The anatomy of the mummies seems to show a wide departure from negro characteristics.  The skull, chin, forehead, bony system, facial angle, hair, limbs, are all different.  The chief resemblances are in the flat nose, and form of the backbone.[186] Scientific ethnologists have therefore usually decided that the old Egyptians were an Asiatic people who had become partially amalgamated with the surrounding African tribes.  Max Duncker comes to this conclusion,[187] and says that the Berber languages are the existing representatives of the old Egyptian.  This is certainly true as concerns the Copts, whose very name is almost identical with the word “Gupti,” the old name from which the Greeks formed the term AEgypti.[188] Alfred Maury (Revue d.  D. Mondes, September, 1867) says that, “according to all appearances, Egypt was peopled from Asia by that Hamitic race which comprised the tribes of Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia.  Its ancient civilization was, consequently, the sister of that which built Babylon and Nineveh.  In the valley of the Nile, as in those of the Euphrates and the Tigris, religion gave the motive to civilization, and in all the three nations there was a priesthood in close alliance with an absolute monarchy.”  M. de Rouge is of the same opinion.  In his examination of the monuments of the oldest dynasties, he finds the name given to the Egyptians by themselves to be merely “the Men” (Rut),—­a word which by the usual interchange of R with L, and of T with D, is identical with the Hebrew Lud (plural Ludim), whom the Book of Genesis declares to have been a son of Misraim.  This term was applied by the Israelites to all the races on the southeast shore of the Mediterranean.  It is, therefore, believed by M. de Rouge that the Egyptians were of the same family with these Asiatic tribes on the shores of Syria.  Here, then, as in so many other cases, a new civilization may have come from the union of two different races,—­one Asiatic, the other African.  Asia furnished the brain, Africa the fire, and from the immense vital force of the latter and the intellectual vigor of the former sprang that wonderful civilization which illuminated the world during at least five thousand years.

Sec. 6.  The Three Orders of Gods.

The Egyptian theology, or doctrine of the gods, was of two kinds,—­esoteric and exoteric, that is, an interior theology for the initiated, and an exterior theology for the uninitiated.  The exterior theology, which was for the whole people, consisted of the mythological accounts of Isis and Osiris, the judgments of the dead, the transmigration of the soul, and all matters connected with the ceremonial worship of the gods.  But the interior, hidden theology is supposed to have related to the unity and spirituality of the Deity.