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V. A second period of advancement in civilization was that of the early monarchies. Egypt, Chaldea, India, and China, have each pretensions to superior antiquity, and a claim to invention; and the claim of each may be allowed. Their common nature and common origin sufficiently account for coincidences which have too hastily been judged certain marks of imitation. Yet if the question were still urged, what country had the best claim to the highest antiquity, that honour might be allowed to Egypt. It is certain mankind never adopt improvements, much less invent them, without the pressure of an immediate want, and a ready facility of removing it. Where the chace is abundant, and the supply of game sure, no tribe of hunters will ever be at the labour, or use the foresight of rearing animals tame, and providing a domestic stock. Where the pastoral country is sufficient for the unlimited increase of their cattle, no tribe of herdsmen will ever make agriculture an object of first-rate importance. And thus, at every step of their progress, men are goaded forward by their wants, and incited and allured by the prospect of supply. It will be readily admitted, that Egypt is the country where these wants would be soonest felt in succes

sion, and most easily removed. Even had the first inhabitants been savages, the vale of the Nile is so narrow, that the beasts of chace would be quickly thinned, and animals for domestic purposes caught and tamed. The habitable country being extremely limited in extent, agriculture would soonest be thought of, and most easily practised, since the Nile itself does the work of the plough and the harrow, manures the ground, covers the seed, and leaves but the work of harvest for the husbandman, and is the true Ceres and Triptolemus of antiquity, the first indicator of culture, the inventor of tillage, and the bestower of corn. It is there also that men, from the nature of the country, must first have lived in towns, crowded upon the few elevated spots which were superior to the inundation of the Nile, and which, rising like so many cities from the waves, reminded the early Grecian traveller of his native islands amid the Egean sea. Hence also the Nile, by leaving a water communication alone between the different towns, made the Egyptians the earliest sailors; and the barks, which opened to them the only path to the neighbouring cities, found, by following the course of the river, an easy entrance into the Mediterranean sea; and

though, after their early discoveries and colonies, this art amongst them altogether declined, and passed to another nation; yet the Phoenicians, as they had the first hint of an alphabet in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, so they saw the earliest navy, in the vessels, which with a full sail, and a north wind, were ascending the stream, and in return, gently floating down the current of the Nile.

The priority of Egyptian civilization to that of the Indians, might be evinced either from ancient history, or from ancient monuments; from the direction of the earliest commerce, or the planting of the earliest colonies. (E.)

The prior antiquity of India rests upon the suspicions and partial authority of its own writings, themselves of suspected antiquity. The antiquity of Egypt is vouched for by the oldest authenticated writers extant, the Hebrews and the Greeks. Again, there are no monuments in Egypt which need the explanation of having been reared by Indian architects; though there are remains in India which appear to indicate an African origin. It may be added that the monuments of Egypt alone are covered with hieroglyphics, which carry them back to an age, and a literature anterior to the invention of alphabetic characters. Ancient

commerce was founded upon the riches of India, and the wants of the West. Egypt held out no inducement to the Hindoos to emigrate; its narrow valley was soon filled with population, and was surrounded by forbidding deserts; but the wide, and to the ancients, interminable regions of India, with the romantic fables of wealth and wonder attached to them, might easily have induced Egyptian emigrants to leave the scorched and barren shores of the Red Sea, and embark in some of those fleets which were ever steering towards the treasures of the East. With respect to colonies, those which proceeded from India, and have been scattered over the islands of the Indian Ocean, cannot compare either in antiquity or celebrity with those of the Egyptians who commenced the civilization of Greece previous to the period of written history. All this might be proved at length, but this proof is not necessary; we should consider as equally in error those who would borrow the civilization of the Egyptians from the Indians, or those who, on the other hand, would make the Egyptians the instructors of the Indians in the arts and sciences. It was not imitation, but a native impulse, and the concurrence of the same favourable circumstances, which, across the

most fertile zone of the earth, and from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Mediterranean, spread a wide and prosperous civilization. Along the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, and the great Chinese rivers, the nations entered upon a new career, and undertakings were formed, and works executed, of a vastness which throws a shade upon the wonders of following ages. It was there that the productions most necessary to existence, which have from thence been carried into distant countries, and cultivated with so much labour, grew spontaneously, where bread corn sprang up like the grass of the field, and the earth, in emulation of the golden age, and with the fertility of the fabled islands of the west, poured forth unbidden food, and renewed a perpetual banquet. It was there that the pastoral tribes changed without effort their manner of life, and with nature for their example and instructress, cultivated the fruits of the earth, which already grew so freely around them, into a greater abundance, and reared as if by enchantment cities which, like Babylon, rebuilt by the Assyrian for his tributary allies the Chaldeans, received whole nations within their ample walls, and contained and subsisted within their ramparted gardens, the po