the remotest periods, there has existed a most intimate connexion between the two nations, and that colonies emigrating from Egypt to India, or from India to Egypt, transported their deities into the country in which they respectively took up their abode.” This testimony of the Rev. Mr. Maurice’s is fully confirmed by Sir W. Jones, who says,
“The remains of architecture and sculpture in India, which I mention here as mere monuments of antiquity, not as specimens of ancient art, seem to prove an early connexion between this country and Africa: the pyramids of Egypt, the colossal statues described by Pausanias and others, the Sphinx, and the Hermes Canis, which last bears a great resemblance to the Varáhávatar, or the incarnation of Vishnou in the form of a Boar, indicate the style and mythology of the same indefatigable workmen who formed the vast excavations of Canara, the various temples and images of Buddha, and the idols which are continually dug up at Gayá, or in its vicinity. The letters on many of those monuments appear, as I have before intimated, partly of Indian, and partly of Abyssinian or Ethiopic, origin: and all these indubitable facts may induce no ill-founded opinion, that Ethiopia and Hindostan were peopled or colonized by the same extraordinary race; in confirmation of which it may be added, that the mountaineers of Bengal and Bahar, can hardly be distinguished in some of their features, particularly their lips and noses, from the modern Abyssinians, whom the Arabs call the children of Cush: and the ancient Hindus, according to Strabo, differed in nothing from the Africans but in the straightness and smoothness of their hair, while that of the others was crisp or woolly; a difference proceeding chiefly, if not entirely, from the respective humidity or dryness of their atmospheres: hence the people who received the first light of the rising sun, according to the limited knowledge of the ancients, are said by Apuleius to be the Arii and Ethiopians, by which he clearly meant certain nations of India; where we frequently see figures of Buddha with curled hair, apparently designed for a representation of it in its natural state.”[1]
Again, Sir W. Jones says, “Mr. Bruce and Mr. Bryant have proved that the Greeks gave the appellation of Indians to the nations of Africa, and to the people among whom we now live.”[2] I shall account for this in the following work.
Mons. de Guignes maintains, that the inhabitants of Egypt, in very old times, had unquestionably a common origin with the old natives of India, as is fully proved by their ancient monuments, and the affinity of their languages and institutions, both political and religious.[3]
Many circumstances confirming the above, particularly with respect to the language, will be pointed out hereafter.
10. It is curious to observe the ingenuity exercised by Sir W. Jones to get over obstacles which oppose themselves to his theological creed, which he has previously determined nothing shall persuade him to disbelieve. He says, “We are told that the Phenicians, like the Hindus, adored the Sun, and asserted water to be the first of created things; nor can we doubt that Syria, Samaria, and Phenice, or the long strip of land on the shore of the Mediterranean, were anciently peopled by a branch of the Indian stock, but were afterwards inhabited by that race which, for the present, we call Arabian.” Here we see he admits that the ancient Phœnicians were Hindoos: he then goes on to observe, that “In all three the oldest religion was the Assyrian, as it is called by Selden, and the Samaritan letters appear to have been the same at first with those of Phenice.”[4] Now, with respect to which was the oldest religion, as their religions were all, at the bottom, precisely the same, viz. the worship of the Sun, there is as strong a probability that the earliest occupiers of the land, the Hindoos, were the founders of the solar worship, as the contrary.
