II. EGYPTIAN SCIENCE

In the previous chapter we have purposely refrained from
referring to any particular tribe or race of historical man. Now,
however, we are at the beginnings of national existence, and we
have to consider the accomplishments of an individual race; or
rather, perhaps, of two or more races that occupied successively
the same geographical territory. But even now our studies must
for a time remain very general; we shall see little or nothing of
the deeds of individual scientists in the course of our study of
Egyptian culture. We are still, it must be understood, at the
beginnings of history; indeed, we must first bridge over the gap
from the prehistoric before we may find ourselves fairly on the
line of march of historical science.

At the very outset we may well ask what constitutes the
distinction between prehistoric and historic epochs --a
distinction which has been constantly implied in much that we
have said. The reply savors somewhat of vagueness. It is a
distinction having to do, not so much with facts of human
progress as with our interpretation of these facts. When we speak
of the dawn of history we must not be understood to imply that,
at the period in question, there was any sudden change in the
intellectual status of the human race or in the status of any
individual tribe or nation of men. What we mean is that modern
knowledge has penetrated the mists of the past for the period we
term historical with something more of clearness and precision
than it has been able to bring to bear upon yet earlier periods.
New accessions of knowledge may thus shift from time to time the
bounds of the so-called historical period. The clearest
illustration of this is furnished by our interpretation of
Egyptian history. Until recently the biblical records of the
Hebrew captivity or service, together with the similar account of
Josephus, furnished about all that was known of Egyptian history
even of so comparatively recent a time as that of Ramses II.
(fifteenth century B.C.), and from that period on there was
almost a complete gap until the story was taken up by the Greek
historians Herodotus and Diodorus. It is true that the king-lists
of the Alexandrian historian, Manetho, were all along accessible
in somewhat garbled copies. But at best they seemed to supply
unintelligible lists of names and dates which no one was disposed
to take seriously. That they were, broadly speaking, true
historical records, and most important historical records at
that, was not recognized by modern scholars until fresh light had
been thrown on the subject from altogether new sources.

These new sources of knowledge of ancient history demand a
moment's consideration. They are all-important because they have
been the means of extending the historical period of Egyptian
history (using the word history in the way just explained) by
three or four thousand years. As just suggested, that historical
period carried the scholarship of the early nineteenth century
scarcely beyond the fifteenth century B.C., but to-day's vision
extends with tolerable clearness to about the middle of the fifth
millennium B.C. This change has been brought about chiefly
through study of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphics
constitute, as we now know, a highly developed system of writing;
a system that was practised for some thousands of years, but
which fell utterly into disuse in the later Roman period, and the
knowledge of which passed absolutely from the mind of man. For
about two thousand years no one was able to read, with any degree
of explicitness, a single character of this strange script, and
the idea became prevalent that it did not constitute a real
system of writing, but only a more or less barbaric system of
religious symbolism. The falsity of this view was shown early in
the nineteenth century when Dr. Thomas Young was led, through
study of the famous trilingual inscription of the Rosetta stone,
to make the first successful attempt at clearing up the mysteries
of the hieroglyphics.

This is not the place to tell the story of his fascinating
discoveries and those of his successors. That story belongs to
nineteenth-century science, not to the science of the Egyptians.
Suffice it here that Young gained the first clew to a few of the
phonetic values of the Egyptian symbols, and that the work of
discovery was carried on and vastly extended by the Frenchman
Champollion, a little later, with the result that the firm
foundations of the modern science of Egyptology were laid.
Subsequently such students as Rosellini the Italian, Lepsius the
German, and Wilkinson the Englishman, entered the field, which in
due course was cultivated by De Rouge in France and Birch in
England, and by such distinguished latter-day workers as Chabas,
Mariette, Maspero, Amelineau, and De Morgan among the Frenchmen;
Professor Petrie and Dr. Budge in England; and Brugsch Pasha and
Professor Erman in Germany, not to mention a large coterie of
somewhat less familiar names. These men working, some of them in
the field of practical exploration, some as students of the
Egyptian language and writing, have restored to us a tolerably
precise knowledge of the history of Egypt from the time of the
first historical king, Mena, whose date is placed at about the
middle of the fifth century B.C. We know not merely the names of
most of the subsequent rulers, but some thing of the deeds of
many of them; and, what is vastly more important, we know, thanks
to the modern interpretation of the old literature, many things
concerning the life of the people, and in particular concerning
their highest culture, their methods of thought, and their
scientific attainments, which might well have been supposed to be
past finding out. Nor has modern investigation halted with the


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