yptians belong? The only historic document which
takes us back so far as this is the list of nations in the tenth chapter
of Genesis. We cannot, indeed, determine the time when it was written. But
Bunsen, Ebers,[181] and other ethnologists are satisfied that the author
of this chapter had a knowledge of the subject derived either from the
Phoenicians or the Egyptians. Ewald places his epoch with that of the
early Jewish kings. According to this table the Egyptians were descended
from Ham, the son of Noah, and were consequently of the same original
stock with the Japhetic and Semitic nations. They were not negroes, though
their skin was black, or at least dark.[182] According to Herodotus they
came from the heart of Africa; according to Genesis (chap. x.) from Asia.
Which is the correct view?

The Egyptians themselves recognized no relationship with the negroes, who
only appear on the monuments as captives or slaves.

History, therefore, helps us little in this question of race. How is it
with Comparative Philology and Comparative Anatomy?

The Coptic language is an idiom of the old Egyptian tongue, which seems to
belong to no known linguistic group. It is related to other African
languages only through the lexicon, and similarly with the Indo-European.
Some traces of grammatic likeness to the Semitic may be found in it; yet
the view of Bunsen and Schwartz, that in very ancient times it arose from
the union of Semitic and Indo-European languages, remains only a
hypothesis.[183] Merx (in Schenkel's Bibel-Lexicon) says this view "rests
upon a wish formed in the interest of the Philosophy of History; and the
belief of a connection between these tongues is not justified by any
scientific study of philology. No such ethnological affinity can be
granted,--a proof of which is that all facts in its favor are derived from
common roots, none from common grammar." Benfey, however, assumed two
great branches of Semitic nationalities, one flowing into Africa, the
other into Western Asia.[184] Ebers[185] gives some striking resemblances
between Egyptian and Chaldaic words, and says he possesses more than three
hundred examples of this kind; and in Bunsen's fifth volume are
comparative tables which give as their result that a third part of the old
Egyptian words in Coptic literature are Semitic, and a tenth part
Indo-European. If these statements are confirmed, they may indicate some
close early relations between these races.

The a