184 Memnon. excellent work on Indian antiquities has produced a number of very strong arguments, to prove that the religion of Egypt must have been transplanted from India '^. That he has decided the point would perhaps be too much for any one, certainly for one who is not familiar with the literature of both countries, to pronounce. But if upon continued ex- amination this opinion should be as generally received as that of the Ethiopian origin of the Egyptian priesthood, which not long ago was as generally rejected ^'^, we should then have another key to the mysterious legend we have been discussing. For as it would then be clear that there was a historical connexion between the Indian Menu and the Egyptian Menes, so it would not be an extravagant con- jecture, that the movements which transported an Indian colony into Africa, vibrated through the heart to the ex- tremities of Asia, and that the same shock which agitated the nations, carried the name of Memnon on the wave of conquest and migration from the Indus to the ^sepus. As however I do not wish the reader to strain his eyes upon this distant retrospect, I will conclude with reminding him that the hypothesis here proposed is quite independent of all these conjectures, though perhaps if it were to be tried by their merits it might bear to be confronted with its rival; but that the advantage it claims over its antagonist is, that it gets rid of a cumbrous load of hypothetical machinery, which, though it cost the ingenious author little trouble to raise, his readers cannot so easily support, and that it preserves the essence of an ancient tradition, while it illustrates the character of the people which interwove the foreign legend with their national poetry. C. T. 79 V. Bohlen. Das alte Indien mit besonderer Rucksicht auf Aegypten, 80 VTesseling on Diodor. iii. 2. (Vol. i. p. 175) observes : Quod si tamen Aegyptiis respondendi locus essetjdubium non est quin iisdem rationibus pugnarent, et Aethiopas suos esse colonos pertenderent : manebit ergo lis sub judice, donee aliunde, utri anti- quitate praestent, probabitur : quod Aegyptiis fortasse in facili erit.
