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'tion and deposit of Sinism (20,000—15,000 B.C.)' we discern 'the 'earliest polarisation of religious consciousness." Baron Bunsen avows himself the disciple of Niebuhr, and naturally claims all Niebuhr's license in the treatment of history. But Niebuhr was dealing, at the most, with but three or four centuries of traditional tales; and these were concerned with a state of things of which the results were strictly historical. Apart from all legends of the Seven Kings, the commonwealth of Rome points to an earlier monarchy; but, if we object to Niebuhr that he treats Romulus and Numa sometimes as fictitious, sometimes as real persons, that he assumes the existence sometimes of yearly chronicles, sometimes of national epics, that he draws historical inferences in one place from statements which he had treated as doubtful in another, we shall see that his transgressions, when compared with Baron Bunsen's, are but as a mote to a beam. It may be satisfactory to think that the Herodotean Sesostris is the result of a confusion between Sesoosis, Sesorcheres, and Tosorthrus; but the clearness of the conclusion will not explain why the history of the second millennium B.C. should be judged by a different canon from the history of our own or any other day. When a writer, taking the conflicting accounts of Sesostris, Sethos, and Ramesses †, can gravely state that the question for critical inquiry is to determine what part of the Sesostris-Sethosis tradition belongs to Ramesses and what to his father Sethos, and how much again is to be abstracted from both of them and given to the two great rulers of the third and twelfth dynasties, it is time to insist on some definite rule by which we may distinguish fact from fiction. When scholars, however learned or estimable, claim to pass off as history a patchwork from inconsistent or contradictory chronicles, we owe a debt of no common gratitude to those who maintain boldly and plainly that there is but one law of historical criticism, and that we dare not apply it more loosely or leniently to one age than to another. History has its own difficulties; but they do not lie in doubts whether we are to receive as evidence for one time what for another we should at once reject. From known facts we may, if we can, draw a new inference. We may rehabilitate Themistocles, or Henry VIII., or Frederic the Great; or we may bring forward new evidence to prove that the verdict of a former age is wrong, so long as we can submit that evidence to as stringent a test as the facts already acknowledged. But, after all, the difficulties of history, whatever they may be, are confined within the narrow Ib. vol. iii. p. 171.

Egypt's Place, vol. iv. p. 485.

bounds of three or four generations. In the absence of written records, oral tradition may preserve a tolerably faithful account of events for about a century. Beyond that limit, we cannot assert the most probable event to be wholly historical; within it, we may reasonably accept statements which in themselves may be very questionable. The whole matter turns on the credibility of witnesses; and the history of nations must therefore be measured, not only by the standard of contemporary testimony, but by the degree in which they exhibit the historic faculty. We should not believe on the authority of Homer that Aphroditê rescued Æneas from the battle-field, or on that of Herodotus, that deified heroes fought against the Persian hosts at Delphi, because, on points like these, the poet and the historian are not competent witnesses. We take the tale of the Feast of Attaginus, and we believe at once that Herodotus so heard it from Thersander; but we cannot tell how far Thersander's imagination may have pointed its moral during nearly half a century. On the stories of Democedes and Histiæus we look with suspicion, not merely because they contain some improbabilities, but because they come in great part from a source on which we can place no reliance. Yet here we are dealing with persons whose historical character we can as little doubt as we doubt our own. From these we have to turn to a people who at no time exhibited any critical faculty; a people inured to all the monotony of Oriental despotism, and filled with a strong sense of their own importance, which had been grievously mortified by some incidents in their history. We have to take into account the paramount influence of a sacerdotal caste, who kept in their own hands every record, whether civil or astronomical. We have to remember further that these records were written in a character almost incredibly complicated, that they were preserved partly in picture-writing, partly in a symbolical and phonetic alphabet, and that the priests who professed to read them gave different accounts at different times to the foreigners who came to them for information. And then, remembering this, we are asked to believe that the records which they claimed to keep were really historical, that, in addition to these, they had a historical literature, now lost, and that their ruling desire was to preserve the history of the kingdom from its first beginnings in uncorrupt integrity; and, finally, we have to acquiesce in a method which will cut up one name into two or more persons, or reduce two or more persons to one, while it treats kings or dynasties sometimes as successive, sometimes as contemporaneous, as may best suit a foregone conclusion.

At the outset, therefore, we should welcome any protest against a system which would make history an inextricable labyrinth. Against a method which reconciles contradictory accounts by extracting some of their differences, we are prejudiced not by any love for theories of our own, not because we are unwilling to believe that men have lived on earth for ten, or fifteen, or twenty thousand years, or that language, religion, and government may have required millenniums for their development, but simply because, if we yield to it, we must be guided by rules, or rather arbitrary dogmas, which may be made to yield any result at pleasure. We are willing to accept any suppositions on the antediluvian history of man or the consolidation of Egyptian polity, as conclusions more or less probable. We may admit that calculations drawn from variations of the earth's orbit may explain some phenomena of the ancient world; but it is absurd to infer that such grounds are a warrant for framing an exact chronology, and even more absurd to think that a chronology can be manufactured without history, and that in some mysterious way the two may not only exist, but ought to be treated separately.

The vast fabric of Egyptology will not have been reared in vain, if its only result is to call forth such a protest as that of Sir Cornewall Lewis. The errors of a generation are well compensated by a clearer apprehension of the laws of historical credibility. When all that is worthless has been swept away, there will yet remain in Baron Bunsen's pages much that is profitable; but that residuum will be chiefly speculation rather than history; and it is well that his chronological arithmetic, if not his hieroglyphical interpretations, should be met by such an antagonist. No protest has ever come more opportunely. From Thebes and Memphis, from Nineveh and Babylon, a flood of discovery threatens, by the bulk of the records borne in upon us, to overlay the earlier history of the Western world. The work of Herodotus, whose object was to relate the struggle of European freedom with Eastern despotism, has been buried beneath an obscure mass of Persian and Assyrian lore; while the discordant lists of old chroniclers, by the aid of hieroglyphic inscriptions, have furnished matter for the still more ponderous learning of the Egyptologists. How much more there may be yet to come we cannot tell; but unless future researches on the banks of the Nile or in the mounds of Kouyunjek reveal something different in kind from what has been laid bare already, we are fairly justified in forming a judgment on the value of the treasures spread before us. The perfect deciphering of the hieroglyphics (beset although it appears with almost

hopeless difficulties), the unquestioning acceptance of all that has been read as a true interpretation, will not in the least degree affect the conditions of the controversy. The monuments have but added one more version to those which we had before; they have supplied no criterion whereby we may measure the credibility of the latter. We have still, as we had before, to deal with statements some of which may be facts and some of which are undoubtedly fictions. The attempt to disentangle the one from the other, and so to accept what is true and reject what is false, is as much or as little justified here as in the chronicles of the Trojan dynasty of England. They who do not choose to mix up history with speculation, will receive as golden words the remark of Sir Cornewall Lewis:

In history, as in philosophy, it is important to fix the boundaries within which knowledge can be attained, and not to waste the time of writers and readers in vain endeavours to determine facts of which no credible testimony exists, and of which the memory has perished. Researches into ancient history, which lead to merely negative results, are important and useful, as well as similar researches which lead to positive results. They distinguish between fiction which, however diverting, instructive, or elevating, can never be historical, and reality which is a necessary attribute of a historical narrative. (Astronomy, p. 433.)

It

The task undertaken by Sir G. C. Lewis was not to controvert the conclusions of Egyptologists, or to throw suspicion on interpretations of hieroglyphic or cuneiform inscriptions, but to trace the history of astronomy among the nations of the old world, and to determine the amount of scientific knowledge possessed by each. His searching and elaborate inquiry has brought down the vaunted wisdom of Egypt and Assyria. has proved that astronomy, with the latter, resolved itself into astrology, while by the former it was used more for religious than civil purposes. Rome claimed neither the reality nor the reputation of knowledge. In Greece, the history of the science exhibits speculation issuing perpetually in theories based not on inductions from experience, but (with scarcely more than a single exception) on some arbitrary hypothesis. This succession of speculative systems Sir Cornewall Lewis has examined with great keenness and fullness of research. Yet the thought that his work could not end here, may well have come in to lighten the task of tracing out assumption after assumption and fallacy after fallacy, and of describing cosmical systems, many of them differing only in degrees of absurdity. He has proved, indeed, the natural superiority of the Greek intellect over every other. He has shown that their astronomy

was as much their own as the rest of their philosophy; but the special importance of his work lies in the criticism which has struck at the roots of the newly-discovered or reconstructed history of Egypt and Assyria. The direction of this attack may well strike Egyptologists with dismay; for unless Sir Cornewall Lewis's position can be overthrown, all pretence to a real knowledge of Egyptian history before the Dodecarchy must be abandoned. To minds in which the critical faculty is weak there is much to impart to these constructive accounts the semblance of real history. The dates are precise; the notices circumstantial; and the names of kings in the lists of Herodotus or later writers are found in tombs and palaces. For many readers there is much authority in a printed book; for many more there is still greater authority in a carved inscription: and the legitimate inference that, if in a pyramid be found the name of one to whom that pyramid is ascribed, it must have been built by him and no other, is held to determine also that he lived at the time assigned to him. If in the absence of conflicting accounts this might perhaps be admitted, it is otherwise when the same name is assigned in various lists to different generations, or centuries, or millenniums. A building cannot assert its own date; an inscription is worth nothing more than a manuscript. The inscriber may have been either deficient in his knowledge of the event recorded, or under some temptation to misrepresent it. In most cases, therefore, it becomes necessary to test monuments by the statements of contemporary historians rather than to give weight to the latter because they agree with the former. If the Egyptian name equivalent to Cheops is found in the pyramid ascribed to Cheops by Herodotus, it is a reason for thinking that Cheops built it; but if we find that Cheops is assigned to three several dynasties, we cannot determine the time of its erection unless the pyramid attests its era.

If the criticism of Sir Cornewall Lewis appears to the advocates of constructive history to sweep away much available knowledge or block up a mine rich with materials for future discovery, to the critical historian the confusion introduced by Egyptologists into the first principles of evidence may reasonably be a cause of much greater anxiety. That mind must, in truth, be weak which can complain that its knowledge is circumscribed by excluding that which cannot be really ascertained. It is a question not of feeling, but of fact,-not of speculation, but of truth. To suppose that the migration of the people of Menes into Egypt took place in the eleventh millennium B.C., and that the sojourn of the Israelites in that

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