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the walled towns of Judah, and pillaged the temple of Jerusalem; and though no very extensive buildings remain erected by him, the sculptures he added on the walls of Karnac, suffice to show that this campaign is recorded with the names of the captured places. The king, as usual, presents his prisoners to the deity of the temple, and to each figure is attached an oval, indicating the town or district he represents; one of which M. Champollion concludes to be the Yooda Melchi, or kingdom of Judah ; a name whose component letters agree with the hieroglyphics, though the place it holds is not sufficiently marked to satisfy the scruples of a rigid sceptic.

The era of Sheshonk is the first fixed point for the establishment of chronological data; and we have been enabled, by reckoning backwards to the Exodus, and from inscriptions on the monuments, to fix the probable duration and date of each reign. From the accession of Thothmes III., about 1495, B.C. to the year 1068, twentythree kings succeeded to the throne of Egypt, which gives about eighteen years to each reign; and the ninety years intervening at the end of the twenty-first dynasty, may readily be accounted for by assigning them to sovereigns whose names are lost.

"A very favourable argument in support of the dates I have given, is derived from the astronomical subject on the ceiling of the Memnonium at Thebes, erected by Remeses the Great: where the heliacal rising of Sothis is found to coincide with the beginning of Thoth, which could only have happened in the year 1322 B. C., and this falls, according to my table, in the middle of his reign. But whatever I offer on such intricate questions is given with much deference, and I shall willingly yield to the sounder judgment of the scientific reader."

Few students of Egyptian archæology have been at once so accurate, and so cautious and modest, as Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson. We must leave, however, these most

interesting speculations and inquiries, of which only a glance can be taken in the limits of these chapters. No ruins of the ancient world, it will be seen, yield results at all to be compared, either in interest or value, to those which have heretofore been deduced from the remains of that ancient land which is so remarkably associated with the early pages of sacred history, and so closely connected with all the most remarkable characteristics of Greece and Rome.

With the close of Egyptian annals, we wellnigh exhaust the interest which attaches to the ruins of Africa. Once, indeed, civilization extended along the whole Mediterranean shores of that continent. Phoenician colonies were planted on its coasts, and rose to such wealth and power as to eclipse their parent sources. Carthage espe cially became the centre of commerce, and for a time seemed destined to preserve to the ancient African continent the chief seat of empire and civilization. But Rome triumphed at length, after a terrible struggle. Hannibal in vain swept across the Alps, and led the hosts of the African capital into the fertile plains of Italy by such strange paths. The scene of African grandeur became a heap of ruins, of which no traces remain; even the works of later Roman colonists on its site having been nearly obliterated.

Greece also sent her colonists to Africa. Cyrene and other seats of Greek colonization are still discernible by the fragments of ruined temples and sculptured marbles, while amid the barbarous Moors, and within sight of the distant rock of Gibraltar, the remains of Saracenic art still tell of the old builders of the Alhambra, ere the chivalry of Spain compelled them to abandon for ever the country which retains such magnificent traces of Moorish art and civilization.

PART III.-AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

THE NEW WORLD.

Say who, when age on age had roll'd away,
And still, as sunk the golden orb of day,
Who first adventured-in his birth obscure,
Yet born to build a Fame that should endure;
Who the great secret of the deep possest,
And issuing through the portals of the West,
Fearless, resolved, with every sail unfurled,
Planted his standard on the Unknown World!

ROGERS.

THE course of our history now leads us from the continents whereon the scenes of ancient story have been chiefly enacted, to that vast portion of the globe which still emphatically receives the name of the New World. Our province, however, is to deal, not with the new, but with the ancient relics of our race, and of these the American continents are no less prolific than those which have been from earliest times the seat of empire and of human action. Few questions have excited greater interest, or led to more varied controversy, since the dis

covery of the New World, than the probable source of its first colonists. Theories of the most extravagant and improbable nature have been advanced to account for the peopling of a continent separated by impassable oceans from the ancient scenes of human habitation, and yet to reconcile it with the scriptural fact, that the single human pair who inhabited the garden of Eden, were the parents of the whole human race, "made of one blood on all the face of the earth." One among the several theories advanced has aimed at making of the Red Indian race, the lost Ten Tribes, whose restoration to their ancient land the prophecies of Scripture are thought clearly to foretell. Others looking to the simplest and most natural source of population for the New World, have pointed to the facilities offered by the near approach of the North American continent to that of Asia, at Bhering's Straits, for the passage of wanderers from the Old World to the New, or for their boats and canoes being driven by chance upon the further shores.

Recent literary discoveries have put the question beyond all possibility of dispute, that the New World had been known by Europeans, and visited and colonized, centuries before the discovery of the Indian Isles by Columbus; who, it will be remembered, never landed on the American continent. The Society of Northern Antiquaries of Copenhagen, published in 1837, a work of great learning and research, entitled "Antiquitates Americanæ," designed to furnish evidence of the discovery of the American continent by the Norsemen several centuries before the voyages of the Spanish discoverers. These Danish antiquaries have entered into lengthened correspondence with distinguished American scholars and men of science, on this subject, the result of which has been the discovery of some curious traces of these older Scandinavian colonists, of whose pre-occupation of the North American continent, upwards of four centuries before it

was rediscovered by the Spanish followers of Columbus, and by other European explorers, it is no longer possible to doubt. In one of the communications furnished to the antiquaries of Copenhagen by the secretary of the Rhode Island Historical Society, it is remarked :-"In the western parts of our country may still be seen numerous and extensive mounds, similar to the tumuli met with in Scandinavia, Tartary, and Russia; also the remains of fortifications that must have required for their construction a degree of industry, labour, and skill, as well as an advancement in the arts, that never characterized any of the Indian tribes. Various articles of pottery are found in them, with the method of manufacturing which they were entirely unacquainted. But, above all, many rocks inscribed with unknown characters, apparently of very ancient origin, have been discovered, scattered through different parts of the country, such as it was impossible so to engrave without the aid of iron or other hard metallic instruments." Of several of these inscribed rocks engravings are given in the Danish Society's publication, and while some are in rude and unknown characters and hieroglyphics, others are unquestionably engraved in Runic characters, corresponding to the ancient monuments of Northern Europe. But what appears at first still more extraordinary, the same traces of the ancient dawn and slow progression in the arts of civilization, are discoverable in the New as in the Old World. Historians and archæologists may speculate and theorise, but the antiquities of the New World occupy a place in their investigations altogether apart from every other branch of their studies, though the very recent date of the discovery of the great continents of North and South America only renders more interesting whatever is calculated to throw light on their previous history. The modern archæologists, reasoning from the discovery that in nearly every primitive state of society, where the arts of civilization have been unknown,

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