for the waters to subside, and the country to bud and bloom anew, as with the life of spring.2

But the very rising of the flood, to which the Egyptians owed their lives, obliged them to undergo unusual toils; to build their dwellings with especial care, and to seek expedients of cultivation and sustenance which were necessary to no other people, at least to no other so numerous. As population multiplied, labors increased; trade followed upon agriculture, and larger numbers than the land seemed able to support found means to live by various employments of a lower or a higher kind. The temple rose in solemn and stupendous forms. The city gathered round it in masses of walls and columns, that still uphold themselves. The long canal was dug to supply the thirsty fields in which the living toiled. The pyramid was piled in enormous proportions upon the sands, to give the dead a resting-place. Upon all these a countless multitude was set to labor, day after day, and century after century, at the same time that the priests who ordered the temple were learning the secrets by which it might be constructed and hallowed; at the same time, also, that the warriors and the kings of a later generation, for whom the pyramid was reared, were struggling in arms to drive out invaders, and keep the land and the people of Egypt to themselves. The field, the market, the conflict, the places of study and of mystery, were all alike, to one and to another class, the scenes of industry, and, in a greater or less

2" Where Nile, redundant o'er his summer bed,

From his broad bosom life and verdure flings,

And broods o'er Egypt with his watery wings," etc. — GRAY.

degree, of power. The feeling for nature, which a wider and a more majestic country might have inspired, did not touch the Egyptian, who, in the early times, at least, was driven to toil and enterprise. One sort of labor was for the people, and another for their rulers; yet the hum and the haste of a busy race must have been, originally, the lot of all. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the inaction of another hierocracy will not be found amidst the nation to which we now are turning.

The Egyptian conqueror, Ramesses, or, as he was commonly called, Sesostris, of greater fame than any king before him, was said to have carried his arms into India, and to have left behind him there some of the monuments he was in the habit of erecting to his own glory3 in the countries he subdued. It would be difficult to believe, though this tradition were true, that the institutions of India were much affected by the transitory conquests of the Egyptian hero, or, on the other hand, that the institutions of Egypt were changed according to the system which prevailed among the distant people who were too

3 The inscriptions upon them were to "the king of kings, the lord of lords, Sesostris." Diod. Sic., Hist., I. 55. One of these has been found near Beirout, on the old Phoenician coast. There were other traditionary expeditions from Egypt to the East before Sesostris. Osiris, the god, had penetrated as far as the Ganges, and Osymandias, the king, had conquered Bactria. See

VOL. I.

6

the account of the earlier Sesostris (of the 12th dynasty), in Manetho.

Diodorus Siculus (the Sicilian), just quoted, wrote a universal history, extending from the earliest period to that in which he lived, near the close of the old era. Of the fragments of his forty books, the most valuable relate to the history of the East, Egypt, and Greece.

feeble to defend themselves. Such an expedition, however, would scarcely have been attempted without some previous intercourse between the countries. The priests of one nation might have learned their secrets, in part, at least, from those of the other; or both, as is more probable, may have been instructed from a common source. There may even have been, for a time, a continued communication from one priesthood to the other, although it must have suffered from interruptions which would finally put an end to it altogether. But the very name of Sesostris, and the achievements recorded of him as a single man, point to differences too great to admit of any close relations between the institutions which gave rise to them and those which were established by the Brahmins. One race may bear resemblance to many other races under nearly similar circumstances of origin and development; but it is because the human body and mind are everywhere formed according to principles so similar as to lead to similar results among different nations, be they ever so widely separated.

The institutions of India, in the immovable and unmixed character of the hierocracy they established, have deserved the precedence in our inquiry; but Egypt, whose people were regarded of old as the most ancient of the universe, will always be considered as the peculiar land of antiquity. It seems especially to date its origin from the cloud-land into which the eye of man can never penetrate. Its

4 Aristot., Pol., VII. 9. 5.

civilization was supposed to have come from the South, and to have been spread through different settlements in the valley of the Nile. Coming with stranger priests, as is most probable, or with stranger warriors, it was, at all events, derived from abroad, and was diffused amongst various states, in part already existing, in part formed by the new comers. The priests were regarded as the founders of religion and law; and the warriors, who may or may not have accompanied them, as the instruments of conquest, the servants, in fact, of the civilization to which the priests alone were thoroughly admitted in the beginning. The superstition of an early race, and the force by which the victory would be gained, in case superstition failed, were at the foundation of the Egyptian institutions.

The earliest chiefs, or kings, undoubtedly taken from the priests, were afterwards, perhaps in the beginning, considered to be divine in character or in authority. As the divided states were united and reduced to more moderate numbers, the power of the warriors, by whose victories the union, however imperfect, may have been accomplished, would become more prominent, so that their voices would be heard in the election of their monarch. Many years, which we cannot now number, must have elapsed before the kings were chosen directly from the warriors; and even then the choice would be restricted to the most eminent men of the order thus climbing to the royal power, which the priests, under the claim of gods, had

5 Diod. Sic., III. 3.

hitherto monopolized. A great name, Menes, is recorded as "the first of men" who reigned over Egypt, and he may have been thus described because he was the first of the warriors who came to be king. He is supposed to have been the founder of the unity in which the multiplied states of Egypt were combined in one great nation under their inherited institutions."

But the materials for the foundation which Menes completed had been prepared through centuries of an earlier civilization. Though he was a warrior, the chief of some unknown and successful revolution, the priests could not have been overthrown. They would still remain at the head of the progress which had been made amongst themselves; and their knowledge still seemed indispensable to the security of the newly established empire. They became the interpreters of religion and the ministers of law; their laws, indeed, remained, for the most part, unchanged; while the power they possessed in virtue of science, the only science yet existing, would be altogether undisturbed. The authority of superstition was not to be shaken off; and the kings were submissive to the deities of the priests, if not to the priests themselves. Besides, the monarchy was, at first, elective; dependent chiefly upon the suffrages of the priest

6 Herod., II. 4.

7" Menes created in the Egyptians a sense of their national unity distinct from all other nations, as Charlemagne did in the Germanic tribes." Bunsen, Egypt's Place

in Univ. Hist., Vol. I. p. 444, Eng. translation. If he did so, it was a great work; for perhaps no nation, except the Jews, ever had so much unity as the Egyptians.