their rulers; like them, they claimed an ascendancy as their birthright; and in the course of events, this was sometimes allowed them-and the people were thereby goaded to revolt; while at other times the emperors governed according to the will of "the lessenlightened majority."

When Mr. Sharpe is not under the influence of his Socinian bias, his observations respecting men and things are generally very judicious. We give the following specimens. He says of Josephus :

"Though his style is elegant, his narrative simple, and his manner earnest, yet his history cannot be read without some distrust. He was false to his country, to its religious laws, and to his foreign wife. He is sometimes biassed by his wish to raise the character of his countrymen-at other times, by his eagerness to excuse his own conduct. His history, however, throws great light

upon the state of the Israelites at a time which is in the highest degree interesting to all Christians; and in his answer to Apion, who had written against the Jews, we find some short, but most valuable quotations from many writings, which were then in the Alexandrian libraries, but have been since lost."p. 392.

After mentioning the building of the great temple at Latopolis (Esne), in the reign of Vespasian, which, he says, is worthy of the best times of Egyptian architecture, he proceeds:—

"The economist will, perhaps, ask from what source the oppressed Egyptians drew the wealth, and where they

found the encouragement necessary to finish those gigantic undertakings, which were begun in times of greater prosperity; but the only answer which we can give, is, that the chief encouragement, at all times, to any great work, is a strong sense of religious duty-and the only fund of wealth upon which men can draw for their generosity, or nations for their public works, is to be found in self-denial."-p. 393.

With this extract we dismiss, for the present, Mr. Sharpe's volume, and turn to that of Mr. Ösburn. His work, he tells us,

"Is designed to present to the Christian reader a few examples of the extent to which the Bible is susceptible of illustration from the remains of ancient

Egypt, now that the mode of interpreting the hieroglyphic writings has been discovered. It will be found to differ from other recent publications with the same professed object, in appealing not merely to the pictures which occur on Egyptian temples and tombs, but also to the inscriptions that accompany them, without which they were never intended to be understood, and are, therefore, necessarily unintelligible."-p. 1.

He begins with the proofs of the colonization of Egypt from the North East; and here we think he might have advantageously omitted his diagram of "the three Niles," for which there is no Egyptian prototype; and the passage in the book of the dead," which he gives in page 20, as giving us the geography of the Meh-moou." It is made up of fragments of unconnected sentences, in none of which is there any mention made of that imaginary river, nor the slightest allusion to it that we can perceive. His reasoning from the late age of the earliest existing monuments at Thebes, as compared with those at Abydos, Beni-hassan, and Ghizeh, the buryingplace of Memphis, has much weight; yet it might be objected against it, that monuments of the twelfth dynasty are, in fact, found both there and all up the river to the second cataract, while the sovereignty of Menes over Upper as well as Lower Egypt, is as certain a deduction from history as his existence. Mr. Osburn is unquestionably right as to the fact, that the progress of colonisation was up the river, and not down it, as the ChamSince pollions originally supposed. Lepsius's expedition, we believe that all Egyptologists are agreed as to this. He seems, however, to place the peopling of the Southern part of Egypt much later than he should.

which, when certain known complements were not expressed after them, required them to be supplied by the reader, and which had thus, in a qualified sense, a double value. The languages, too, have much in common. They not only agree, both of them, in many points with the Hebrew and its kindred languages, and consequently with each other; but-what is much more remarkable-they agree with each other in points where the Hebrew differs from them, as do also the Phonician, Aramaic, and Arabic. Thus, the affix "her," is S, and "their," S N, in both Egyptian and Assyrian ; while the languages of all the intermediate countries have H in place of S. Again, the root N B, "all" is common to the Egyptian and the Assyrian, but appears to have belonged to none of the Semitic languages previously known. The plural Atwat "fathers," by which Xerxes, out of respect, designates Darius, in the Third Persepolitan inscriptions, is evidently related to the Hebrew Avoth (with which, by the way, it agrees in its feminine form); but the Egyptian Atv has a closer resemblance to it. These are evident indications of these two people having had a common origin, and that within a reasonable period. It might, perhaps, be supposed that the Assyrians adopted some of the peculiarities of the Egyptians, at the time when a part, at least, of their country was subject to them, as we know was the case under Thothmes III., and his son and grandson. But to this supposition it appears to us that there are decisive objections. The cuneatic determinatives are always prefixed to the phonetic characters; the hieroglyphic ones always follow them. The hieroglyphic characters all represent objects; very few of the cuneatic ones have any resemblance to objects; and they are certainly not copies of the Egyptian characters to which they correspond. Again, as to the languages, the vocabularies of the Assyrian and Egyptian tongues appear to differ in a vast majority of instances.

The re

semblance between the languages is chiefly to be found in the grammatical forms. The reverse of this would be the case, if Assyria had borrowed from Egypt during its temporary subjection to the latter country. The English language after the Norman conquest, adopted many words from the language

Be

of the conquerors, but no grammatical forms. The case is strikingly the same with the Persian language, the voca bulary of which abounds in Arabic words, but which has no grammatical forms derived from the Arabic. sides, though the primitive forms of the pronominal affixes are nearly the same in Assyrian and in Egyptian, the latter language had certain peculiar forms, which were constantly used in particular situations, and these do not appear to exist in Assyrian. Had the Assyrians adopted the Egyptian pronouns, it is to be supposed that they would have adopted them in all their forms. A further objection to this view is, that it appears highly probable that the oldest inscriptions which Dr. Layard has excavated at Nimrud, are more ancient than the period when Assyria was occupied by the Egyptians; and the difference between these inscriptions and the more recent ones (of the seventh century B. C.) is very slight. We conclude, then, that neither did Assyria borrow from Egypt, nor Egypt from Assyria; but that these two nations had common ancestors, and that at a period not very remote.

Mr. Osburn proceeds to treat of the Canaanites and their costume; and afterwards, referring to the account given in Exodus, of "the service of the tabernacle," describes the manufactures of the Egyptians in metals, wool, leather, and carpentry, their oils and spices, their precious stones and music. Several passages in the Bible are quoted and illustrated. He gives a great number of woodcuts, and some coloured plates, from which the reader will be able to form a more correct judgment as to the progress in the arts which the Egyptians had made, than from any other cheap work that we know. Of the Onomasticon we will not offer any criticism. We do not in general agree with Mr. Osburn ; but the points on which we differ must be considered as still sub judice. We will conclude with giving our readers a specimen of the latter part of his work. After giving a coloured figure of a Tyrian, as he calls him-certainly one of the same family of nations as the Tyrians taken from the tomb of Rameses Meiamoun, he says::

"The inner garment resembled that of all other ancient nations. It was a fine

linen cloth, bound round the waist, and descending nearly to the ankles. The mantle and tunic were of wool, as their stiff, heavy folds sufficiently indicate; and must have been of fine texture, as the contour of the arms and chest is represented as visible beneath the mantle. Their colours seem to set at rest the difficult question as to the tint denoted by the Tyrian dye. They are both purple and scarlet, and are so made that one half the person is clothed in the one colour, and the other half in the other.* Both colours are extremely vivid, as the Greek and Latin authors uniformly represent them to have been. The scarlet part of the mantle has a pattern of large purple spots upon it, which appear to have been formed during the process of dying, either by sewing on patches of cloth of the shape of the spots, or by applying some earthy ground, to protect the purple in these places from the reagent, which turned the rest scarlet. This agrees remarkably well with the account given by the elder Pliny of the mode in which woollen cloth was dyed of the Tyrian hue. The cloth was first steeped twice, for five hours each time, in the preparation from the shell-fish, called purpura; this process dyed it of a rich deep purple (purpura nigricans). Afterwards it was again immersed in a preparation from another shell-fish, called murer or buccinium, whereby an intensely bright scarlet was produced.‡ The stop or ground must have been applied after the first of these processes, while the cloth was purple. The mantle and tunic were both edged with a deep gold lace." -pp. 115, 116.

Will none of our naturalists find out what the two shell-fish were, of which Pliny speaks in the above passage? The re-discovery of the Tyrian dye, would possibly make the fortune of whoever should achieve it.

We are now come to the more important work of the Chevalier Bunsen-a work of greater pretension than any which has appeared for many years; but one which, so far as it has yet appeared, is as little likely to

satisfy its readers as any that we know. It abounds in confident statements, but is deficient in proofs. The author promises to do much, but, in the present volume, he actually does very little. What he professes to do in it is, indeed, almost exclusively, to lay down his method of action, to criticise his authorities, and review the labours of his predecessors, and to collect a number of detached facts, to be compared together, and reasoned upon hereafter. All this is, we admit, very necessary in such a work as M. Bunsen has undertaken; but it is most unsatisfactory to his readers that he should have stopped here. he can form an opinion as to whether even the first stages of his journey be in the right direction, the English reader is asked to wait for the second volume of the work, which will probably not be published for several years; and as to the remaining volume, to which even this is but the prelude-looking merely to the numerous engagements of the author, and not taking into account the difficulties it presents we may reasonably doubt whether it will ever be finished.

Before

This piecemeal mode of publication may have some advantage. It has been suggested that there may be persons who would undertake the perusal of a single volume like the present, but who would shrink from the task of going through three such volumes at once. Such persons, however, will have forgotten what they now read, long before a second portion can be prepared for them; nor are they the class of readers that would be likely to feel an interest in the work, or that would be qualified to pass judgment upon it. There may be others, again, it is alleged, who may be so much interested in the present volume, as to engage in the study of the hieroglyphic legends, with a view to prepare themselves for forming a correct opinion of the remainder of the work.

"Historia Naturalis," Lib. ix. c. 38.

We rather wish that this may be a numerous class, than expect that it will be so. On the whole, we are quite satisfied that the disadvantages of this mode of publication greatly preponderate; and the only excuse for it, that we can admit to be valid, is necessity. The author not having finished, nor being likely to finish, what he has undertaken, he must either publish in parts, or keep back the entire for an uncertain, and, probably, a very considerable time.

When the work shall be completed, if it ever be so, it will consist of five books. The present volume contains the first of these. It was published in German about four years ago, along with the second, and part of the third books; and we were then led to expect that the remainder of the third and the fourth books would follow these very speedily. The end of 1845 was mentioned. Nearly three years have elapsed since this period, and as yet there has been no additional matter published in German; nor, we believe, any announcement that such is about to be published. The preparation of this English translation of the first book, in which some material improvements have been introduced by the author and his friends, has, of course, been partly the cause of this delay; but other causes have, no doubt, combined with this, some of which may be easily imagined.

The first book is, as we have already intimated, a mere opening statement, which lets us know what the author expects to be able to do, and explains his intended method of proceeding; but which does not exhibit his proofs, and is, consequently, not intended to enable us to judge how far he may be deceiving himself. The task which he has undertaken is, he tells us, "that of establishing the exact position of Egypt, in relation to general history." In accomplishing this task, he says that "there are many and serious difficulties to encounter before the goal is reached;" and in the present volume he will "endeavour to point out wherein these difficulties consist, the means and conditions requisite for overcoming them, as well as the paramount importance of the object proposed, which can only be attained by the laborious process adopted in its pursuit."

This is not a very definite state

ment of what is proposed, nor is the following more intelligible :

"If the place of Egypt can be fixed at all, it must first be done according to time, by settling the chronology; and, secondly, according to its own intrinsic importance to general history. These two points, each of which is dependent on the other, will form the main divisions of the whole work, as well as of this introductory volume. The proof of the latter rests upon the adjustment of the former, although itself the prize, for the sake of which the preliminary researches have been made."-p. xxiii.

The first sentence in this paragraph appeared to us, when we read it, so very obscure, that we were induced to turn to the German original; and this suggested a preliminary inquiry into the merits and authority of this translation. Before we proceed further, we will lay before our readers the result of this inquiry.

We had been led to expect, before the translation was published, that it would be a perfect representation of the original, as corrected and enlarged by the author; that it would be, in short, a second edition of the work, considerably improved-in English, instead of in German, through Mr. Cottrell's assistance; but still, to all intents and purposes, Chevalier Bun sen's own. This expectation appeared, from the author's postscript to his preface, to have been too high; but we still looked for general accuracy in a translation, which he states to have been "most carefully revised," he himself "sparing no trouble to give his assistance in the revision."

Now, what is the actual state of the case?

1. There appear to be some passages in the translation, which have been revised by the author, and may be depended on as English originals. We are inclined to think, however, that such passages are very few. They are chiefly to be looked for among those in which Divine revelation, or what is commonly regarded as such, is treated of, or in which mention is made of living individuals.

2. There are other passages, in which additions or corrections of the author are introduced into the English text. In these cases, the translator may have had the benefit of an interleaved copy of the work, containing

the author's notes. Great carelessness is, however, sometimes shown in working them into the translation of the German edition. Thus, in pp. 46-48, the description of the celebrated Tablet of Abydos is sadly confused. In the German edition, the author had explained it on the supposition that the seated figure, of which a fragment remains, represented the king who constructed the Tablet. He mentioned in a note that Mr. Birch explained it in a different manner, supposing the figure to have been Osiris ; but gave reasons for thinking this view to be erroneous. Having afterwards discovered that Lepsius agreed with Birch, he determined to adopt their views in the English translation, and accordingly made some additions and changes. He left, however, a large part of the description uncorrected; and the consequence is that the English reader finds that in the first part of it the figure is Osiris, and in the last it is the king, and is thus involved in the greatest confusion.

3. In the greater part of the work, the translation has not been carefully revised by either the translator himself or the author. It is generally inelegant, often unintelligible, and abounds in mistakes, the result of haste and inattention. Of its inelegance and actual obscurity, our readers have seen one instance in the passage which we have quoted; and they will soon see others. It is quite unnecessary, therefore, for us to produce any examples of it here; but we will quote a few instances in which the translator has been guilty of great carelessnessin some cases completely misrepresenting his author's meaning.

We shall begin with some blunders respecting proper names. In p. 69, we find "Eusebius, the Armenian,' meaning "the Armenian translation of Eusebius." In pp. 175, 176, Uzziah, king of Judah, is thrice called "Uzzi," and thus confounded with a priest of this last name, who is mentioned in the same passage. In p. 100 we have this heading "The more ancient tradition-that of Homer and the later Thon (Thonis) and Proteus." The German is "Die alteste Ueberlieferung. Homer's und der Später Thon (Thonis)

und Proteus." The English of this is

"The most ancient tradition. The Thon (Thonis) and Proteus of Homer and of later writers." Bunsen con.. trasts the tradition respecting Proteus and Thon, which is found in the Odyssey, with the accounts of the same personages given by Herodotus and other later writers. English Egyptologists have generally used the term prænomen for the first of the two rings or cartouches used by Egyptian kings. Bunsen calls these rings "Vornamen ;” and this is rendered, p. 43, et pass., "surnames," which conveys to an English reader the very opposite idea to what is intended. In return for this rejection of a good Latin word, Mr. Cottrell introduces on all occasions the misapplied expression "data"-meaning sometimes the "results" of an investigation (Ergebniss), and sometimes the "statements" of an author (Angaben).*

In p. 19, we have "usually" for "in some rare instances" (ausnahmweise); in p. 25, "mentioned" for "published;" in p. 53, "volume" for "column," and "decimals" for "tens;" in p. 159, "a century and a-half" for "two centuries and a-half" (dritthalb Jahrhunderte). The "Glieder" of a genealogy are not "branches," as in p. 174 and elsewhere, but " "generations;" and the "Urzeit" of our planet is not its "material stratum," as in p. 36, but "the most remote periods in its history."

Our attention was caught by the above gross blunders in reading over a few sections in different parts of the work-less than a tenth of that part of the volume for which Mr. Cottrell is responsible. We noticed many other mistakes of a minor character, and we have no doubt that there are many others, great and small, which escaped our observation. In general, indeed, we did not refer to the German, unless where the English appeared, on the face of it, to be erroneous.

But, apart from positive misrepresentations of the author's meaning, such as we have been pointing out, a translation may be faulty by its looseness of expression, when words of definite meaning occur. The words "Forscher" and "Forschung" occur