id.

The celebrated French Egyptologist, M. Mariette, has very much enlarged
our knowledge of the more ancient dynasties, by his explorations, first
under a mission from the French government, and afterward from that of
Egypt. The immense temples and palaces of Thebes are all of a date at
least B.C. 1000. We know the history of Egypt very well as far back as the
time of the Hyksos, or to the eighteenth dynasty. M. Mariette has
discovered statues and Sphinxes which he believes to have been the work of
the Hyksos, the features being wholly different from that of the typical
Egyptian. Four of these Sphinxes, found by Mariette on the site of the old
Tanis, have the regular body of a lion, according to the canon of Egyptian
art, but the human heads are wholly un-Egyptian. Mariette, in describing
them, says that in the true Egyptian Sphinx there is always a quiet
majesty, the eye calm and wide open, a smile on the lips, a round face,
and a peculiar coiffure with wide open wings. Nothing of this is to be
found in these Sphinxes. Their eyes are small, the nose aquiline, the
cheeks hard, the mouth drawn down with a grave expression.

These Shepherd Kings, the Hyksos, ruled Lower Egypt, according to Manetho,
five hundred and eleven years, which, according to Renan,[150] brings the
preceding dynasty (the fourteenth of Manetho) as early as B.C. 2000.
Monuments of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties are common. The oldest
obelisk dates B.C. 2800. Thanks to the excavations of M. Mariette, we now
have a large quantity of sculptures and statues of a still earlier epoch.
M. Renan describes[151] tombs visited by himself, which he considers to be
the oldest known, and which he regards as being B.C. 4000,[152] where were
represented all the details of domestic life. The tone of these pictures
was glad and gay; and, what is remarkable, they had no trace of the
funeral ritual or the god Osiris. These were not like tombs, but rather
like homes. To secure the body from all profanation, it was concealed in a
pit, carefully hidden in the solid masonry. These tombs belong to the six
first dynasties.

The great antiquity of Egyptian civilization is universally admitted; but
to fix its chronology and precise age becomes very difficult, from the
fact that the Egyptians had no era from which to date forward or backward.
This question we shall return to in a subsequent section of this chapter.

Sec. 2. Religious Character of the Egyptians. Thei