CHAPTER I

THE DAWN OF NILE EXPLORATION

The first men who entered Egypt and travelled up the valley of the Nile came, almost unquestionably, from the east, and were part of those radiations from the central focus of humanity, India. It is possible that the first men who entered the valley of the Nile from this direction may have been of so primitive, simian, and undetermined a type--so “Neanderthaloid”--as not to belong definitely to any one of the three main species of humanity. At that distant time, however (let us say at the end of the Pleistocene period or beginning of the Quaternary Epoch), there was undoubtedly a land connection over the south as well as over the north end of the Red Sea, joining Arabia to Ethiopia as well as to Egypt; and across this bridge came many types of Asiatic mammals, also man,--possibly in the form of a low Negroid, a type represented to-day (much changed and modified, of course) by the Congo Pygmies and South African Bushmen. As regards the history of humanity, however, the valley of the Nile has been divided into two very distinct parts. The southern half of its basin--in common with all Africa south of the Sahara and the fifteenth degree of north latitude--was peopled from the east, through southern Arabia, and by the Negro species in the main. Egypt proper and the adjoining regions of Arabia once lay within the domain of the Negroid Pygmies, but these indigenes were overwhelmed at a relatively early period by more or less “negrified” branches of the Caucasian stock coming from the direction of Syria or from Libya. Before the dawn of the historical epoch--say nine thousand years ago--an element in the population of Lower Egypt certainly showed Bushmen affinities. These steatopygous Bushmen were perhaps Proto-negroes, who may have branched off from the Nigritic stock when first that species reached the Mediterranean regions. This Bushman element in Egypt was for some time distinct, prior to the historical period, as the characteristic type of the servile class. Following on these dwarfish people came races bearing some slight resemblance to the Dravidians of India or the Brahuis of Baluchistan,--a somewhat Australoid stock which has left traces in Elam and around the shores of the Persian Gulf. Then came an aquiline type of nearly pure Caucasian stock, usually known by Egyptologists as the “Khafra” race. This probably arrived from Syria or Cyprus. But the men of the northern half of the Nile basin who fathered the principal, dominating type of ancient and modern Egyptian emigrated seemingly from the direction of Galaland, Somaliland, or Abyssinia. In these countries, or originally perhaps in southern Arabia, there was formed a handsome race mainly of Caucasian stock, but which had mingled somewhat considerably with the Proto-negroes and Dravidians in Arabia and in northeast Africa, and so had acquired darker skins, and hair with more or less tendency to curl. The men of this race, like the modern Somali or Gala, and the inhabitants of southern Arabia, grew thin and wedge-shaped beards. Their lips were full, their noses straight and finely shaped. Their degenerate descendants continue to exist with but little altered facial type in the Danākil, Somali, and Gala of the present day; but in the northern half of the Nile valley they became in time the main stock of the Egyptian population. They also, it would seem, profoundly modified Negro Africa; for while on the one hand they started out by a series of race movements and conquests from the direction of Abyssinia to invade and mould Egypt, on the other (though more faint-heartedly) they advanced in a southwesterly direction to influence Negro Africa. They have formed aristocracies in the countries round the head-waters of the White Nile. Their influence on the Negro races has been widespread, permeating, even though faintly, in a handsome physical type and remarkable form of language, to Zululand on the south and perhaps westward across the continent to the Congo, the Cross River, and the Atlantic coast. This Hamitic race (as it is called for want of a better word), which made its first home--and retains as its last--the highlands of Abyssinia and the plateaux and arid coastlands of Afar, Somaliland, and the Gala countries, has been the mainstay of Ancient Egypt, and also, together with its not distantly related Libyan brethren, the main human agent in saving the Negro from slipping back into the life of the anthropoid ape.

[Illustration: THE NILE AND THE PYRAMIDS.]

The valley of the Lower Nile, however, attracted many invasions from Europe and Asia, and from Libya (northwest Africa), where the dominant race was mainly of Iberian stock.[1] Dynasties rose and fell, often coincident with the invasion of Egypt by one race of conquerors after another. All these races (with the exception perhaps of the Hittites) belonged to various types of the Caucasian species. The Hittites possibly may have introduced a slight element of the Mongolian. In the earliest historical period Egypt and the lower valley of the Nile does not seem to have been markedly severed in its interracial relations from the far greater portion of the Nile basin which lies to the south of the fifteenth degree of north latitude. Egyptians penetrated no doubt without much difficulty up the Nile valley into and among the Negro tribes of the Central Sudan and Equatoria. The Ancient Egyptians may have had--must have had--a certain proportion of Negro or Negroid in their composition; beside the drop of Negro blood in their Hamitic ancestors, they must have absorbed the earlier Negroid population of their country and have imported and intermarried with Negro slaves. But they were fully Caucasian in the vivid interest they took in nature, and in their desire to depict all the striking forms of life around them, especially when such forms had anything of novelty. Prof. Flinders Petrie has, I believe, recently discovered a vase of immeasurable antiquity of the “Pre-Dynastic” period in Lower Egypt which is incised with a delineation of the Kudu antelope.[2] Other and later relics would seem to show that the Egyptians were acquainted with the chimpanzee of the Bahr-al-Ghazal regions, the Pygmies who once inhabited the western part of the Upper Nile basin, and many forms of the Tropical African fauna. But after these early historical times there appears to have come about a severance of relations between Egypt and the Upper Nile, though an overland route to the Land of Punt (Somaliland) either through Abyssinia or to the west of that elevated region nearly always existed unclosed to traffic. It is noteworthy that the Ancient Egyptians themselves do not appear ever to have penetrated up the main stream of the Nile much above its junction with the Bahr-al-Ghazal, no doubt owing to the obstruction of the sudd. Their traders may have travelled into many parts of the Bahr-al-Ghazal region, and possibly even westward in the direction of Lake Chad,--westward, it may be, even across the western Sudan to the Niger,--yet there is not the slightest indication of their ever having journeyed up the main White Nile to the snow-mountains and the equatorial lakes. But they traded for thousands of years with the men of Punt (Somaliland) by sea and by land; and there is evidence to show that the peoples of Somaliland and Galaland (who had by repeated prehistoric invasions permeated the Upper Nile basin and left aristocracies behind them) traded anciently--say, in pre-Islamic times--southwestward to Lake Rudolf, and round Lake Rudolf to the present Turkana country, the neighbourhood of Mount Elgon, and even to the northeastern shores of the Victoria Nyanza.

The Ancient Egyptians seem to have known the main Nile as far as Khartum, and the Blue Nile up to its source in Lake Tsana. They exercised intermittently some kind of rule over the northern and western escarpment of Abyssinia, and are said to have sent criminals and political exiles to die of cold on the snowy heights of the Samien range. But they appear to have displayed little knowledge or curiosity concerning the ultimate source of the _White_ Nile. No doubt the vast marshes and obstructions of the sudd which characterised the course of the Nile above its confluence with the Bahr-al-Ghazal, the generally hopeless nature of this country with its utter absence of anything like high land, of minerals, or of a trading population, discouraged the practical-minded Egyptians from pursuing their researches in that direction. The Nile itself they called _Hapi_, which was also the name of the Nile God. It was sometimes spoken of as _Pi Yuma_, or “the River.”[3] Its valley they called Atr, Atur, Aur (Modern Coptic = _Eiōr_).[4]

Several foreign dynasties ruled over Ancient Egypt,--Arabian and Libyan,--and for centuries at a time the energies of Egypt were mainly concentrated on domestic work under these foreign task-masters or insurrections to expel the hated rulers. The original civilisation of Egypt rose rapidly to a great and wonderful height at a period which may be as remote, historically, as about seven thousand years ago. The main source of their civilisation seems to have been the introduction into the country of copper implements instead of and in addition to those of improved stone and flint manufacture. A wonderful development of pictorial art occurred concurrently with this brilliant rise in civilisation, and this early Egyptian art is of a realistic character from which all subsequent Egyptian pictorial or sculptured art has been a degeneration. At this time they easily impressed the Negroes of the south and the Libyans of the west with their power, and it was no doubt a matter of ease for Egyptian expeditions to penetrate into the Sudan from the countries of Abyssinia and Galaland. Gold and precious or gaudy stones were sought for in the east and southeast. Ivory, slaves, gums, perfumes, and strange beasts were obtained from the south and southwest. But no doubt Ancient Egyptians in their extensions of political or commercial influence introduced amongst the Negro tribes the knowledge of working metals. They also gave to them all those domestic animals and cultivated plants now existing in Tropical Africa which are not of a far later American or Indian origin (that is, introduced by the Portuguese and Arabs). By instructing the Negroes in this indirect manner in the arts of civilisation, and by spreading among them, no doubt, the use of metal weapons (which were probably as good as those used by the Egyptians themselves), there came a time when--to use a term once much employed by the European pioneer--the black men became “saucy” and objected to be harried, bullied, assessed, and exploited by the lordly Egyptian. The Negro race at this time, too, was becoming infiltrated by the same splendid stock--the Hamites--as had so largely composed the ruling population of Egypt. Here and there, no doubt, Negro tribes submitted willingly to be governed by Hamitic princes (as has been the case in Uganda and Unyoro), and, thus ruled, offered sharp opposition to Egyptian encroachments. Egyptian interest, therefore, in the sources of the Nile died away, especially as in the revival of native Egyptian power and in the expulsion of foreign dynasties the thoughts of Egypt were all bent on the conquest and retention of Syria, Asia Minor, and Cyprus. These lands were more desirable in their eyes than the appalling wastes of the Sahara, the sun-smitten Sudan, the cold mountains of Abyssinia, or the fetid marshes of the Nile Negroes.

Almost older than the civilisation of Egypt was that of Mesopotamia, the reflex action of which on the Hamites of western Arabia and Abyssinia and on the inhabitants of the Nile Delta may have provoked the civilisation of Egypt. Empires rose, declined, fell, and were revived in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and their influence over Arabia and Syria produced in those countries a stirring of commerce and invention and a desire for distant enterprise. The Phœnicians, who were originally an Arab people of the Persian Gulf, forced their way across the barren wastes of northern Arabia to the coasts of Syria, leaving behind, however, colonies of bold navigators at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. The Phœnicians, by the building of more seaworthy boats, and probably by the development of sails, soon traversed the Mediterranean in all directions, passed out through the Straits of Gibraltar, and even found their way to Britain long before Julius Cæsar. Their most noteworthy action in connection with Africa perhaps was the founding of Utica in 1100 B.C. and Carthage in 820 B.C., these settlements being made at no great distance from each other in that projection of North Africa which constitutes the modern state of Tunis. The Carthaginian successors of the Phœnicians carried on the work of discovery along the north and west coasts of Africa until, in the memorable voyage of Hanno, they had penetrated as far south in that direction as the existing colony of Sierra Leone. The Phœnicians as bold navigators were enlisted in the service of one of the last Egyptian sovereigns of a real Egyptian dynasty,--Neku, son of Psametik I., who succeeded to the throne of Egypt in 611 B.C. Evidently by this time the overland routes to the regions of the Upper Nile and even to Somaliland had been closed by hostilities with the Ethiopians and Negroes. A Phœnician expedition was directed to sail down the Red Sea and along the coast to the Land of Punt and the unknown territory beyond. According to tradition, this expedition sailed round the whole continent of Africa and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, reaching Egypt from that direction.

Egypt, in her several thousand years of history, had been many times conquered by foreign races or the leaders of foreign armies, and had sometimes endured the domination of strangers for five hundred years at a time, though Egyptian art, tradition, and religion either survived concurrently alongside the habits and customs of the less civilised rulers, or ended by Egyptianising the stranger. But there was to come a time when the independence of Egypt was to disappear, when the Egyptian language was to cease to be dominant, when, in fact, the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Pyramids, of the Hieroglyph and the Mummy, of Ra and Aphis, Osiris, Isis, and Horus was to disappear--perhaps for ever; for the potent race that had so long held aloft a brightly-lighted lamp of civilisation has been so changed and degraded by the infusion of Persian, Arab, Greek, Italian, Negro, Circassian, Turkish, French, and Maltese blood, so often decimated by wars, famines, and diseases, and renewed with the tainted blood of mercenary armies, that, though the residuum of the population may still offer great facial resemblances to the vanished Egyptian type, the majesty of demeanour, the brilliant mental endowments of the old race have gone, and the rulers of Egypt to-day under the indifferent English are the descendants of Slavs and Turks, Arabs, Armenians, and Circassians.

A ruler of Egypt, a usurper named Aahmes, had been raised to the kingship over Egypt by a soldier’s mutiny. He had legitimised his position by marrying a granddaughter of Psametik I. Carrying out a series of successful expeditions, he once more opened a way to the commerce of Nubia and the Upper Nile. He intervened in the affairs of Asia Minor to support a small state there against encroachments by the Persian conqueror Cyrus. The son of Cyrus the Great, whom we know as Cambyses, but whose real name was probably in Persian Kambujiya, resolved to punish Egypt for this interference. Aahmes, whom the Greeks called Amasis, died before he could resist the invasion, and his son, Psametik III., lost his throne and the independence of Egypt in the battle of Pelusium. Cambyses became the conqueror, and was crowned the legitimate King of Egypt. He seems to have been an erratic and cruel conqueror, but, like Nero, somewhat fantastically interested in science and exploration. He sent one great expedition into the Libyan Desert which was never heard of again, and is supposed to have perished in the sand; and he led a great army himself up the Nile with some vague intention of conquering the Ethiopians. His soldiers, however, had marched only a small distance into the desert when their commissariat failed, and many perished, while others became cannibals in their mad hunger. This disaster put a stop to any further efforts on the part of the Persian Overlords of Egypt. For nearly two hundred years Persia maintained her hold over Egypt, though for brief intervals native dynasties arose in this part and that part and flickered for a time in a state of semi-independence. Then happened one of the great events in the history of Egypt and of the development of Africa,--an event which may be paralleled by the descent on Egypt of Napoleon Bonaparte two thousand one hundred and thirty-one years later: Alexander the Great, continuing his war against the Persian Empire, attacked that power in Egypt and won the day. Alexander left in charge in Egypt one of his generals (who was perhaps also his illegitimate half-brother), Ptolemy. After his death Ptolemy refused to acknowledge the claims of Alexander’s posthumous son, and made himself King of Egypt. He thus founded a Greek dynasty in that country which lasted till the advent of the Cæsars and expired in the person of the world-famed Cleopatra.