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THIS work, of
which two bulky volumes have been published, containing together nearly
twelve hundred large quarto pages, and of which other two volumes are
ready for the press, while, at the least, one more volume will be
required to complete the work, is more likely, were it for no other
reason than its bulk, to appal than to attract readers; and, for more
reasons than one, it is well fitted to try the patience of those who may
venture upon its perusal. They will find it a hard out to crack;
and the kernel, when got at, will but poorly repay the pains of those
who shall have succeeded in cracking it. The author himself seems
to have a notion that he is making unreasonable demands upon the faith
and patience of his readers. Towards the close of the second
volume, he remarks, half apologetically, that "conclusions already
attained by the writer had to be occasionally stated, glanced at, or
implied, which must appear to the reader the sheerest, and sometimes
most unwarrantable assumptions, until the evidence for such conclusions
can be completely set forth. He thus stands self-condemned: for
nothing can justify an author for bringing forward statements which must
appear to the reader the sheerest and most unwarrantable assumptions,
without, at the same time, setting forth the evidence by which he
proposes to substantiate them. Were Mr Gerald Massey a vates
in the highesh sense of the term—prophet as well as poet—be could
scarcely have made a more exorbitant demand upon the faith of his
readers, who will, doubtless, reserve their confidence for writers who
can convince their judgment.
The aim of the work is to demonstrate, or, at the
least, to render credible, the hypothesis that at some far away time,
and somewhere in the interior of Africa, the negro, or primitive man,
was evolved from the ape—for the author is nothing it not an
evolutionist—and that, in process of time, the negro race descended the
valley of the Nile, peopled Egypt, became a civilised and cultured
people, sent out colonies all over the world, and spread "mythology,
religion, symbols, language," and all that civilisation implies, to the
uttermost ends of the earth. Against this very simple and
symmetrical hypothesis stands the obvious fact that the ancient
Egyptians, as represented by themselves on their monuments, are not
negroes, but, on the contrary, are sharpely distinguished from the
negro, who also appears on the same monuments wearing the self-same
features which he wears to-day. Even Mr Massey confesses that the
Egyptian "type on the earliest monuments had become liker to the
so-called later Caucasian." This he regards as of no importance,
since "the Egyptians themselves never got rid of the thick nose, the
full lip, the flat foot, and weak calf of the Nigritian type." The
differentiation of the Egyptian from the negro only demands, in the
author's view, a longer period of pre-historic time.
It is a far cry from Egypt to England ; but the
distance in not too far for Mr Massey to bridge across. How many
sensible people will trust to the frail and fantastic structure with
which he proposes to span it is another matter. The Aryan family
of languages is so organically distinct from the Hamitic, which includes
the Egyptian, that no philologist has yet been able to discover the
slightest trace of affinity between them; yet the task of connecting
them is not too hopeless nor too vast for Mr Massey to undertake.
Nay, more, he has convinced himself—although it way well be doubted
whether he will be able to convince anyone else—that all the languages
in the world are descended from the Ancient Egyptian. The means by
which he proposes to reach this conclusion may easily be guessed.
It is none other than the old-fashioned and exploded etymological
process in which the vowels count for nothing, and the consonants for
very little more; and in which, by juggling with letters, any word in
any language may be identified with any other word in any other language
of quite another organic structure. To make way for this process,
scientific philology must be swept aside; and this is easily effected by
a stroke of the pen:—
"The founders of philological science have worked without the most
fundamental material of all, the Egyptian ; this they neglected early
and avoided late. From lack of the primaries to be found in that
language, a vast number of their conclusions are necessarily false, and
their theory of the Indo-European origin of languages and races is, in
the present writer's opinion, the most spurious product of the century.
This list of words, at least, will give no countenance to the theory ;
they point to Egypt, and not to India, as the place to look for the
origines of the language that first came into the British Isles."
It seems, then, that Bopp and
Grimm, the fathers of comparative philology, and their followers, in
working patiently and laboriously backwards from the known to the
unknown, have for the last fifty years been on the wrong tack, and that
the magnificent results which they have achieved are "the most spurious
products of the century!" How far the author is qualified to form
an opinion on this subject will be seen presently; but meanwhile it may
be remarked that he has put himself, by these remarks, in opposition,
not only to comparative philologists, but also to Lord Bacon and to the
scientific world generally; since if there is any thing on which
scientific men agree, it is that science must work backwards from the
known to the unknown, and not conversely from the unknown forwards to
the known.
If guess-work shall ever take the place of scientific
method as a means of arriving at truth, then Mr Massey will come to be
accounted a philologist and a philosopher. It is hard to know what
he understands by the "theory of the Indo-European languages and races;"
but there can be no doubt that the descent of all the Aryan languages
from a common mother tongue is now as definitely established as the law
of gravitation. It is however, still open for Mr Massey to
affiliate the Aryan upon the Hamitic stock, provided he can do so
scientifically. Let him compare together all the Hamitic tongues,
and from these reconstruct the primitive Hamitic language; and let him
compare this with the already reconstructed Aryan language. Not
till this shall have been done will it be possible to determine whether
there is any or what connection between English or any other
Indo-European tongue and the Hamitic family of languages. It can
lead to no result to attempt to identify modern words, abraded by the
friction of thousands of years, and altered both in form and in meaning,
with ancient Egyptian words, themselves also similarly abraded and
modified by the tear and wear of ages. In any case the
comparison of ready-made words is utterly futile and barren of results.
Roots must be compared with roots, if any important result is to be
attained. This, at any rate, will be universal among those who
have any faith in modern scientific methods. Mr Massey, on the
contrary, does not hesitate to affirm that "comparative philologists
have not gone deep enough as yet to see that there is a stage where
likeness may afford guidance, because there was a common origin for the
primordial stock of words," the likeness to which he refers being simply
a similarity generally fanciful in sound and sense—a similarity which to
the scientific philologist is the surest mark of the diversity of
origin. He does not seem to see that, in assuming a common origin
for a primordial stock of words, or indeed a primordial stock of words
at all, and in further assuming that this common origin is to be found
in the language of the ancient Egyptians, he is simply begging the
question—that he is, in fact, assuming the very points which he has
undertaken to prove.
As might be expected, Grimm's law is the special
object of his abhorrence; and he treats it as if it were an arbitrary
invention, instead of being a natural law, which, in one form or other,
must come into action as soon as a language splits into dialects or
divides itself into branches. As Professor Sayce puts it, "Each
language or dialect has its peculiar phonetic laws or tendencies:
because a particular interchange of sounds takes place in one language,
it does not follow that it does so in another." This is the
fundamental principle which underlies Grimm's law—a principle which the
author has systematically set at defiance. He has held himself at
liberty to omit, insert, or permute vowels at pleasure, and even to
transmute them into consonants; and, in dealing with consonants, he has
made use of every possible form of permutation without taking into
account the phonetic laws and tendencies of the languages to which the
words operated upon belong. A few examples will illustrate his method.
In the list referred to in the foregoing citation,
which he calls a "Comparative Vocabulary of English and Egyptian Words,"
he defines
Eke as "a final tumbler of toddy," and identifies it with the
Egypian
Hek, "drink". It is unnecessary to prove that Eke
(Anglo-Saxon
eac-an) is a native English word meaning add to, and that
in Scotland it is used as a substantive, and means "an addition"—that
is, "something added." An eke may be put to a garment, a
bee-hive, a law plea, and to a thousand other things. —Nor does it lose
its primary meaning when used locally as it is, in some parts of
Scotland, to denote, not "a final," but "an additional" tumbler, or
rather half-tambler, of toddy. It still means "an addition"—that
and nothing else. It includes neither the idea of
drink nor of finality. So far from its being a final
tumbler, topers well know that there may be occasionally a second, a
third, or, indeed, any number of
ekes. The word, therefore, can have no possible connection with
the Egyptian Hek, if that word signifies drink. The Oh, yes ! Oh, yes
! of the town-crier is generally understood to be the old French
form of proclamation
Oyez ! Oyez ! (Hear ye ! Hear ye !) which has survived
from the Norman period of English history. Mr Massey's account of
the matter may be quoted as a fair example of his method of treatment:—
"The exact form of the town-crier's announcement known to the writer
thirty or forty years since was 'Hoi-yea-yes,' in some cases 'O
yea, yes.' This formula is abbreviated in the Cornish 'Hoyz,'
which has every element of
Hoi-yea-yes. The English Oh and Ah are the
Egyptian 'Hai,' and
Hai in to hail, address, invoke, and means Oh, Hail!
'Heh' signifies search, seek, go in search of, wander about, or
look about and bring to light. 'Hes' is the order to be
obedient: Hes, will, order, command.
Hat-hek-hes, then, is Egyptian for a command, announced with
Hail or
Oh, of the 'Ha,' who was the crier and proclaimer of
Egypt, to go and seek for and find something 'lost, stolen, or strayed,'
according to the mode of 'crying' still in use."
The identity of
the French
oyer with the Latin audire is too evident to have escaped
the author had he not plunged himself over head and ears into Egyptian
darkness. The English parent and the Latin parens
he represents as made up, not of
par and the participial suffix ns or nt, hot of
pa, the begetter,
ren, to nurse, and t the participial or feminine
terminal. Thus parent (Eng.), parens (Lat.), is
equivalent to pa-ren-t (Egypt.). The detaching of the
r from the stem and joining it to the suffix is at once novel,
ingenious, and unphilological. We are no longer to regard England
as the land of the English—at least etymologically. Mr Massey has
discovered that ankh is the Egyptian word for life, and it is the
simplest inference from this that "Ankhland was the land of life in
mythology localised by name in England." One more example, and the
patience of the reader shall be taxed no further :—
"Ark, in the hieroglyphics, is the end of a time or a thing completed. P
is the masculine article the. At the end of its lifetime, or
completed period, the pig becomes pork, which is, when read in Egyptian,
the ended or completed pig. The period is represented by a circle,
the symbol of enclosure, or arking round. Thus, ark with the
article p yields' our word park."
One is tempted
to doubt whether the whole work is one great elaborate joke, or only a
clumsy attempt at a kind, of verbal legerdemain; for surely these
passages—and there are hundreds quite as absurd—can never have been
meant for sober philology. In any case, the reader may be warned
that this spurious etymology pervades the whole work, and vitiates every
one of the author's conclusions. This is a sweeping condemnation;
but it is sufficiently justified by the fact that the philologial is at
present the sole method by which comparative mythology can work out any
trustworthy results; and when this method is wrongly applied, as it is
throughout these volumes, it is impossible to put faith in any of the
conclusions which are reached.
It only remains to state that, in the second volume,
he attempts to affiliate the Hebrew, the Akkadian, and the Maori races
and languages upon the Egyptian, and to prove, after his own peculiar
fashion, that the Jews borrowed their religion from Egypt, and that the
books of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, and Judges are composed of Egyptian
myths, with the slightest possible admixture of the historical element.
The time may come when the questions here raised may
have to be faced; but they will have to be dealt with by a very
different person than Mr Gerald Massey, and in a very different method
from that which has been employed in these volumes. |
