THE LAND OF BEGINNINGS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3148, 15 July 1914, Page 77

THE LAND OF BEGINNINGS.

By Jessie Mack ay.

(Concluded.) Wo have glanced at the arts and sciences which the accomplished and thoughtful Egyptians imparted to the early Mediterranean peoples around them —arts which laid the foundations of our present civilisation. But, if more subtle and intangible than these obvious gifts, the early spiritual conceptions passed on by Egypt to the surrounding races were noble offerings to the succeeding ages. Here, again, we are faced by the truth that no civilisation has ever come to flower apart from a lively and definite religion. We have learned to look on religion with a larger, wiser eye as a progressive message to man, and to read in each great faith of the past those elements which were divine. We know now that our own faith was deeply indebted at the first to Egypt for that certainty of immortality which has tor millenniums past comforted the aching heart of humanity. Herodotus says: “The Egyptians were the first who taught that the soul of man is immortal.” Plato and Pythagoras, who imparted this hope to Greece, were the pupils of Egyptian scholars. This cult of Plato and the vigorous Alexandrian school exercised a reflex influence on the Christian Church in the age following the apostolic. Again and again we -find the worn and formal, but still imperious, thought of Egvpt imposing itself, but now 'as a shackle on the loftier, simpler, later genius of Semitic religion, cradling the Hope of the World. But, looking back past the time of Jewish kings and judges, we watch with a strange reveronce the fixed faith of this sad, serious, busy people who were teaching lessons of retnbution, salvation, righteousness, and mercy when our own wild European forefathers were little higher than the apes as regarding their conceptions of a, hereafter. The Elysian Fields and the gloomy Tartarus of ancient Greece point, us back to the Sekhetu Aalu, or heaven of Osiris, and to the place of torment prepared for wicked Egyptians. It was upon these early, pure, and just teachings that many of the sublime ideas of the Hebrew prophets were modelled, though they rightly drew away from the gross decadence of later Egypt and sternly fOl ebade alliance with the worshippers of these fallen divinities. Yet their great lawgiver was trained for his high task, in the first place, in the halls of Egyptian learning. Still, there was some strange doom clinging round the polished, subtle consciousness of Egypt. Neither it nor the widely dissimilar and lofty faith of S4oroastes was to keep or spread its dominion over the souls of men; that was left for the fiery Semitic genius to achieve in the spiritual triumph of one small Levantine nation. Yet we cannot forget the tenderness and majesty of the early Osirian ideal of the holy man-god, slam and raised from the dead to be the judge of all men and the hope of struggling humanity. It is not easy, indeed, fo dissociate the language of the Christian Apocalypse from that Egyptian forecast of the heaven where the blessed ones sat with Osiris, clothed in white, and eating the tree ,of life, which stood by the sacred lake. More merciful, too, than the hard, literal post-Apostolic exhatology was the Egyptian idea of annihilation, not torment, for the enemies of Osiris. The teachers of early Israel were not uninfluenced by the Book of the Dead. It is folly to imagine that the long sojourn of the "desert princes in Egypt was like a watertight compartment, sealed against the life and thought around them. It was a friendship at first, not a bondage, and the Hebrews could not have remained insensible to the better elements in the faith of the Nile in those loftier days. With Greece the relations of Egypt were even\ closer and quite as ancient. The remains recently unearthed betray the presence of Greek colonies in. Egypt. Nay, more, the long-kept secrets of the dark, old Etruscan kings before Romulus have been at least nartially yielded up to the patient research of nodern scholarship. Those unknown hieroglyphics and archaic pictures of the old Lucuraos are shown to have been taken from Egypt to the lowlands of Etruria in the same way as the sculptures of ancient Greece, the carvings, the architecture, the wall patterns, the Doric pillars, the lonic capitals, and all else we once* thought to be the evolution of indigenous Hellenic art. The Etrurian and the Greek studied side by side in the Nile Valiev, where the oddest buildings in the world still attest the enduring nature of Coptic culture. Nor can we go to the limit of history in song-lore, in nursery tales, or in-popu-lar games of skill without landing back in that same fertile, sun-bathed Land of Khem. Tradition finds some connection between iEsop and Egypt, and it is true that eight centuries before the sharptongued dwarf delighted the Attic wits of his time with the fables that Socrates later turned into polished verse, the same stories had been told in Egypt, as well as many which reappeared long afterwards in the Arabian Nights,” and were received as the product of Asiatic imagination. “ The Lion and the Mouse.” “ Cinderella/ 1 ’ “Prince Agib,” “Ah Baba,” and “Sinbad the Sailor ” all came from Egypt. The folk-songs of Europe are often found to have been sung first on the banks of the Nile, and games resembling chess and draughts are found represented on most ancient papyri.

Mr Richardson does not weight his paper with the-haunting speculations which link Egypt with the _ yet more remote civilisation of a_ Titanic past. Put such links have been industriously traced as far away as India, Tibet, and Japan. He does not speak of the Mexican pyramid and other remains showing affinity with the very early culture of Central America. He does not speak of the curiously Egyptian character of the giant statues of Easter Island, nor follow up the fascinat-

ing speculations of Ignatius Donnelly, which found in Egypt the eldest daughter of lost Atlantis, and the treasure-house of what was saved from the wreck of the Atlantean civilisation. Nor_ does he enter on the field of the mystics, who, like Gerald Massey, count Egypt the cradle of occult learning, of magic, of symbolism, of Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and the ancient Wisdom Religion, which has taken on new life as modern theosophy. But he has said and suggested enough to show that no country on earth better merits the title of “ The Land of Beginnings.’’ Is there to be a revival of this most ancient and persistent of races under the fostering care of Britain? Has Egypt, withered finally by the Mohammedan blight, said her last word to the world ?