THE PROSPECTIVE REVIEW. No. XXXVI. ART. I.-LEPSIUS' LETTERS FROM EGYPT, &c. 1. Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia and the Peninsula of Sinai. By Dr. Richard Lepsius: Translated by Leonora and Joanna B. Horner. Henry G. Bohn. 2. Über den ersten Aegyptischen Götterkreis. Von R. Lep[On the Egyptian Gods of the sius. Berlin. 1851. First Series.] 3. Über die Zwölfte Aegyptische Königsdynastie. Von R. Lepsius. Berlin. 1853. [On the Twelfth Royal Dynasty of Egypt.] In the year 1842 the king of Prussia sent to Egypt an expedition, the object of which was to investigate the ancient monuments of that country, of Nubia, and of the peninsula of Sinai, and to bring home such remains of antiquity as they should be able to remove, in order to furnish the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. Lepsius, who was already known as the most eminent Egyptologist in Europe, was placed at the head of the expedition, having under his direction an efficient staff of surveyors, draughtsmen and modellers. Our countrymen, Bonomi and Wild, associated themselves with it as volunteers. Alexander von Humboldt and Bunsen had recommended the undertaking to the king, and the Royal Academy of Sciences had examined and approved the plans which Lepsius drew up. Both the conception and the detail of the expedition reflect great honour on the Prussian government, which CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 62. K K can have no other than a scientific interest in Egypt. An Englishman may be proud of the zeal and liberality of his individual countrymen who have done so much to illustrate the antiquities of the land of the Pharaohs, but the contrast of his government with those of Tuscany and Prussia is anything but flattering to his national feeling. The Prussian expedition mustered in Alexandria in September, 1842, and on the 9th of November of that year began operations at the Pyramids. On the 26th of November, 1845, Lepsius entered Beyrout, on his return to Europe, having explored in the interval the valley of the Nile, beyond the junction of the Blue and White Rivers, with parts of the adjacent deserts, and the peninsula of Sinai. The scientific results of his labours are gradually appearing in the elaborate and costly "Denkmäler aus Egypten und Ethiopien," which the Prussian government is publishing, and the commentary with which Lepsius will illustrate them. Notwithstanding the researches of the French and Tuscan sçavans and their voluminous publications, much remained to be done. They had almost entirely neglected two very productive fields, the Pyramids and the monuments connected with them, and the valley of the Nile above the Second Cataract; nor had either of them penetrated to Meröe. There were other reasons why a German expedition was desirable. Rosellini was a simple and straightforward writer, but in Champollion there was a dash of the charlatan, which occasionally casts a shade of doubt over his generalizations; and altogether the standard of literary ethics is much higher in Germany than in France. The positive gain to Egyptian archæology and history derived from the Prussian expedition has been very considerable, and it may be acceptable to the readers of this Journal to have them exhibited in a concise view : I. Above 400 drawings were made, of which a large part has been already published, from the tombs in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, the contents of which were previously almost unknown. This region contains the monuments of the Old Monarchy of Egypt, and they establish beyond doubt its truly historical character. They have enabled Lepsius to fill up many vacant spaces in the lists of the early dynasties of Manetho, and as he thinks (though in this there is not a perfect harmony between him and his friend the Chevalier Bunsen), to prove that some of them were contemporaneous and not consecutive. What is beyond controversy is, that the times when these monuments originated were highly-civilized times, in which both the elegant and the useful arts flourished, in which government was minutely organized, and theology had attained a systematic development. A people possessed of such institutions had certainly not wandered the day before from neighbouring deserts to the land on which we find them. Their arts and their ideas must have been the growth of centuries; for they are thoroughly indigenous, and bear no analogy to those of other nations. They afford us, therefore, a firm standing point, from which we may look backward over many preceding centuries, in which Egypt had been slowly acquiring the characteristics which these remains of antiquity so distinctly reveal. II. Before the visit of Lepsius and his associates to the district of Fyoum, it was supposed that hardly anything remained of the ancient Labyrinth, described by Herodotus (ii. 148) in language which showed how he had been bewildered as his guide led him from porticoes to courts, and courts to covered ways, and covered ways into roofed chambers, and again into other porticoes, courts and chambers, but gave no clear conceptions to his reader. The age of the building had been variously attributed to the earliest and latest times of the monarchy, and historians had generally acquiesced in the opinion that a king of the name of Moris had been its builder. The truth is, that by far the larger part of what remains of it is buried under the soil, yet at so slight a depth, that it is difficult to understand how the eyes of preceding visitors, especially the first French Commission, who had leisure for the survey, and were in no dread of robbers, should have failed to detect its traces. Lepsius has uncovered these remains, and has ascertained their original extent. Strabo says that its length was more than a stadium, and the ruins occupy a rectangle, 600 feet long and 500 wide, within which were three piles of building each 300 feet in breadth. These were occupied by many hundreds of chambers, not connected together in any regular plan, and therefore forming a complete labyrinth in the modern sense of the word. The name of the builder, at least of the original nucleus of this pile and of the pyramid near it, has been ascertained by the excavation of bricks and stones marked with shields, to be Amenemha, the Ammenemes of the 12th dynasty of Manetho, when the Old Monarchy was at its highest pitch of power. This discovery belongs also to Lepsius; the French engineer Linant had preceded him in ascertaining that the centre of the Fyoum had anciently contained a vast artificial reservoir for the waters of the Nile, of the embankment of which a considerable portion still remains. Lepsius confirms from inspection the discovery of Linant. III. The grotto tombs of Benihassan in Central Egypt had been passed over very hastily by Champollion and Rosellini, but have yielded an ample harvest to Lepsius. His predecessors had referred them to the New Monarchy; he has found in them inscriptions which clearly prove that they are of far earlier date, and nearly equal in age to the Great Pyramid itself. Here we find the name of Cheops and the shield of the centenarian king Pepi-Apappus, whom the President of Magdalen seems ambitious of rivalling in length of life and dominion. If no other evidence remained of the prosperity and civilization of Egypt in these early times, the tombs of Benihassan would have been sufficient. Their painted walls are covered with representations, proving the high state to which peaceful art and refined luxury had attained. It is evident that the sovereigns of Egypt had already extended their conquests over the black nations of the south, for negro slaves are among their menials; but there are no traces of wars with the northern nations, from whom the destruction of the Old Monarchy was to ensue at no distant period. Traces, however, are found of immigrations of a fairer race than the brown Egyptians, indicating that the access to Egypt was already patent to its northern neighbours, and preparing the way for the invasion of the Shepherds of Palestine, who kept possession of Lower Egypt for several centuries. The well-known tomb of Nefruhotep, in which some have desired to find a representation of Jacob and his family, is supposed by Lepsius to represent such a migration of a portion of a northern tribe, most probably of Semitic race. Of his researches at El-Amarna, and his opinions respecting the figures of the Sun-worshippers, |