534 ARTICLE V. Monumens de l'Egypte et de la Nubie; d'après les Dessins exécutés sur les lieux, sous la direction de CHAMPOLLION le Jeune. Publiés sous les auspices de M. THIERS et de M. GUIZOT. Par une Commission spéciale. Paris: 1836. SINCE Our analysis of Rosellini's work on Egypt, in the last number of this Review, a new work on Egyptian discovery has been brought before the public, of an importance equal to Rosellini's, as regards the distinguished reputation of the author-the high auspices under which it makes its appearance-the new lights which it throws upon this interesting and important subject; and, finally, from the splendid and expensive form of its publication. We refer to the posthumous work of Champollion, on Egypt, which heads our present article, and which, as the reader will perceive, is ushered into the world under the sanction of an especial commission, at the head of which are the present premier of France, M. Thiers, and his late official colleague, M. Guizot. We may, en passant, while we congratulate France on having cabinet ministers capable of appreciating the still buried treasures of ancient Egypt, regret the supineness which has been manifested by our own cabinet on the subject, and which, by enabling France to associate her name with the idea of Egyptian influence, has given to her agents and consuls a monopoly of the most valuable antiquities of Egypt; and put it in their power to appropriate monuments which are, by right, the property of this country, and ought to grace its museums; and indeed, to proceed to a most disgraceful extent of extortion and rapacity, in stripping the palaces and temples of ancient Egypt of appendages, by which those extraordinary monuments are greatly deteriorated. But quitting this painful subject of defeated British competition in Egypt, which might be very easily proved to be closely connected with social and commercial prosperity, we return to a consideration of Champollion's great work. This posthumous work may be naturally expected to be at present imperfect. It is so indeed. The commission superintending the papers and drawings of the late M. Champollion, have published a few livraisons of illustrations; but having probably no warrant for giving unity to the work, by accompanying letter-press descriptions, in consequence of the condition in which the voluminous MSS. of the defunct writer, have fallen into their hands, they have merely attached some meagre, vague, and sometimes hypothetical interpretations, in numerical order, to the series of plates of which the livraisons consist. The work will, at present, be "cavire to the multitude." It will, doubtless, be admired sometimes for the pictorial amusement of the subject, sometimes for the magnificence of the getting up; but as far as a perspicuous and intelligible view of its purposes and revelations is concerned, it will remain for the present a sealed book. It is to throw a light upon these purposes and revelations, without being slavishly guided by the "provisional numerical explications" to which we have referred, and which are in many respects incorrect and inapplicable, that we lay before our readers these brief remarks. A considerable portion of the drawings of Champollion, which are given in the first livraisons of this work, is occupied with illustrations of similar objects, animate or inanimate, to those which had previously occupied the pencil or graver of Rosellini. There will be no occasion, therefore, to employ the reader's time with any description or explanation of these, since that has been sufficiently done, for all useful purposes, in our preceding article. The circumstance, however, furnishes ground for one gratifying remark on the corroborative testimony which is supplied by this collation to those startling inferences which we drew from the subjects submitted to the faithful evidence of the eye by Rosellini. We compared some of those inferences to the sudden discovery of a new volume of history, or a new pagan Genesis, and we do not think that we at all exaggerate their importance by applying to them such emphatic phraseology. Of that our readers, however, will have been the best judges. But, if the designation be even partially correct, the importance of a double corroborative testimony, as to the truth of the visible data whence those inferences are drawn, will be admitted to be of paramount importance. By way of example, we may state that Champollion exhibits drawings, taken from the same localities, of some of the Pharaohs, and their wives and daughters, which perfectly agree, not in outline only, but in those minute shades of physiognomical distinction, which we have urged before as being equally curious and important;-as exhibiting the Retzch-like skill of the Egyptian artists 4000 years ago-as showing that they were as perfectly cognisant, as their pupils the Grecian sculptors were afterwards, with the great truths of physiognomy; --and as preserving substantial evidences, in the character of the persons represented, either to confirm what history has said of them, or to fill up the void of what it has omitted to say. For example, we have in Champollion a full-length portrait, and a half-length portrait, of the great Sesostris. Both are coloured in imitation of the extant representations, in the temples or tombs whence they are drawn, and both perfectly agree in complexion, expression, and costume. The resemblance of the great conqueror to Napoleon, in facial outline, we before adverted to, although Champollion, in his slavish anxiety, "To crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, degraded himself by comparing the portrait to Charles X., under whose sanction he was sent to Egypt, as is well understood, on a mission equally political and scientific. Champollion also gives another portrait of the conqueror, at full length, in the act of being apotheosised by himself, from which Rosellini took his copy of the head of the conqueror, on a large scale; to the beauty of this, as well as the graceful form in which the horn of Ammon is disposed, we bore testimony in our last number. Although the scale of size be different, the truth of each copy is proved by the accurate resemblance of the details of both. According to the coloured portraits of Sesostris, his complexion would seem, like that of all the Egyptians represented on the various monuments of Egypt, to have been of a copper colour, like that of the Moors who now occupy the Northern Coasts of Africa, and the ruined dwelling places of Hannibal and the Carthaginians. We may, therefore, very safely pronounce, that the ancient Egyptians and Carthaginians were of the same Moorish complexion, and possibly of the same hereditary lineage. Our learned readers will, doubtless, recollect that there is a vexata questio of ancient standing, connected with this department of the subject. Of what colour were the Egyptians? Were they, as Herodotus says, in his Euterpe, black, with crisped hair? Does he mean by the words which we translate crisped or curly, woolly hair? Were they then, in fact, negroes? Are we indebted, therefore, to the race on whom we have so long trampled, and whose bonds we have just broken, for that civilization by which we have been enabled to revenge ourselves upon them for their vital gift? Did the stream of civilization flow northward from Central Africa and Negroland, feeding, as it proceeded, one of the sacred founts of Meroe, those reputed sources of civilization? Was the Egyptian Memnon, whose black complexion is described by Virgil, and whose beauty is depicted by Homer as only second to that of Achilles, in fact, a negro, as it has been alleged? Do the now scarcely distinguishable features of the sphinx bear remnants of the negro character, as has also been asserted? We have now the means, through Rosellini and Champollion, of answering all these questions, and setting them at rest for ever. The native race of the Egyptians, including the monarchs who reigned even in Nubia up to the borders of the Negroland, from the earliest time of the establishment of Egyptian government by Thothmos, and his son, Amenoph I., down to the time of the Grecian conquest and the Ptolemies, were, with some exceptions which may be stated, of a copper complexion, resembling the Moors of the northern coasts of Africa, now bordering on Egypt, and having some affinity (with the distinction of their being bearded) with the native American Indians. This fact is proved by the uniform complexion given to all Egyptians in all the Egyptian monuments, without exception; a complexion carefully distinguished from that of the individuals of other nations. The varieties of the human race are distributed by the Egyptian anatomists into four, with a precision equal to and corroborative of Laurence's theory; first, the Black, or Negro race; second, the White, or Caucasian race; third, the Tawny, or Mongolian race; and fourth, the Red, or native Egyptian race, probably embracing the American Indians. Further corroboration of the latter hypothesis is derived from every mummy which is unrolled. The umber-coloured skin may have lost its original hue by time, or by the process of embalming. Beyond a doubt the colour of the hair has been affected by that process, which is often of a reddish brown; because the hair may be dyed, and now is frequently dyed of the same colour by means of some of the ingredients used in that process. But the form of the features is preserved; the slightly aquiline nose; the full Abyssinian lip and large chin; the position of the eyes slightly inclined upwards at the exterior angles, with large eye-lids, and the general form of the head. In all these physiognomical characteristics, the mummies precisely concur with the facial outline assigned to native Egyptians on all the Egyptian monuments. The hair, both of males and females, according to the monuments, was black, coarse, and long; and, according to the testimony supplied by the mummies, was occasionally curled, or crisped,-sufficiently so to save the character of the historian for accuracy. The monuments supply no testimony in aid of this inference with regard to the hair; because the ordinary head-dress of the Egyptian males and females, and which consisted of a kind of capote or hood of striped cotton, conceals the hair from view, but they prove that it was long, by its appendages, which fall over the shoulders with something like the effect of the "mob-cap," which our female ancestors wore some hundred years ago. The exception of head-dresses occasionally exhibited by the Egyptian Pharaohs, separated artificially into minute curls like wigs, and resembling those exclusively appropriated to the Indian Bacchus, cannot be referred to as bearing with any weight upon the argument. The Egyptians, therefore, may generally be pronounced to be characterised by Moorish complexion, with black hair, sometimes long, sometimes curled, but never woolly. An approach to the Negro character is sometimes, indeed, seen in some of the outlines of the sculptured or painted monuments. But there is nothing surprising in that circumstance, when it is considered that the rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs, of Thebes as well as of Memphis, extended over the modern countries of Nubia and Abyssinia, as far as Negroland; there would be, therefore, an occasional mixture of the two races. In effect, the Nubian lip is a distinguishing character of all the males and females of the early courts of the Pharaohs. Some of the female aristocracy of these courts are, as we have said, exquisitely beautiful, and resemble some of our female aristocracy in their combined expression of calm hauteur or languishing self-possession. But they always possess a distinction which shows the accuracy of the delineation;-an indefinable |