The Historians' History of the World 01

A still more bewildering confusion has been engendered by the term Cushites. In the Old Testament, in the review of the races taking their departure from Noah, the name Cush has been transferred to Babylonia (Gen. x. 8; possibly also in the story of the Fall, ii. 13). This is to be explained by the fact that the robber mountain horde of the Kossæans, or, as they called themselves, the Kasshu, maintained supremacy for centuries in Babylonia; this name was identified by the Hebrew narrator with that denoting the African tribe. Recent experts have derived the most illusory consequences from this misunderstanding. In consequence of it the Cushites have become for them an Asiatic-African aboriginal people of wide extent, appearing everywhere and never at home; and wherever we encounter riddles in the matter handed down to us, or a bold combination has to be made possible, these Cushites are trotted out, only to sink again into nothingness as soon as they have done their work. Conceptions of this character have found their way into ethnographical, philological, and historical works of high merit.

From the abortion that has grown out of the amalgamation of the Babylonian robber and warrior hordes with an African tribe, originally of quite a low grade of cultivation and the scantiest mental endowment, has been manufactured a people to whom the beginning of all civilisation has been referred, to whose inspiration the great monuments of Egypt, as of Babylonia, are supposed to owe their origin, but whose personality ceases to be tangible anywhere from the moment that positive historical evidence begins.

In the face of this we must again dwell on the fact that the Kossæans and the Cushites have not the slenderest historical connection with each other. The latter is a very real people that gradually absorbed a certain degree of external civilisation from the Egyptians.

With these East African nationalities on the one side, and the Libyans and Moors on the other, the Egyptians form a great group of nations whose languages are closely related to one another, and whom one may designate as North Africans. The North African languages again, in their grammatical structure as well as in their vocabulary, reveal a kindred spirit, however distant, with that in the language of their eastern Asiatic neighbours, the Semites, i.e. the inhabitants of Arabia, Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia. Especially in the most ancient form of Egyptian handed down to us, in the language of the time of the Pyramids, are we everywhere confronted with this kindred spirit. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that there was a time when the forefathers of the Egyptians and of the rest of the North Africans enjoyed a community of speech with the Semites.

Such being the case, we are inclined to conclude that the North Africans belong to the so-called Caucasian race of men, and that they reached their later domicile in prehistoric times, after their detachment from the Semites.

If this assumption can claim for itself a high degree of probability, we have not advanced a very great deal toward the understanding of the historical development of Egypt. For these wanderings and migrations belong in any case to times remote—ay, very remote—from all historical evidence, and they provide us with no new disclosures from any direction as to the character and the development of the Egyptians. A further inference has been expressed that the immigrants into Egypt found it occupied by an indigenous population, which they subdued, and that from this population came the bondmen whom we find in ancient Egypt, while the immigrants went to make the lords and the aristocracy.

Possibly this assumption is just; in support of it we may cite the agreement subsisting between the nature of the Egyptian animal worship and the religious conceptions of several of the African peoples. But we must never lose sight of the fact that the Egyptians themselves have no knowledge of any such theory.

If an immigration and an amalgamation of peoples took place, at the time of the Pyramids it had already long been buried in oblivion; the Egyptians regard themselves as autocthonous, and—with the exception of a part of the population in the lower lands of Nubia, Libya, and Asia—as a single nation, within which there can be no question of a clash of mental conceptions, and within which the proud and the humble, the lord and the bondman, have nothing to distinguish them externally.

Historical presentation demands that we should treat the Egyptians throughout as one people, whatever may be the number of different tribes that settled in the Nile Valley in prehistoric time.b