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Meantime, the people were either more rigidly governed, or suffered to degrade themselves in idleness and in sensuality; while the higher classes, served by greater hosts of slaves, who relieved them from all dependence upon their inferior fellow-countrymen, gave themselves up to the most extravagant luxuries and the most degrading debaucheries. When the Persians came, five centuries and a quarter before the end of heathenism, the Egyptians were conquered, as if they had become too wasted to defend themselves.

Such testimony as can be found or imagined concerning the decline in knowledge and in spirit under which the ancient nation succumbed, at last, corresponds with the course of events just rapidly defined. It seems that some efforts, at length, were made to withstand the dangers surging about the habits and the institutions which had once bid fair to stand, like the pyramids, for ever. Some laws that may have belonged to this later period are evidently the result of suspicions aroused concerning the permanency of the system according to which the Egyptians lived. One forbade physicians to use any other remedies than those prescribed in the sacred volumes of the priesthood; and another, mentioned by Plato as a masterpiece of legislation, confined musicians and artists to the rules established for them of old.48 Customs, arts, and sciences of foreign nations were

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47 Diod. Sic., I. 82.

Winckelmann, Storia delle Arti, 48 In his Laws, Book II. See Lib. II. cap. 1.

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more carefully rejected, as though they had been fatal; and this hostility to other institutions than their own continued long after independence was lost beyond recovery. 50 All this time, the knowledge of the priests, like the industry of the lower classes, was wearing away. It could not altogether perish; but from the moment of its slumber in the midst of the gains it had made, it was unprofitable, except as an assistance to the accumulation of fresher stores. There had never, however, been more than a beginning made amongst the Egyptians, even in the the sciences and arts through which they obtained their greatest renown in antiquity; unless the moving of enormous stones and the carving of gigantic monuments be taken for one of the ends of architecture.

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Yet it is in the religious knowledge of the Egyptians that the plainest signs of imperfection and incapacity are to be perceived. With some pretension 51 to remembrance of the truths, once, undoubtedly, in the possession of their progenitors, concerning the creation and the government of the world, the worship they rendered was more local than that of almost any other nation,52 at the same time that its objects and its doctrines testified to the deeper degradation of their souls. They knelt before the brutes

49 Herod., II. 91.

50 Müller's Anc. Art, § 217, III. 51 As in the famous inscription at Sais: "I am all that has been, is, and will be; but my robes have never yet been lifted by any mortal."

Plut., Is. et Osir., ed. Reisk., Tom. VII. p. 396. See Bunsen, Egypt, etc., Vol. I. pp. 385-387.

52 See the lines of Juvenal, Sat. XV. 35 et seq.

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they were meant to command; they would have preserved the bodies they tenanted, as if their only immortality were that of the silent tomb, which might perhaps become the cradle of a second life, fleeting and hopeless as that from which they were set free.54 The marks of the worst bondage that man can be forced to bear are almost as deplorable in Egypt as in India. Whatever intelligence the priests may have obtained was either shrouded entirely from the view of men, or, if brought to light at all, was expressed in characters which few besides the priests themselves could read. The worshipper beat his breast despairingly before the altar at which he offered sacrifice; 55 and in the same mournful spirit, the image of a dead man was introduced at the more joyous festival.56 The higher classes struggled with their own alarms; but the lower had the terrors of the higher besides their own to bear, or rather to attempt in vain to bear. Fear, creeping from a false faith, coiled around the gifts of nature,57 as well as

53 This strange adoration of animals has been variously explained. One account is founded upon its different objects in different places, that the animals worshipped by the various native inhabitants were admitted by the stranger priests into their sanctuaries in order to make the people more willing to bear with their religion and their dominion. Heeren's Researches, etc., Egypt, Sect. III. ch. 2. Diodorus (I. 89) says the early kings introduced the worship of different animals in order

that the people, inclined to be rebellious, might be kept disunited. It would not be worth while to repeat these things, if they did not throw light upon the spirit of the Egyptian rulers.

54 See Herod., II. 123. Cf. the account which Diodorus gives of the judgment of the dead, I. 72, 92. 55 Herod., II. 40. 56 Ibid., II. 78.

57 Wheat and barley were both forbidden fruits. Herod., II. 36.

the enjoyments of men; and a braver race than the Egyptian would have quailed before the fangs for ever threatening their destruction. As soon as the monarchy was loosened, it seemed as if classes and principles, arts and mysteries, were struck with the chill of mortality.

The civilization of Egypt was the transition from an earlier to a later period of human progress. Its beginning in obscurity, its procession in war and superstition and despair, its division between a monarchy, a priesthood, and a warlike caste, are the indications of a disturbed and an unsettled condition as that from which it sprang and in which it issued. But there is no despair so deep, no superstition so abject, no war so cruel, as to resist the light which shimmers along the horizon of the darkest centuries. The intellectual and the material expansion of human energies was prepared among the people by the Nile; and many of the forms they wrapped and buried, as if in faith of eternal death, have had their resurrection.

CHAPTER IV.

PERSIA.

"Les liens de la société unissent un plus grand nombre d'hommes." — TURGOT, Disc. en Sorb., II.

FAR back, beyond the reach of history, but where the traditions of many people united as on common ground, there were preserved, in ancient as in modern times, the vestiges of those miraculous catastrophes by which the earth was wasted and its inhabitants were dispersed. In the midst of general sinfulness and universal terror, the cities of Babylon and Nineveh were founded, the one on the Euphrates, the other on the Tigris, by the leaders of two different races, which were presently joined together in a single empire, called the Assyrian, under Ninus and Semiramis the queen. Some years or centuries afterwards, another division occurred, transforming the single empire into the three empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Media; each of which obtained, in turn, a greater or less predominance over the rest. But of these successive conquests it is impossible to give any assured narration; the more so, that other nations, such as

1 See Herod., I. 95. Diod. Sic., agreeable, and sometimes beautiful, II. 21, 28. Vell. Pat., I. 6. was written about A. D. 30. It begins at a period antecedent to the foundation of Rome.

The last-mentioned authority is of the historian Velleius Paterculus, whose Roman history, always

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