THE HISTORY OF EGYPT FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL THE CONQUEST BY SAMUEL SHARPE. A NEW EDITION. LONDON: EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. M. DCCC. XLVI. PREFACE. AMONG the histories of the ancient world those of the Jews, of Greece, and of Rome will always hold the first place in value; that of the Jews because it contains the history of our religion; those of Greece and Rome, for the poets and historians, the almost perfect works of art, and the quantity of knowledge that those nations have left us, and for the share that they have had in forming our opinions and guiding our tastes even in the present day. After these three histories, that of Egypt may certainly claim the next place, from the influence which that remarkable country has had upon the philosophy and science of the world, and from the additions it has made to the great stream of civilization, which, after flowing through ages of antiquity and fertilizing the centuries through which it has passed, is even now in its present fulness still coloured with the earliest of the sources from which it sprung. Architecture and sculpture, the art of writing and the use of paper, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, indeed we might add legislation, and almost every art which flourishes under a settled form of government, either took its rise in Egypt or reached Europe through that country. Many of our superstitions, and some of our religious truths, are first met with in Egyptian history; and one hundred references to the Bible in these pages show how much light Egypt and the Scriptures may throw one upon another. But it is not as the birthplace of art and science alone that Egypt now claims our attention. When Greece afterwards rose, its poetry, philosophy, history, eloquence, and pure taste in art threw the more mechanical knowledge of Egypt into the second rank. But no sooner did Greece itself sink, than Greek literature took refuge in Alexandria. Philosophy then becomes coloured with the mysticism of Egypt, and literature is waited on by its criticism. To the Alexandrian copiers and libraries we mainly owe our knowledge of the great Greek writers, and our earliest manuscripts of the Bible; while whatever help we have received from grammarians and critics, whatever in history we have gained from chronology, in poetry from prosody, in geography from mathematics, in medicine from anatomy, was first taught in Alexandria. Moreover, after the rise of christianity, Alexandria no longer played that second part in civilization, nor furnished the handmaid sciences alone, but had its own schools in philosophy and sects in religion. In Alexandria took place that important union between Judaism and Platonism which should receive careful attention in the history of philosophy and of the human mind. Hence the Jewish scriptures became first known to the pagans, and the doctrine of one God was perhaps less unwillingly listened to by them in consequence of its being united to some of their own philosophical opinions. The pagans were beginning to drop their polytheism, as Platonism appeared in the writings of the Jews; and both may thereby have been at the same time better fitted for the truths of christianity. The later Platonists of Alexandria have perhaps hardly had justice done them by the moderns, either in regard to the improvement which they wrought in paganism, or the share which they have had in forming the present opinions of the world. Taking the doctrine of Plato as the foundation, borrowing something from the Jews and something from the other sects of pagans, they formed a philosophical religion, which we may think of little worth when offered as the rival of christianity, but which we ought to admire as surpassing any other sect of paganism. In Gnosticism we see another form of philosophy, an eastern mysticism, in which science was studied as a help to magic and divination; which had at the time, and no doubt still has, some share in moulding the opinions of Christians. It was common among the Jews at the time of the apostles; Paul censures it by name, and John indirectly. It was the parent, or perhaps the sister of Manicheism, and it has left its traces among several sects of Christians who seem to look for some other source for the origin of evil than the will of a benevolent Creator. The older monuments of Theban sculpture teach us the names of numerous kings of Thebes, of Memphis, and of the Arab or Phenician shepherds; and though there may be doubts as to the order in which |