispersions must, we know, speaking broadly, have been contemporaneous. Their date, however, as has been already observed, was so remote that no one branch of the race retained the slightest trace of a tradition of the original seat of the race, or of the way in which they themselves came to their new home, or of any par- ticulars of the occurrence. We will suppose, then, that the event to which they all belong, and of which each is a part, occurred 20,000 years ago. I merely use these figures to make myself intelligible. But the Aryan immigration into Egypt belongs to a still more remote epoch, and to another order of events. In the stratifications of history its place is far lower down. It is a part of what forms a distinct and more primitive stratum. Again, for the purpose of making my meaning distinct, I will say that it belonged to a series of events which took place 30,000 years ago. The peoples and civilization of Europe, as they now exist, are to be traced back to the first-mentioned of these two world-movements. To that which preceded it may possibly be referred some fragments of a previous condition of things in Europe which have been enigmas to his- torians and ethnologiats, as the Etruscans, the Finns, the Laps, and the Basques. The Egyptians may have been a part of that first original wave coming down freely of their own accord into Egypt. Or they may have been driven out of Persia, or from the banks of the Indus, at the epoch of the rise and outflow of the second wave. At all events, this is clear, that they were no part of the second wave itself ; because their language was older than the Aryan tongue of that epoch. As it was also older than that of the Semitic peoples, they, too, must have come into being after the Egyptians."

When we first opened these pages, and saw that many of them were devoted to the Pyramids, we were inclined to think we had had the subject presented to us ad nauseam, and were little disposed to believe any fresh good derivable from its consideration. We can only assure those who may be in a similar frame of mind that they will be agreeably disappointed. If Mr. Zincke has not exactly succeeded in presenting us with many fresh facts concerning these ancient monuments, he has at least poured a flood of fresh thought over them. But it is the same with almost everything he touches ; he seems to possess the quickening power which makes the dry bones live. We all knew long ago that there was some truth in the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it might be a subject of carious speculation how many travellers have gazed at the wooden statue in the Boulak Museum without investing it with flesh and blood as our author has done, looking at it, as he himself says, till the soul returns to it. Nothing perishes in Egypt, and the wooden statue which for thousands of years has lain unmolested in its tomb "bears no stain of time upon it." The sense of the ancientness of Egypt was always upon our traveller. As he stands before the obelisk at On, he remembers "that it had been there for centuries when Abraham came down into Egypt, that Joseph and Moses had read its inscriptions word for word as the erudite Egyptologer reads them this day;" that there Thales, Solon, Pytha- goras, and Plato had all studied, and smiling at himself, involun- tarily shifts his position, as if half conscious he "was obstructing the view of Joseph or Herodotus, or standing in the way of Plato or of Moses." We cannot follow Mr. Zincke further. We would gladly notice much that he has said of the ancient architecture of this extraordinary people, of their knowledge of hydraulics, and their practical application of their knowledge, of which he gives remarkable instances, proving beyond controversy the very high state of civilisation to which even at a very remote period they must have attained.

With reference to the Suez Canal, after remarking that there is nothing new in the idea, the old Egyptians having fully debated the plan and rejected it only from motives of policy, the idea itself having been eventually carried out and through communica- tion kept up by Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Saracens, Mr. Zincke adds :—

"The only absolutely new point is that it is a salt-water, and not a fresh-water canal ; and with respect to this, I think we may feel certain that if old Rameses, or Necho had engineered it, instead of M. Lesseps, it would not have been as it is. They would have decided in favour of fresh water, because they could then have constructed it at half the cost ; and would, furthermore, by so doing, have had a supply of water in the desert, sufficient for reclaiming a vast extent of land, which would have more than repaid the whole cost of construction. Instead of cut- ting a canal deep in the desert at an enormous cost, they would, as it were, have laid a canal on the desert. This they would have done by excavating only to the depth requisite for finding material for its levees, and for the flow of the water which was to be brought to it from some selected point in the river. It is evident that this kind of canal might have been made wider, and deeper, than the present one at far less cost. The river water would then have filled the ship canal, jut as it now does the sweet-water canal parallel to it. The sweet-water canal now reaches Suez. A sweet-water ship-canal might have done the same. As far as navigation is concerned, the only difference would have been that locks would have been required at the two extremities, such as Darius and Ptolemy had at Armee. These looks would have been at Suez, and at the southern side of Lake Menzaleh. But the diminution in the cost of construction, say £8,000,000, instead of £16,000,000, would not have been the chief gain ; that would have been found in the fact that the canal would have been a new Nile in a new desert. It would have contained an inexhaustible storage of water to fertilize, and to cover with life, and wealth, a new Egypt."

The conclusions at which our author has arrived on many social and political questions are well worth attention. He has taken his experiences as a Suffolk vicar and an Eastern traveller, and

fusing the two together, has given us the result. We would com- mend to more than one of those quiet, unobservant human beings who are content to rest and be thankful,—quite sure that our English agricultural labourer has a very good time of it,—the thoughts Mr. Zincke has written down in his chapter on " Achmet tried in the Balance with Hodge." He has expended much thought, too, on growth as an essential element in the life of Christianity.

We can but hastily allude to this, but there are a few valuable pages on the manner in which the schools of Alexandria were eliciting the life while they thought only to stereotype the doctrines of Christ.

The wisdom of Old Egypt was great, but we have seen the end of

arranging society (of however high an order) in the iron frame of caste, and petrifying all knowledge in the form of immutable doctrine. We have before said that we do not by any means endorse some of the deductions Mr. Zincke draws from the facts before him. And we almost venture, even in the presence of such considerable scholarship, to doubt if he quite realizes where some of his conclusions would land him, but we heartily commend his

delightful book as a fresh pleasure to the thoughtful reader.