away, while hieroglyphic horses' limbs and human limbs seemed interspersed along the whole line after the manner of Egypt on the Rosetta stone." We cannot transfer the inscription to our pages, but any one who has seen a facsimile of a stone rudely engraved with oriental characters, and noticed how they sprawl and straggle over the surface, will be aware that with a little help from the imagination, they may be made into legs or arms or almost anything you please. Of this help Mr. Forster is not sparing. To the two rude characters which he chooses to call the legs of a horse, he adds in his drawing the head, mane, body, tail, and two hind legs, and invites his readers to consider the whole as a representation of Pharaoh's horse, made in imitation of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, by the Israelites after passing the Red Sea. A little further on he fixes on two more uncouth characters, which have no resemblance to the legs on Egyptian monuments, but which by setting upon them a body, a head, and a pair of arms, become Pharaoh returning on foot from the Red Sea, after his horse had been drowned there. This ingenious way of manufacturing evidence might be greatly extended. In Roman inscriptions it is very common to meet with L L, which archæologists are generally content to take for letters and read libens lubens or lubentissime; but Mr. Forster has only to consider them as a pair of human legs, which they much more resemble than the characters in the Sinaitic inscription, get an artist to draw a figure upon them, and there is no knowing what curious results may be obtained. We have already seen how careless Mr. Forster has been in rendering the passage from Beer, on which this whole doctrine of hieroglyphic figures rests. He has not dealt more fairly with the words of Cosmas, in his argument respecting the antiquity of these inscriptions. Cosmas says (see note, p. 35), that the whole region was full of Hebrew inscriptions, "preserved even now, as I think, for the sake of the unbelieving." Even to draw an inference from this as to their having had the appearance of being near 2000 years old in the time of Cosmas would not be very logical; but it is inexcusable on the strength of these words to tell the reader that Cosmas “has described the inscriptions as wearing early in the sixth century, all the hoar marks of dilapidation consequent ordinarily upon the lapse of ages and the waste of slow natural decay." P. 27. As to the question of absolute antiquity, no one who has paid any attention to palæography will readily believe that they could have endured in a legible state for two-andthirty centuries. Mr. Forster appeals to the Egyptian monuments, and triumphs in the admission of their high antiquity by the savans of the French expedition, whom in his candid and courteous phrase he designates as "the veriest revolutionary atheists." But there is no analogy in the two cases. The Egyptian inscriptions are deeply and carefully cut, not scratched or dotted on the surface like most of the Sinaitic, and above all in Upper Egypt and Nubia were not exposed to rain, which in Lower Egypt has been fatal to their durability, and must have had the same effect in Arabia. The alphabet by which Mr. Forster reads these inscriptions has been put together on no principle but that of apparent resemblance, being compounded of Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Himyaritic, and the demotic character of Egypt, which last was not in use till the time of Psammiticus. He tells us, indeed, that inscriptions in the Sinaitic character are found in the quarries of Masara and at Phila; but we have the authority of Lepsius for saying that this is an error, and that the inscriptions in question are in the demotic character. The language he calls Arabic, but it is not a language spoken or written in any one age or country; and even when he has called to his aid everything that can be found in an Arabic dictionary, he cannot put his readings together into any grammatical structure or arrangement, but is obliged to suppose that his primæval language "was one of those dialects which by the nearly total absence of prepositions, conjunctions, inflexions, declensions, moods, tenses, voices, prefixes, affixes, and suffixes, prove their near relationship to a common origin, the one language and one speech which obtained before the confusion of tongues at Babel." This account will only increase the reader's wonder at the ingenuity with which he has contrived, from this disjointed mass of words, to extract the well-compacted sentences of his transla tions, which he gives without any mark of doubt or hesitation. The most formidable difficulty, however, remains. The children of Israel were known in Egypt as Hebrews; surely then they spoke Hebrew, and if they wrote at all, wrote Hebrew. How is it that the Sinaitic inscriptions, instead of being in the old Hebrew, that is, the Phoenician character, are in an alphabet made up from those of half a dozen nations? how is it that their language is the barbarous jargon described by Mr. Forster, instead of the Hebrew of the Pentateuch, in which, certainly, neither voices nor tenses, prepositions nor conjunctions, affixes nor suffixes, are wanting? Cosmas had given an explanation of the extraordinary multitude of the Sinaitic inscriptions; the Israelites first learned to write by the communication of the two tables, and not being apt scholars were detained in the wilderness forty years, till they had perfected themselves in the art. Having quitted Egypt in haste, and being cut off from communication with it, we may well suppose they had no stock of papyrus, and therefore used the rocks of the Desert as a sort of gigantic slates, on which to practise at once their drawing and their writing lessons. But Cosmas supposed the inscriptions to be in Hebrew, and, therefore, his hypothesis will not help an author who denies, what indeed is evident, that either the character or the language is Hebrew. Mr. Forster, however, has a resource. It is said in the eighty-first Psalm"This was a statute for Israel And a law of the God of Jacob This he ordained in Joseph for a testimony, When he went out through the land of Egypt: The sudden change of person makes it difficult to fix the connexion of the last line; it seems most probable that it is spoken in the person of Jehovah, to whom the language of Egypt, not being that of his chosen people, which the history always represents him as using, is anthropomorphically said to be barbarous and unintelligible. Mr. Forster sees in it the record of a fact never hinted at in the history, that for the purpose of insulating his chosen people, God miraculously changed their speech at the time of the giving of the Law, from the primæval language which they had used in common with the Egyptians, to the Bible-Hebrew. Has he then suddenly gone over to the German Rationalists? and does he consider all the pure Hebrew etymologies, from the names of Adam and Eve to those of Jacob and his sons, as fictitious, and invented subsequently to the revelation of the new language made at Sinai? Were the people of Israel left to learn this language by ordinary methods? Then the cruelty of the Roman emperor who set up his edicts so high that no one could read them, and beheaded those who disobeyed them-the tyranny of the Normans who introduced French into their legislation and jurisprudence -were nothing compared with the hardship inflicted on the chosen people by having a law, guarded with the severest penalties, promulgated in a language which they did not understand. How is it that we never find them excusing themselves by the very natural and just plea of ignorance, or murmuring at a lot much more severe than the privation of the flesh-pots of Egypt? Or if the millions of the people were supernaturally inspired to speak Hebrew, how has the history been silent respecting a miracle far more stupendous than that of the manna and the quails? But it is needless to urge objections against an hypothesis which is evidently only a desperate attempt to cut a knot, in which the author has entangled himself. The identity of the Egyptian language with that of the Sinaitic inscriptions is an essential part of Mr. Forster's system. For if Misraim, the grandson of Noah, did not introduce it into that country, it will be difficult to believe that it is the one primæval speech which his father Ham must have used; and if the Israelites brought it with them from Egypt, they must have learnt it there, being themselves of Aramæan stock. Now Mr. Forster has decided this language to be mainly Arabic; consequently there arises a necessity to prove that the old Egyptian was at once Sinaitic and Arabic; and this naturally brings us to the second part of his work, the Monuments of Egypt, and their Vestiges of Patriarchal Tradition. If we implicitly take his statement, we have historical evidence of the original population of Egypt being derived from Arabia, which of course would be a presumption that the language was radically Arabic. But we have learnt not to put implicit faith in his statements, and to look narrowly to his authorities, and we find this, the fundamental fact of his theory, as applied to Egypt, to have no basis but mistranslation. Juba, he tells us, a writer of great authority among the ancients, states that Egypt was originally peopled from Arabia, whence he infers that the old Arabic stands identified, historically as well as philologically, with the ancient Egyptian. The words of Juba, as quoted by Pliny (N. H. 36, 34), are, "Juba tradit accolas Nili, a Syene, non Ethiopum populos sed Arabum esse dixit, usque Meroe." That Mr. Forster, who cites this passage, should have overlooked the circumstance that no part of Egypt lies between Syene and Meroe, can only be explained by the blind haste with which men rush to claim evidence in support of foregone conclusions. Had Juba even made such an assertion respecting the country bordering on the Egyptian Nile in his own days (he lived near the Christian æra), what evidence would that have afforded of the origin of the Egyptian population in the second century after the Flood? So much for the historical identification of the old Arabic with the ancient Egyptian. The philological will not be found to proceed more successfully. There are two sources whence a knowledge of the Egyptian language may be derived. One is the remains of the Coptic, which appears from many coincidences with notices in ancient authors, to be the same which they called Egyptian. These remains have long been considerable, and have been recently augmented by the researches which our Government enabled Dr. Tattam to make in Egypt. They have led all recent Coptic scholars to the conclusion that the language has nothing in common with the Semitic family, except a few words borrowed from the Hebrew and the Arabic. To this conclusion, which is fatal to his theory respecting the one primæval language, Mr. Forster has nothing to oppose but his own confident denial and the opinions of some learned men who lived when the Coptic was little known. The discoveries in hieroglyphical literature have added an immense weight of evidence to the proof |
