centuries, each individual mechanically pursuing the occupation to which he was born—millions cultivating the soil, and producing wheat, etc., for the subsistence of the whole: others tending the cattle necessary for food or sacrifice; millions, again, crowded into the numerous towns, occupied in the various handicrafts necessary to provide articles of clothing, luxury, etc.—a large proportion of this class being available for stupendous architectural works; and lastly, diffused through these country and town populations, two other proprietor-castes—the one a militia, occupied in gymnastic exercises alone; the other a sacerdotal or intellectual order, within whose body was accumulated all the speculative or scientific wisdom of the country. Relations existed between Egypt and the adjacent countries; and rumours of the nature of its peculiar civilization may have spread through the nations of the Mediterranean; but for a long while it was shut, like the present China, against foreign intrusion; and it was not till about the year 650 B. C. that it was thrown open to general inspection. In the sixth and fifth centuries B. C., the philosophers of other countries, and especially of Greece, used to visit Egypt in order to acquire, by intercourse with the Egyptian intellectual caste, some of that precious knowledge of which they were believed to be the depositaries.
Although the Egyptian civilization is known to have existed pretty much as we have described it from immemorial antiquity, yet, with the exception of what we learn from Scripture, we know little of Egyptian history, properly so called, anterior to the time when the country was thrown open to the Greeks. Herodotus and Manetho, indeed, have given us retrospective lists of the Egyptian kings, extending back into the primitive gloom of the world; but portions of these lists are evidently constructed backwards on mythical principles. Thus Manetho, preserving doubtless the traditions of the sacerdotal Egyptian caste, to which he is supposed to have belonged, carries back the imagination as far as 30,000 years before the birth of Christ. From this date till B. C. 5702, great divine personages ruled in Egypt; then (B. C. 5702) it came into the possession of human kings, the first of which was Menes. From the accession of Menes down to the incorporation of Egypt with the Persian empire (B. C. 525), Herodotus assigns 330 kings, or, as they are called in Scripture, Pharaohs, whose names he informs us, were read to him out of a papyrus manuscript by the Egyptian priests, who pledged themselves to its accuracy; and Manetho reckons up twenty-six dynasties, some of them native and others foreign, which divided the long period into portions of different lengths.
Arabia. The great peninsula of Arabia was in the earliest times inhabited
by a population of the Semitic stock, in all essential respects similar
to that which inhabits it now, partly concentrated in cities, partly wandering
in tribes through the extensive deserts which mark the surface of the
country. The inhabitants of the towns subsist by agriculture and commerce;
the wandering tribes by cattle rearing and pillage. In ancient
times, as now, the Arabs were celebrated for their expert horsemanship,
their hospitality, their eloquence, and their free indomitable spirit. In
religion, however, the modern Arabs, who are Mohammedans, differ from
the ancient Arabs, who were idolaters, chiefly worshippers of the celestial
luminaries, nowhere so beautiful as in the sky of an Arabian desert. The
Arabs themselves trace their history back, the older tribes to Kahtan (the
Joktan of the 10th chapter of Genesis), the latter to Adnan, a descendant
