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nals of Manetho, although himself an Egyptian; and they have been conceived to contain such discrepancies among themselves, and with the historical books of the Old Testament, as to have caused perpetual disputes among modern chronologists. On this dark period of history, our author has thrown a most unexpected light.

On one of the colonnades that decorate the first court of the great palace of Karnac at Thebes, are two royal legends: one has been found by our author to contain the name Scheschonk, the Ecoys (Sesonch-is) of Manetho, the other that of Osark or Osork, the Oropzov (Osorchon) of the same writer. Champollion identifies these with Shishak, and Zarah, or more properly Zoroch: the first of whom invaded Judea in the reign of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon; and the second encamped at Maresa, with an immense army, in the days of Asa, the grandson of Rehoboam. The former, being unnoticed by Herodotus, and only mentioned in fragments of Manetho, has been by some confounded with the more famous Sesostris,-we shall see presently with how little reason.

Our author states, that he is in possession, although he does not delineate all of them, of the names of many of the sovereigns of the nineteenth dynasty of Manetho; restricting himself to the consideration of the legends of the first and most noted of the list. He finds it to be by far the most frequent name upon the monuments of the first style of Egyptian architecture, from Syene to the mouths of the Nile; it is varied in a multiplicity of ways, but he has succeeded in showing the identity of the name throughout; it is sculptured on each side of the doorway of the recently discovered temple of Ibsamboul in Nubia, and on the great edifices of Calabsché, Derry, Ghirché, and Wady-Essebouâ, in the same country; it is frequent upon the palaces of Karnac and Luxor, at Thebes; it is inscribed on every part of the building usually called the tomb of Osymandyas, in the same city; it is found on the palace of Abydos, in Lower Egypt, on the obelisks of Luxor, (which he writes Louqsor,) and on four of those that are now in the city of Rome. But, what is still more remarkable, it has been discovered in a bilingual inscription, near the ancient Berytus, in Syria. The Pharaoh, to whom this multiplied legend refers, was a warlike sovereign, for his image is represented in basso relievos of sieges, battles, marches, and passages of rivers; he carried his arms over distant countries, for he is in other pictures the object of the homage of conquered nations, whose complexion and dress have nothing in common with those of the Egyptians: he penetrated, more particularly, as a conqueror, into the interior of Africa, as he is represented receiving the productions of this country, the cameleopard, the ostrich, various species of monkeys, and antelopes. That this king possessed immense wealth,

and employed it in the encouragement of the arts, the number and importance of his works attest; while the inscription in Syria, whose duplicate is in the arrow-headed character of Assyria and Persia, demonstrates that he had traversed the desert with his armies, and penetrated at least to the former country.

When Germanicus visited the venerable remains of Theban greatness, he asked the eldest of the priests of the country the history of their founder;* who stated that they were the work of RAMSES, who, with an army of seventy thousand men, drawn from the population of that city alone, had conquered Libya, Ethiopia, the Medes and Persians, Scythia and Bactria, with Syria, Armenia, Cappadocia, Bithynia, and Lycia. This name, Ramses is identical with that found by our author in the various monuments we have cited. Four princes of this name are found in the list of Manetho. The third of these, Ramses, or RamesesSethosis, the first king of the nineteenth dynasty, was one of those princes whose memory, perpetuated by the events of their reign, survives in spite of the lapse of time, and the revolutions of empires. By the direct testimony of the Egyptian historian, this prince succeeded his father Amenophis III., after an interregnum caused by one of the invasions of the shepherd kings (or captives, as it is sometimes translated,) and conquered Syria, Phenicia, Babylon, Media, &c. The Sethosis of Manetho is unquestionably the same with the Sesoosis of Diodorus Siculus, who is the Sesostris of Herodotus. The age and era of this illustrious prince, is a matter of curious research. He is nowhere named in Scripture, nor does it appear probable that he could have executed such vast conquests in countries to which the direct road lay through Palestine, without having his name at least mentioned, if his exploits had occurred subsequently to the passage of the Jordan by Joshua. Still, a direct calculation upon the extract from Manetho in Africanus, makes him to have lived fourteen hundred years before the Christian era, cotemporary with Othniel, judge of Israel: the Abbé Dufresnoy, in his chronology, places him 1722 years before the same epoch, and according to his view, drawn from the Samaritan text, a few years later than the death of Joseph; but by the vulgate he would have been cotemporary with that patriarch. Thus then there appears an uneertainty in the date of the accession of Sesostris, of more than three hundred years. If we are permitted to consider the second invasion of the shepherds, and the interregnum that followed, as referring to the disasters that befell Egypt at the Exodus of the Israelites, Sesostris will have reigned and made his conquests during the forty years that they sojourned in the wilderness, and may by his arms have prepared the way for the triumphs of

C. TACITES, Annalium, Lab, II.

Joshua. The name of Ramses is however identified with the history of the Israelites, one of the cities built by them in Egypt being called after a king so named. If our views be correct, this Ramses, the oppressor of the Israelites, was the grandfather of Ramses-Sethosis. One curious coincidence is to be found, in the history of the latter, with that of the sacred volume; he is said to have divided the lands of Egypt among the people: now the state of the arts before his reign is such as could not have existed when the distinction of property was unknown; and the inference is a fair one, that at no remote epoch, some revolution must have occurred by which the land of Egypt had become the property of the king.

It is a subject of curious inquiry, whether the building described by Diodorus Siculus as the tomb of Osymandyas, be identical with that considered as such by modern travellers. If this should appear to be the case, his Ösymandyas and Sesoosis are one and the same personage, and thus the apparent similarity of their exploits is accounted for. The text of that author does not at first sight authorize this conclusion, and yet on more close examination does not contradict it. He does not assign the date of the reign of Osymandyas, by means of the generations of preceding and succeeding kings, as in all other cases, but introduces his name in the description of the royal sepulchres of Thebes, of which he states his to be the most remarkable. Now, although this is done immediately after naming Busiris, the founder of that city, he does not intimate that he was his immediate successor, or even one of the seven intervening between him and Uchoreus, the founder of Memphis. It is the opinion of his best commentatorf that Diodorus, although he actually visited the court of Ptolemy Neo-Dionysius, drew his knowledge of Egyptian history from preceding Greek historians, and not directly from the traditions of the country: we can therefore readily imagine that he may ⚫ have been deceived, both by the disposition of the Greeks to alter and hellenize foreign words, and the numerous epithets given by the Egyptians to their kings; he thus, in drawing from two different authorities, may have been insensible to the identity of the person described under two different names.

In the description of Diodorus, the first great portal, (v) the square court intervening between it and a second portal, are features common to other Egyptian edifices; but in this first court was placed an object so vast, and durable, that little fear is to be entertained of its removal, however it may have been mutilated by the outrages of Cambyses, or by subsequent injuries. "In the entrance," says Diodorus, "were three statues,

* Diodori Siculi Bibliothec. Historic. Lib. I. Cap. 47.

†C. G. Heyne, De fontibus Hist.-Diod. Sicul. in edit. Bipont. 1793.

And of these, one

all cut out of one block of Syenitic stone. which is seated is the greatest existing in Egypt, the measure of whose foot is more than seven cubits. The other two, placed at the knees of the first, one on the right and the other on the left, of his wife and daughter, do not equal it in magnitude. This work is not only worthy of praise from its magnitude, but wonderful for the style of art, and remarkable for the excellent nature of the stone, as in its vast mass no flaw or fissure is to be detected."+ In effect, on the examination of this ruin, one rocky mass distinguishes itself by its magnitude from the other fragments. Upon a closer view, it is discovered to be the head, the chest and arms of a colossal statue; another block, lying close at hand, contains the rest of the body, and the two thighs; the foot and the left hand have also been found; the whole having evidently been originally formed of a single piece of red granite, and most highly and beautifully finished. The dimensions of the statue are twelve times the size of life; the height, when in its place, one-eighth more than that of the colossus of Memnon, and the foot has exactly the measure given by Diodorus. In the quarries of Syene, the very rock whence this statue, its two attendants, and its pedestal, were formed, in a single piece, has been discovered, still bearing the traces of the chisel, and marking the vastness of the original dimensions of the separated block. Can any doubt remain that this is the statue spoken of by Diodorus as that of Osymandyas? But the inscriptions of the surrounding buildings bear the legend of Ramses-Sethosis: we cannot therefore avoid the conclusion that they were one and the same person.

The seventh predecessor of Sesostris was Amenophis II. whom Manetho states to have been confounded by the Greeks with the Memnon of Homer: our author has sought for the legend of this king upon the statue that the Greeks and Romans recognised as that of Memnon, and which, in its colossal proportions, has come down to our own days: after having been broken in two by Cambyses, and restored by the Romans, this inscription has been copied and published in the Description of Egypt, and reads Amenoph; while, to confirm the identity of this statue with the vocal Memnon of the ancients, its base is covered with inscriptions attesting the fact of the harmonious sounds that issued from it; and one by P. Balbinus, who visited Egypt during the reign of Hadrian, styles the figure indifferently Memnon and Amenoph. It is also this name that is inscribed upon those remains at Thebes that tradition has handed down to us as the Memnonium. Every

We have preferred the reading, " èvos xíðou Teuvouévous Zurvrou," given in the annotations, to that, ἐξ ἑνος λίθου Μέμνονος το Συλντου, found in the text of the Bipont edition.

† Diod. Sicul. Lib. I. cap. 47.

step in the research, then, strengthens the truth of the accounts transmitted to us by the Greeks, and still more of the records of Manetho, himself an Egyptian priest, and probably drawing his information from the very monuments decyphered by Champollion. We shall not trespass upon our readers with more than a few names of kings of even earlier date; Thouthmosis, whom the national vanity of Josephus has made the contemporary of Moses, confounding his own humble and oppressed ancestors with a warlike dynasty, whom this prince drove out of Lower Egypt; Mephris, or Mesphris, the Moris of Herodotus; and Amosis, the founder of this family, that counted so many illustrious princes.

We have now reached to within a thousand years of the flood, according to the Samaritan text, which will still leave ample room for the eighteen kings whose legends have been ascertained to be of still earlier date; and with them our author's researches appear to have terminated. As regards the multitude of kings Manetho places before the epoch we have attained, they are easily accounted for by the well-established fact, that the territory of Egypt was at a more early date parcelled out among several petty chiefs, and was not united into one kingdom until the Diospolitan conquest by Thouthmosis. With this dynasty the splendour of Egyptian arms and arts appears to have commenced; and to them are to be attributed the most magnificent of the more ancient monuments of that country, with the exception perhaps of the pyramids, which, unstoried and uninscribed, may escape the researches even of a Champollion.

ART. VII.-NATURAL HISTORY.

Introduction offrant la détermination des Caractères essentiels de l'Animal, sa distinction du Végétal, et des autres corps naturels; enfin, l'Exposition des Principes fondamentaux de la Zoologie. Tome 1er de l'Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertèbres. Par M. LE CHEvalier de la MARCK. Paris. Nature; Article dans le XXIII. tome du Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle; Par LE CHEValier de la MARCK.

Ir is the high prerogative of man to possess reason-that power which qualifies him to observe the present; compare it with the past; anticipate the future; deduce general principles from the scrutiny of particular facts, and transmit to posterity, in illimita ble progression, the benefits of his experience. Hence to the increase of human knowledge no boundaries are set, but those which terminate individual existence-to the universal improve

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