What Is Egyptology?
The object of Egyptology is to render it a sort of elevated standing-point, from which all the realms of ethnography and philology might be surveyed, and the most distant and isolated points brought within range of view. This undertaking has been attempted chiefly by Bunsen, who has completed in five volumes his work entitled Ægypten’s Stelle in der Weltgeschichte (“Egypt’s Place in Universal History,” Hamburg, 1845-1857), and has discussed some of the same subjects in a more general and miscellaneous book, or collection of treatises, called Christianity and Mankind, their Beginnings and Prospects (London, 1854). It is Bunsen’s theory that “the Egyptian language is the point in universal history at which the creative energy of language still shows its original form, just before it raises its pinions aloft, and assumes in the world-ruling nations an entirely different and more spiritual form; while in the other races, according to laws not yet explored, it sinks into the atomic and mechanical, or at best deflects into subordinate ramifications.”—(Ægypten, i. 338). Looking back over a period of more than twenty thousand years, this philological speculator recognises a time when the as yet undivided families of Japhet and Shem lived together in a civilized state in Northern Asia. From this undivided Asiatic stock Egypt, according to Bunsen, must be a colony, gradually degenerated into the African type; for the old Egyptian language claims affinity at once with the Aramaic idioms in immediate contact with it, and with the Indo-Germanic tongues, with which it has no direct commerce—(Report of the Brit. Assoc., 1847, p. 280; Ægypten, iv., Pref., p. 10). It must be owned that these sweeping conclusions do not rest upon philological inductions of the most accurate kind, and are supported by arguments which are sometimes as arbitrary as they are precarious.—Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edition.