we may meet in the field of research which is common to scholars; while even here, the sympathy, which justifies respectful exposition, need not imply entire agreement.

In the great work upon Egypt, the latter volumes of which are now appearing in English, we do not find that picture of home life which meets us in the pages of our countryman, Sir G. Wilkinson. The interest for robust scholars is not less, in the fruitful comparison of the oldest traditions of our race, and in the giant shapes of ancient empires, which flit like dim shadows, evoked by a master's hand. But for those who seek chiefly results, there is something wearisome in the elaborate discussion of authorities; and, it must be confessed, the German refinement of method has all the effect of confusion. To give details here is impossible (though the more any one scrutinizes them, the more substantial he will find them), and this sketch must combine suggestions, which the author has scattered strangely apart, and sometimes repeated without perfect consistency. He dwells largely upon Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and their successors, from Champollion and Young to Lepsius. Especially the dynastic records of the Ptolemaic priest, Manetho,** are compared with the accounts of the stone monuments. The result, if we can receive it, is to vindicate for the civilized kingdom of Egypt, from Menes downward, an antiquity of nearly four thousand years before Christ. There is no point in which archæologists of all shades were so nearly unanimous as in the belief that our Biblical chronology was too narrow in its limits; and the enlargement of our views, deduced from Egyptian records, is extended by our author's reasonings on the development of

Egypt's Place in Universal History, by Christian C. J. Bunsen, &c. London, 1848, vol. i. 1854, vol. ii.

**See an account of him, and his tables, in the Byzantine Syncellus, pp. 72-145, vol. i., ed. Dind., in the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. Bonn. 1829. But with this is to be compared the Armenian version of Eusebius's Chronology, discovered by Cardinal Mai. The text, the interpretation, and the historical fidelity, are all controverted. Baron Bunsen's treatment of them deserves the provisional acceptance due to elaborate research, with no slight concurrence of probabilities; and if it should not ultimately win a favourable verdict from Egyptologers, no one who summarily rejects it as arbitrary or impossible can have a right to be on the jury.

commerce and government, and still more of languages, and physical features of race. He could not have vindicated the unity of mankind if he had not asked for a vast extension of time, whether his petition of twenty thousand years be granted or not. The mention of such a term may appear monstrous to those who regard six thousand years as a part of Revelation. Yet it is easier to throw doubt on some of the arguments than to show that the conclusion in favour of a vast length is improbable. If pottery in a river's mud proves little, its tendency may agree with that of the discovery of very ancient pre-historic remains in many parts of the world. Again, how many years are needed to develope modern French out of Latin, and Latin itself out of its original crude forms? How unlike is English to Welsh, and Greek to Sanskrit yet all indubitably of one family of languages! What years were required to create the existing divergence of members of this family! How many more for other families, separated by a wide gulf from this, yet retaining traces of a primeval aboriginal affinity, to have developed themselves, either in priority or collaterally! The same consonantal roots, appearing either as verbs inflected with great variety of grammatical form, or as nouns with case-endings in some languages, and with none in others, plead as convincingly as the succession of strata in geology, for enormous lapses of time. When, again, we have traced our Gaelic and our Sanskrit to their inferential pre-Hellenic stem, and when reason has convinced us that the Semitic languages which had as distinct an individuality four thousand years ago as they have now, require a cradle of larger dimensions than Archbishop Ussher's chronology, what farther effort is not forced upon our imagination, if we would guess the measure of the dim background in which the Mongolian and Egyptian languages, older probably than the Hebrew, became fixed, growing early into the type which they retain? Do we see an historical area of nations and languages extending itself over nearly ten thousand years: and can we imagine less than another ten thousand, during which the possibilities of these things took Essays and Reviews.

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body and form? Questions of this kind require from most of us a special training for each: but Baron Bunsen revels in them, and his theories are at least suggestive. He shows what Egypt had in common with that primeval Asiatic stock, represented by Ham, out of which, as raw material, he conceives the divergent families, termed Indo-European* and Semitic (or the kindreds of Europe and of Palestine), to have been later developed. Nimrod is considered as the Biblical representative of the earlier stock, whose ruder language is continued, by affiliation or by analogy, in the Mongolian races of Asia and in the Negroes of Africa.

The traditions of Babylon, Sidon, Assyria, and Iran, are brought by our author to illustrate and confirm, though to modify, our interpretation of Genesis. It is strange how nearly those ancient cosmogonies** approach what may be termed the philosophy of Moses, while they fall short in what Longinus called his "worthy conception of the divinity." Our deluge takes its place among geological phenomena, no longer a disturbance of law from which science shrinks, but a prolonged play of the forces of fire and water, rendering the primeval regions of North Asia uninhabitable, and urging the nations to new abodes. We learn approximately its antiquity, and infer limitation in its range, from finding it recorded in the traditions of Iran and Palestine (or of Japhet and Shem), but unknown to the Egyptians and Mongolians, who left earlier the cradle of mankind. In the half ideal half traditional notices*** of the beginnings of our race, compiled in Genesis, we are bid notice the combination of documents, and the recurrence of barely consistent genealogies. As the man Adam begets Cain, the man Enos begets Cainan. Jared and

*The common term was Indo-Germanic. Dr. Prichard, on bringing the Gael and Cymry into the same family, required the wider term IndoEuropean. Historical reasons, chiefly in connexion with Sanskrit, are bringing the term Aryan (or Aryas) into fashion. We may adopt whichever is intelligible, without excluding, perhaps, a Turanian or African element surviving in South Wales. Turanian means nearly Mongolian.

** Aegypten's Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, pp. 186-400; B. v. 1-3. Gotha. 1856.

*** Aegypten's Stelle, &c., B. v. 4, 5, pp. 50-142. Gotha. 1857.

Irad, Methuselah and Methusael, are similarly compared. Seth, like El, is an old deity's appellation, and MAN was the son of Seth in one record, as Adam was the son of God in the other. One could wish the puzzling circumstance, that the etymology of some of the earlier names seems strained to suit the present form of the narrative had been explained. That our author would not shrink from noticing this, is shown by the firmness with which he relegates the long lives of the first patriarchs to the domain of legend, or of symbolical cycle. He reasonably conceives that the historical portion begins with Abraham, where the lives become natural, and information was nearer. A sceptical criticism might, indeed, ask, by what right he assumes that the moral dimensions of our spiritual heroes can not have been idealized by tradition, as he admits to have been the case with physical events and with chronology rounded into epical shape. But the first principles of his philosophy, which fixes on personality (or what we might call force of character) as the great organ of Divine manifestation in the world, and his entire method of handling the Bible, lead him to insist on the genuineness, and to magnify the force of spiritual ideas, and of the men who exemplified them. Hence on the side of religion, he does not intentionally violate that reverence with which Evangelical thinkers view the fathers of our faith. To Abraham and Moses, Elijah and Jeremiah, he renders grateful honour. Even in archæology his scepticism does not outrun the suspicions often betrayed in our popular mind; and he limits, while he confirms these, by showing how far they have ground. But as he says, with quaint strength, "there is no chronological element in Revelation." Without borrowing the fifteen centuries which the Greek Church and Septuagint would lend us, we see, from comparing the Bible with the Egyptian records and with itself, that our common dates are wrong, though it is not so easy to say how they should be rectified. The idea of bringing Abraham into Egypt as early as 2876 B.C. is one of our author's most doubtful points, and may seem hardly tenable. But he wanted time for the growth

of Jacob's family into a people of two millions, and he felt bound to place Joseph under a native Pharaoh, therefore, before the Shepherd Kings. He also contends that Abraham's horizon in Asia is antecedent to the first Median conquest of Babylon in 2234. A famine, conveniently mentioned under the twelfth dynasty of Egypt, completes his proof. Sesortosis, therefore, is the Pharaoh to whom Joseph was minister; the stay of the Israelites in Egypt is extended to fourteen centuries; and the date 215 represents the time of oppression. Some of these details are sufficiently doubtful to afford ground of attack to writers whose real quarrel is with our author's Biblical research, and its more certain, but not therefore more welcome, conclusions. It is easier to follow him implicitly when he leads us, in virtue of an overwhelming concurrence of Egyptian records, and of all the probabilities of the case, to place the Exodus as late as 1320 or 1314. The event is more natural in Egypt's decline under Menephthah, the exiled son of the great Ramses, than amidst the splendour of the eighteenth dynasty. It cannot well have been earlier, or the Book of Judges must have mentioned the conquest of Canaan by Ramses; nor later, for then Joshua would come in collision with the new empire of Ninus and Semiramis. But Manetho places, under Menephthah, what seems the Egyptian version of the event, and the year 1314, one of our alternatives, is the date assigned it by Jewish tradition. Not only is the historical reality of the Exodus thus vindicated against the dreams of the Drummonds and the Volneys, but a new interest is given it by its connexion with the rise and fall of great empires. We can understand how the ruin on which Ninus rose made room in Canaan for the Israelites, and how they fell again under the satraps of the New Empire, who appear in the Book of Judges as kings of the provinces. Only, if we accept the confirmation, we must take all its parts. Manetho makes the conquerors before whom Menephthah retreats into Ethiopia Syrian shepherds, and gives the human side of an invasion, or war of liberation;* Baron Bunsen

* νόμον ἔθετο μήτε προσκυνεῖν Θεοὺς . . . . συνάπτεσθαι δὲ μηδενὶ