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The Queen Nofre-Ari: Egyptian
THIS condition of things, which is not denied by the boldest admirers of the past history of Egypt, and is attested by the unanimous reports transmitted to us twenty centuries or more ago, by the sagacious observers of antiquity, who went from all the centres of civilization in those days, to the borders of the Nile to study a civilization older than their own-this state of things, we say, was discredited by one of our contemporaries as remarkable for the universality of his learning as for the vivacity of his scientific decisions. Arguing from the text of of some funereal inscriptions, in relation to the civil or private life of the ancient dwellers on the borders of the Nile, Mr. J. J. Ampère has felt authorized to declare that there never were castes among them.† * Manava Shastra. Book First. † In reference to castes in Egypt, see Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Sept., 1848.
Without disputing the validity of the documents adduced by that savant; without inquiring whether they did not belong to periods of perturbation in Egyptian history, to times of trouble and strife, like those which preceded the eighteenth and followed the nineteenth dynasty; and especially to ages of decline, like those in which the last Rameses passed away, we shall confine ourselves to ascertaining, with Mr. Ampère himself, that if, at certain epochs of Egyptian history, the functions of judges, engineers, architects, chiefs of nomes and districts, seem to have been exercised indifferently by priests, or by warriors, and if by chance there was so little demarcation between these two aristocratic classes, the same person could, sometimes, accumulate sacerdotal, military and civil offices, the line of separation between them and the inferior classes always remained so broad that nothing could obliterate it-not even death. For the honors paid to ancestors in the tombs, the admission of their names into the funereal inscriptions do not appear to have ever ceased to be the exclusive privilege of members of the priesthood and the army.
It would be easy to prove that of the two terms of this proposition, the last affirms much more decidedly than the former one, the existence of castes. However that may be, we shall leave to any one who has studied in good faith, the nature of man and the affiliation of his social conceptions, the task of deciding whether deductions drawn from hieroglyphics, or from a doubtful interpretation and uncertain dates, are sufficient to refute the formal assertions of Herodotus, Plato, Strabo and Diodorus, who affirmed nothing concerning the institutions of Egypt without having seen them with their own eyes and touched them with their own hands.
For our part, even in the absence of such testimony, the contemplation of the valley of the Nile, which has been for 3000 years impotent in the production of a people, the sight of the degraded race that now occupies the homes of Thothmes III., of Seti and of Mei-Amoun, would have sufficed to convince us that this long hereditary lethargy, this stupor that has fallen there upon the growth of that progress of which Providence has planted the seed in the bosom of every region and every man, can be attributed to nothing but the violence of a rigid system of castes, too profoundly rooted into the land by conquest, and too long carried to extremes by the tyranny of established institutions.
X.
THIS point of historical criticism put aside, and we have touched npon it for no other purpose than to show how far one may go astray, in allowing oneself to be guided by epigraphy alone, we have to admit that the social ideal of our time could not have been that of ancient days. Civilization could not sustain itself, at the outset, and go on with its development excepting under the shelter of a rigorous system. There must be a coercive principle, material as well as moral, to compel wandering tribes, whether rude shepherds or savage hunters, to become a nation. The institution of castes promptly attained this end, in Egypt and India ; but those who promoted it could not foresee how far their system, carried out to its ultimate results, would compromise the future. To the man of those days much less than to him who lives in our own time, was it given to uplift his gaze far enough toward the zenith to catch glimpes of the light reflected there from the dawn that still lingers below the horizen.
He made up for this by creating according to the extent of his visual range and his requirements, a type of absolute monarchy in which the despot could be, up to a certain point, less the tyrant than the father of his subjects; wherein each class and each profession had its allotted sphere; wherein a religious dedication to the task, extending its influence from father to son, age after age, confined each individual within a circle of cares and duties amid which he was to live and die; wherein, finally, at the cost of beholding all human dignities concentrated upon a few heads, and the free will of each one sacrificed to the rigid mechanism of the law, the arts of peace, agricultural abundance, and commercial wealth seemed to diffuse themselves over the whole social body, at the hands of the sovereign like the blessings that descend from Divinity itself.* Some of the reigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties, and, particularly, that of Rameses II., seem to have attained the limits of this ideal type. * See Heeren "On the Commerce and Policy of the Ancients." Vol. I.