17

ON THE EXTENT AND NATURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE POSSESSED BY THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS PRIOR TO THE TIME OF THE PTOLEMIES.

By E. W. BRAYLEY, Jun. Esq.

I HAVE had occasion, in the prosecution of various objects of scientific and archæological inquiry, to review, in a summary manner, the information which we possess respecting the culture of the ancient Egyptians. In the course of this review, I have been led to form the opinion, that what has sometimes been termed the scientific knowledge of that people, was almost confined, prior to the era of the Ptolemies, to an empirical practical acquaintance with the properties of the natural objects employed by them. The following statement and illustrations of this opinion were first made public about four years since, in a work entitled, "The Utility of the Knowledge of Nature considered." That work, having been composed for a particular object, connected with a private establishment, was necessarily of confined circulation. Some of the views which I have suggested, respecting the institutions of ancient Egypt, having acquired, by the reference made to them in certain investigations of the history of Egypt, and other countries, which are now in progress, a degree of importance which I did not originally attach to them; I have been induced, on account of the limited circulation of the work in which they were first promulgated, to adopt the present mode of giving increased publicity to them, in a slightly modified and improved form.

It has been shown, by many writers, that the ancient inhabitants of Egypt possessed a high degree of Mathematical Knowledge, especially in geometry; and some of the most important propositions in the collection known to us by the name of "Euclid's Elements," a work equally honourable to that illustrious geometer, as an editor, and as an original author and inventor in this science, have been traced to certain philosophers of Greece, especially Pythagoras, Thales, and Plato, who received them from the Egyptian priests, while pursuing their studies in the colleges of Heliopolis and Thebes.

But of the Physical Sciences, as branches of knowledge (existing abstractedly from a mere practical acquaintance with the properties of natural substances employed in the arts which they practised, &c.) with the exception, perhaps, of some degree of acquaintance with physical astronomy, there is much reason to believe, on the other hand, that the ancient Egyptians were almost entirely ignorant. Possessing, as is evident from their works, gigantic conceptions and unwearied industry, and induced, by their peculiar mythological tenets, to exert them in perpetuating to the remotest ages, (they hoped for ever, though it should be but an eternity of the grave,) the actually existing state of things, to perpetuate themselves, and, as it were, the very time-being in which they lived, they laid all nature under contribution, to promote their singular designs. They acquired and exercised a most precise and accurate knowledge of the properties of all the objects of nature afforded by their country, or employed in their rites and processes. They knew, for example, that the desiccation of the bodies of animals, tended greatly to withdraw them from the operation of those laws of decomposition to which dead organized matter is amenable. They knew, further, that the impregnation of the body with bituminous and saline materials, and the filling of its cavities with aromatics, would prevent its destruction by insects and animalcula. They knew, also, that the exclusion of the air, and the preservation of a uniform temperature, were necessary for the continu. ance, in its original form, of even the dried and prepared body; and, agreeably to this knowledge, they invested the body in many successive wrappers of linen and cotton cloth, which had been steeped in antiseptic solutions, and placed it, thus secluded from the air, and surrounded with bad conductors of heat, in a double case of wood, afterwards deposited in a catacomb excavated in the unchangeable rock.

Accordingly, the mummies of their royal personages and priests exist to the present day, and frequently in a state as perfect as that in which they were received from the embalmers by the relations of the deceased. A few years since, I had an opportunity f examining the mummy of an Egyptian female of rank, contemporary, it is probable. 2D. SERIES, NO. 37. -VOL. III.

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with Sesostris, which had been opened by Dr. Granville, and found to be in the highest state of preservation. Still more recently, a mummy in the possession of the Philosophical Society of Leeds, has been unwrapped, and discovered in an equally perfect condition, not only with the limbs and flesh perfectly retaining their form and texture, but with the features uninjured; whilst the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the case, manifestly coeval with the embalming, declare the body to be that of a priest, who must have been contemporary with Moses, and who might, therefore, have witnessed the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, about three thousand three hundred years ago.†

Debased and ignoble must have been the ambition which could thus have devoted so much labour and ingenuity, to so worthless an object as the body which the life has abandoned; false and irrational must have been the dogmas which could have impelled the Egyptians to bestow, on insensate matter, a degree of laborious solicitude and misapplied knowledge, which, directed to worthy objects, might have refined and exalted the minds of the living.

It may be supposed, however, from the almost wonderful accomplishment of this ambition by the Egyptians, that they were profoundly skilled in many branches of physical science; and that, without such skill, they could not have effected results so perfect and so extraordinary. Such, however, was not the fact: there is no evidence whatever of their possessing any philosophical knowledge of the substances and principles they employed; -any acquaintance with the causes of the effects, produced by those means, in their operations. In a case of this description, the absence of evidence is equivalent to express information. From all that we know of the Egyptians, whether as derived from the Greek authors, or from modern discoveries in the antiquities of Egypt, it would appear, that, as regarded the cultivation of the arts and the physical sciences, they were a nation of practised manipulators, mechanics, and workmen: experienced in the sensible effects upon each other, of the materials with which they operated, and empirically acquainted with their properties; but being, at the same time, entirely ignorant of their intimate nature and relations. In other words, that the Science of nature was unknown to them. They knew, for example, pursuing the illustration just given, that a corpse became putrid unless its moisture was expelled; but they were ignorant that the cause which rendered this precaution necessary, was the tendency of water to promote the chemical action of the constituents of the body upon each other, by favouring their assumption of the liquid form, and also by suffering decomposition, and yielding one of its constituents, (the oxygen) to them. They had found that the exclusion of the atmosphere was necessary, to effect the long-continued preservation of organic bodies; but they did not know the ground of this necessity, in the circumstance, that the atmosphere, by the oxygen it contains, and the water which is diffused through it, is the great natural agent of decomposition. They knew that variations of temperature were unfavourable to the preservation of animal matter in its natural form, but they had no knowledge, that the cause of this lay in the fact, that the chemical affinities of the elements of such matter are greatly influenced by the heat to which it may be exposed, and that the changes of texture, induced by alternations of temperature, permit a more complete operation of those affinities. They appear, in short, to have pursued the arts in a manner altogether empirical, and without principles; a conclusion which is confirmed by what Diodorus Siculus, and other historians, have related, of their mode of practising medicine, and some branches of the arts also, which are all, in our own times, intimately connected with scientific knowledge.

It is probable, indeed, that this was at once originally the cause, and eventually, in an aggravated form, the consequence also, of the division of the Egyptian people into six hereditary ranks, each of which was confined, from generation to generation, to the exercise of the same general function in society as had been originally performed by it, whilst the individuals of whom it was composed, and their posterity, were equally restricted to the particular occupations of their respective progenitors. Whatever knowledge might be possessed by each class, was entirely traditional, and confined to itself, and never contributed to form a common stock of information. For arts pursued without principles, and without some degree of scientific knowledge of the materials and agents employed, though they might readily be transmitted from one manipulator to another, -as workmen at the present day instruct apprentices, by practising before them the methods of operation-could not be reduced to didactic rules, nor described in language practically intelligible. Hence, the political system of the country provided for a succession of hereditary artists; and hence, also, when that system was destroyed by the successive conquests of Egypt by the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, the peculiar arts of the Egyptians were entirely lost. The recovery of some of the processes they adopted, is due, entirely, to the application of modern science to their existing results.

The late Professor of sculpture in the Royal Academy, Mr. Flaxman, in his Lectures on that branch of the Fine Arts which he cultivated with so much success, has attributed the want of anatomical details in the Egyptian sculpture, together with its total deficiency in the grace of motion, to the low amount of the knowledge of the Egyptians in geometry. Regarding this statement to imply rather their imperfect application of that science, in agreement with some further inferences of Mr. Flaxman, (to be mentioned presently,) I am much gratified to find this confirmation of the views I have just stated, in the opinions of a sculptor so profoundly versed in the history, as well as in the philosophy, of his own art. The want of application of geometry to the arts, is correlative with the absence of physical science, which has advanced, in every age, in direct proportion to the application of abstract mathematical knowledge to the objects of nature, and to the pursuits of civilization. In the basso-relievos and paintings of the Egyptians, Mr. Flaxman observes, "there is not the smallest idea of perspective.... Figures intended to be in violent action are equally destitute of joints, and other anatomical forms, as they are of the balance and spring of motion, the force of a blow, or the just variety of line in the turning figure:" and he ascribes these defects to their want of anatomical, mechanical and geometrical science relating to the arts of painting and sculpture."*

These opinions are in exact agreement with the views I have offered. The manner in which the more perfect mummies have been eviscerated, shows that the Egyptians must have been skilful and accurate dissectors; their stupendous pyramids and temples evince their ability as practical mechanics; and we have seen that they were geometers, of no inconsiderable attainment; but there was no Philosophy in their cultivation of the arts, and therefore no systematic combination of their separate knowledge, whether of abstract truths, or of natural objects, which could tend to refine the different arts they practised. Hence, the Art of Sculpture, as well as others, remained unimproved among them, until the Greeks, under the Ptolemies, introduced the study of some of the natural sci* Lectures on Sculpture; Lect. ii. pp. 39-40, 47-49.

ences, properly so called, and, together with that, a degree of the animation and beauty, which had resulted from its application to sculpture by the artists of their own country.

The reputation acquired by the Alexandrian school of philosophy, and the success with which many branches of natural knowledge were cultivated by its disciples, among whom were Euclid, equally skilled in the science of music as in geometry; Hipparchus, the greatest astronomer among the ancients; Ctesebius, the inventor of the pneumatic pump; and others of equal celebrity; are not to be considered as indicating, in any degree, the previous existence of definite physical science in Egypt. They are attri. butable, entirely to the influence of the philosophy and science of the Greeks; for which an opening was afforded by the sagacity of Alexander the Great, in fixing upon so advantageous a site for his new metropolis, after his conquest of Egypt; and which the subsequent establishment of the Museum, or scientific institution, of Alexandria, by Ptolemy Soter, and the fostering care of his successors, greatly contributed to raise to that high degree of perfection which it attained in this school. But it was, at the same time, the high cultivation of geometry by the Egyptians, in conjunction, doubtless, with their minute empirical acquaintance with the properties of natural substances, which afforded the foundation on which so much natural knowledge was afterwards raised among them by the Greeks.

It may be interesting to contrast with the preceding views, some remarks on the causes interfering, among savage races, with the accumulation and transmission of knowledge, which were made public nearly at the same time with the work in which those views were first offered. The present Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Whately, in the fifth of his Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, delivered in 1831, before the University of Oxford, and published in the same year, quotes the following passage from the account of the New Zealanders, in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, and then proceeds to comment upon it, in the terms which are also subjoined.

""The especial distinction of the savage, and that which, more than any other thing, keeps him a savage, is his ignorance of letters. This places the community almost in the same situation with a herd of the lower animals, in so far as the accumulation of knowledge, or, in other words, any kind of movement forward, is concerned; for it is only by means of the art of writing, that the knowledge acquired by the experience of one generation can be properly stored up, so that none of it shall be lost, for the use of all that are to follow. Among savages, for want of this admirable method of preservation, there is reason to believe the fund of knowledge possessed by the community, instead of growing, generally diminishes with time. If we except the absolutely necessary arts of life, which are in daily use and cannot be forgotten, the existing generation seldom seems to possess any thing derived from the past. Hence, the oldest man of the tribe is always looked up to as the wisest; simply because he has lived the longest; it being felt that an individual has scarcely a chance of knowing any thing more than his own experience has taught him. Accordingly, the New Zealanders, for example, seem to have been in quite as advanced a state when Tasman discovered the country in 1642, as they were when Cook visited it one hundred and twenty-seven years after.'

"It may be remarked, however," Dr. Whately observes, "with reference to this statement, that the absence of written records is, though a very important, rather a secondary than a primary obstacle. It is one branch of that general characteristic of the savage, improvidence. If you suppose the case of a savage taught to read and write, but allowed to remain, in all other respects, the same careless, thoughtless kind of being, and afterwards left to himself, he would most likely forget his acquisition; and would certainly, by neglecting to teach it to his children, suffer it to be lost in the next generation. On the other hand, if you conceive such a case (which certainly is conceivable, and I am disposed to think it a real one,) as that of a people ignorant of this art, but acquiring, in some degree, a thoughtful and provident character, I have little doubt that their desire, thence arising, to record permanently their laws, practical maxims, and discoveries, would gradually lead them, first to the use of memorial-verses, and afterwards to some kind of ma

terial symbols, such as picture-writing, and then hieroglyphics; which might gradually be still further improved into writing, properly so called."

The means by which, for a time, the arts were preserved in Egypt, but by which also they were eventually lost, appear, however, to have been of a distinct character, and to have resulted from a different national genius, from those contemplated by either of the writers here cited. The Egyptians were not savages, in the sense at least in which that vague term is most commonly understood; nor were they an improvident race, who returned to a former state of barbarism, by losing the knowledge of letters; and yet their arts became as irrecoverably lost, as far as regards any means of preserving them which they adopted, as those either of a savage tribe ignorant of letters, or of a semi-civilized community ceasing to be acquainted with them could have been. The knowledge of nature, and the processes of art, which this people possessed, whatever may have been their nature and extent, were not lost from their improvidence, but from the self-worship, and consequent self-sufficiency, which lay deeply at the root of their entire national character and economy, as well as of their mythology, and which, regarding nothing as desirable but the upholding of their own fancied greatness, seems never to have imagined the possibility of its termination.

London Institution, Dec. 11, 1833.

SLAVERY IN AMERICA.

THE present time-in which Great Britain is taking measures for the extinction of slavery in her dominions, seems appropriate to the consideration of its prospects in America. The existence of slavery in the United States has been the result of English policy, though perpetuated by the Americans; and it may, therefore, be interesting to inquire how long it is likely to remain a monument of our past injustice, and of their abiding inconsistency.

The very existence of slavery in the United States would seem, at first sight, at variance, not merely with their professed love of freedom, but with the plainest dictates of self-interest. We can understand that slavery should have existed in the British West Indies, where the number of whites is comparatively small, and unequal to the performance of the necessary works; but that such an institution should be continued in America, where the population is already ten millions, and is increasing with unexampled rapidity; and where the people are both intelligent and industriousdoes seem apparently unaccountable, when we take into consideration the original cost of a slave, the expense of maintaining him in sickness and old age, the compara. tively small quantity of work that he will perform, and the absence of all inducement to perform that work in any but the most careless manner: and add to this, the constant dread of rebellion, accompanied, as it would be, by a fearful waste of property and life; there can be no doubt that the services of a free man are more desirable,

both as regards expense and security, than those of a slave. We do not, however, stand in need of any abstract considerations to convince us of this fact. It is sufficiently proved by the general experience of mankind. It is to this that the freedom of the lower classes in Europe may be traced. Their freedom was not the result of any rebellion of the villeins, but was the gradual result of the general progress of intelligence, and of the perception, on the part of the lords, that their own interest, even more than that of the slaves, was involved in their emancipation. No one in England, at the present time, could gain any thing by keeping slaves, except the power of indulging his arbitrary disposition; but this is a feeling which, though sufficiently powerful in individual instances, is always, in the long run, and among the mass, overcome by the feeling of interest. And of this superiority of free to slave labour, the Americans themselves appear to be in a great degree aware. How then are we to account for the tenacity with which they seek to retain possession of their slaves, and the impatience with which they reject any overtures for their gradual improvement preparatory to a change in their condition? How are we to account for the ferocity of their laws in this respect, which would have disgraced the worst government that has ever existed, and which form an ineffaceable blot on the American escutcheon? An American slaveholder would reply, that these laws were required to prevent the negroes from obtaining their freedom, and were justified, as the result of their freedom would be the entire ruin of