The Mamluks, who currently govern Egypt, settled there around the tenth century: they descended from Mount Caucasus and arrived in this country after having made inroads into Syria. These men, to whom our crusaders applied the name that they bear even today, distinguish themselves from the other inhabitants of Egypt by their physical form and their bellicose character. They are all strongly built, with a robust constitution; their shape is beautiful and agreeable; they have an oval face, a voluminous skull, a high forehead, large, wide eyes, a straight and slightly aquiline nose, a medium-sized mouth, a slightly protruding chin, brown or auburn hair and eyebrows, and matte white skin. The women who come from this same country, and who adorn the seraglios, present the same traits with some favorable modifications: one finds among them some great beauties.
The elderly among these Orientals have magnificent appearances due to the protrusion and the beauty of their facial features and the striking whiteness of the beard that they let grow all the way down to the bottom of their chest. Murad Bey was a perfect example of these beautiful physical forms. The character of the Mamluks is proud and hardy, without being cruel: they are hospitable and generous. They do not marry until they have reached a high rank; they are then trained exclusively in military arts, and I think it is correct to consider them the foremost cavalrymen of the world.
The second race is composed of the Turks or Turkmen, who come from Turkey or Asian Tartary. Their constitution resembles that of Georgians or Circassian Mamluks, of whom I have just spoken: but their coloring is swarthy, their face flatter, their skull more domed and more spherical; they have smaller eyes, a somber and wicked gaze, black and furrowed eyebrows, as well as a black beard. Their character is less lively and has a certain cruelty. This type of man is fairly numerous in Cairo, and they are under the immediate command of the pashas.
The third class is made up of the Arabs, whom one may subdivide into three different races: that of the oriental Arabs, originally from the edges of the Red Sea or Arabia; that of the occidental or African Arabs, natives of Mauritania or the coasts of Africa; and that of the Bedouin Arabs or Scenites, who come from the deserts.
The individuals of the first race, who have persisted in the class of the fellahs, artisans or laborers of the whole of Lower Egypt, are of slightly below-average height: they are robust and rather well-built; their skin is tough, tanned, and almost black; they have a brassy and oval face, the forehead large and rounded, a black and detached eyebrow, with the eyes of the same color, small, bright, and sunken, a straight nose of medium size, a well-formed mouth, well-planted teeth with a beautiful form and white like ivory. One observes among their women certain agreeable differences: one principally admires the gracious contours of their limbs, the regular proportions of their hands and their feet, the pride in their gait and attitude.
The African Arabs relate to the aforementioned in the whole of the form of the body, as well as through the color and vivacity of the eyes; but they resemble the habitants of the coast of Africa in the shape of their nose, of their jaw, and of their lips: their character is very analogous to that of other races of Arabs. These African Arabs have spread throughout Upper Egypt, and they cultivate the earth and practice trades like the former do.
The Bedouins or shepherd Arabs are generally divided into scattered tribes on the borders of fertile land at the edges of deserts where they live under tents that they carry from one place to the next, as needed. They have certain similarities with the others: their eyes are more gleaming, the features of their face generally less pronounced, the shape of their body more beautiful; but they are shorter in stature. They are more agile and extremely thin, though very robust: they have a lively spirit, a proud character; they are distrustful, alert, stealthy, errant, and vagrant; they make fairly good horseback riders, and their dexterity with the lance and the javelin are highly admired. The customs and manners of all these Arabs are more or less the same: they raise herds of sheep, camels, and horses of a highly sought-after breed.
The fourth class of inhabitants of Egypt, and the principal object of my research, is composed of the Copts, who are found in large numbers in Cairo and in Upper Egypt. These are without doubt the descendants of the true and ancient Egyptians: they have retained their physical form, language, manners, and customs. Their origin appears to be lost in the most distant centuries; they existed in the Sa’yd well before Diocletian. Herodotus affirms that the Egyptians descended from the Abyssinians and the Ethiopians. All historians agree with Herodotus on this point, and the research that I have done in this matter inclines me to adopt this opinion.
All Copts have a dark and yellowish complexion like the Abyssinians; their face is full without being puffy; their eyes are beautiful, limpid, and almond-shaped with a languid gaze; their cheekbones prominent; the nose almost straight, rounded at its tip; flaring nostrils, average mouth, thick lips; the teeth are white, symmetrical, and not prominent; the beard and hair are black and kinky. The women present the same characteristics with some flattering differences. This proves, contrary to the opinion of M. Volney, that these men are not at all of the race of the Negroes of the interior of Africa; for there is no trace of similarity between these people and the Copts. In fact, the African Negroes have larger and more prominent teeth, their alveolar arch extends further and is more pronounced, their lips fuller and inverted, and their mouth wider; they also have less prominent cheekbones, smaller cheeks, and duller and rounder eyes, and their hair is fuzzy. The Abyssinian, on the other hand, has large eyes, with a pleasant gaze, and the internal corner is inclined; the cheekbones are more prominent; the cheeks form, with the pronounced angle of the jaw and the mouth, a more regular triangle; the lips are full without being inverted, as with the Negroes, and, as I have already said, the teeth are beautiful and less prominent; the alveolar arch is less extended; finally, the complexion of the Abyssinians is coppery.
All of these traits are found with slight differences in the Copts or true Egyptians; one also finds them in the heads of ancient statues, particularly in those of sphinxes. To verify these facts, I gathered a certain number of skulls in several Coptic cemeteries, the demolition of which had been necessitated by public construction projects. I compared them to those of other races, of which I had also amassed a rich collection, particularly with those of a few Abyssinians and Ethiopians which I had also procured for myself, and I was convinced that these two types of skulls presented more or less the same forms.
The trip that I took to the pyramids of Saqqara permitted me to strip a rather large number of mummies, whose skulls presented to me the same characteristics as the former, such as the prominence of the cheekbones and the zygomatic arches, the particular shape of the nasal cavities, and the slight protrusion of the alveolar arches.
The many parallels that I have just established, the relations that have always existed and still exist between the Abyssinians and the Copts, the similarities of their manners, of their customs, and even of their religion, seem to me sufficient to prove that the Egyptians really descend from the Abyssinians and the Ethiopians. Moreover, it is natural to think the Ethiopians followed, in primeval times, the course of the Nile, and that they stopped little by little in the countries that this river fertilizes: but these settlements only occurred in a successive manner, just as this people successively spread from Elephantine to Thebes, to Memphis, and to Heliopolis; the cities north of these were not formed until long afterward.
I also distinguished three types of mummies, which seemed to me to belong to three classes of citizens, and perhaps to different generations. Those of Upper Egypt are generally more beautiful and better cared-for than those of Lower Egypt. The mummies that I place in the first class are firm, solid, coated in bitumen, embalmed with this same substance, wrapped in strips of flax linen, forming as many surgical bandages as there are regions of the human body; they are enveloped in a case of cardboard dotted with hieroglyphics; and all of these parts are contained in a case of sycamore, on the cover of which is painted the image of the person.
It appears, as Herodotus said, that after having emptied the three principal cavities of the body, one filled them with bitumen then injected the same substance into the extremities and all of the exterior parts of the body; and this substance being completely melted, it penetrated these parts so deeply that it leached into the bones such that these bodies could and still can be preserved much longer, as they are found in a climate where it rains rarely, and the places where they are deposited are very dry and deprived of air. After removing the cases from the mummies of this class, one recognizes first the sex and the principal forms of the individual: the face, the hands, and the feet of certain ones are covered with artistically applied gold leaf. It is under the arms or inside the bodies of these mummies where one has found these rare writings, known under the name of papyrus, whose characters are still unknown to us. Each of these mummies also bears the attributes of the art or the profession that the individual practiced during his life, and his tools are enclosed with him in the coffin. This first type of embalming, reserved for the principal citizens of the State, required lengthy and great preparation, and many ingredients, which must have rendered it quite expensive.
The second class of mummies was less beautiful, less perfect: the bandages were of a less fine fabric, applied less artistically. These mummies did not have the cardboard case, and the sycamore coffin which contained them was less finely worked and was not ornamented with paintings, like the coffins of the first type.
The individuals of the third class were embalmed more cheaply, and the mode of embalming varied infinitely. All of the mummies of this class were prepared with injections into the cavities of the body, consisting of substances that were saline and more or less corrosive, such as a solution of natron or sea salt: after thus thoroughly salting the body, one dried it in the sun, or one exposed it to the heat of a fire until the point of perfect dryness; one then enclosed them in the rudely carved cases of sycamore. All of these operations were doubtless directed by men well-versed in surgery.
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To complete these notes, we will attach to them a précis on the method by which we embalmed, in Europe, the bodies of some fallen soldiers.
If the subject whose body must be embalmed died of a chronic disease with marasmus, provided that one does not suspect any purulent deposits in the viscera, that putrefaction has not been declared, and that the exterior of the body is intact, one may leave the entrails in their respective cavities, except for the brain, which must always be extracted. In this case, the process will begin by washing the entirety of the body with pure, fresh water; followed by an enema of the same substance, and an empty syringe will be used to absorb the diluted matters which could not escape, due to their own weight and the pressure on the lower abdomen. The matter contained in the stomach will be absorbed by the same means. It would suffice to adapt an esophageal probe to the siphon of the syringe, which one will insert into this organ by the mouth or by an opening made in the esophagus on the left side of the neck. The stomach and the intestines are then filled with a melted bituminous substance; the openings are plugged, and one proceeds to the injection of the vascular system. For this, the surgeon detaches a flap of the interior left lateral portion of the chest opposite the aortic arch; he cuts one or two of the cartilages that cover it; he places in the interior of this artery a siphon with a valve, with which he will push a fine injection, dyed red, to fill the capillary vessels of the entire membranous system; immediately afterwards and by the same method, he performs a coarser injection to fill the arteries and their branches, and a third for the veins, which must pass through one of the femorals: he lets the cadaver cool and lets the injected matter coagulate. To empty the skull, he applies a large trepan to the junction of the saggital suture and the occipital suture, after having made a longitudinal incision to the skin, without touching the hair, which he must take care to preserve, much like the hair on other parts of the body. This opening having been made, he breaks the adherences and folds of the dura mater, with the aid of a long, thin, double-edged scalpel; he then pulls back the flaps of this membrane with a tenaculum, extracts all of the mass of the cerebrum and cerebellum with this same instrument, and injects cold water, which promptly dissolves the cerebral substance. He then rejoins the edges of the division of the teguments with a few sutures.
If the subject was considerably stout, and if he died with a putrid or malignant illness, and during a hot season, it will be impossible to preserve the entrails from putrefaction: in this case, they are extracted through a semi-circular incision made on the right flank, near the lumbar region. The surgeon first detaches the intestines, the stomach, the liver, the spleen, and the kidneys; he cuts the diaphragm circularly, then the mediastinum, the trachea, and the esophagus, at their point of entry into the chest, and then removes the lungs and the heart, without damaging this last organ, which must be prepared separately and conserved with care. These two cavities must be sponged out, and a certain quantity of powdered oxi-muriate of mercury is put on the fleshy parts of their walls; these cavities are then filled with washed and dried horsehair; the forms of the lower abdomen are restored, and the edges of the incision are fixed with an interlocking suture; finally, the thusly-prepared cadaver is submerged in a sufficient quantity of as strong a solution of oxi-muriate of mercury as one can make. It soaks in this solution for the length of ninety or a hundred days. Once it is well-saturated with this solution, it is placed on a lattice exposed to the graduated action of a heat source situated in a dry and aerated space; and as the parts gradually dry out, the surgeon restores the natural features of the face and the form of the limbs, placing them in a conventional pose; he places two enamel eyes between the retracted eyeballs and the eyelids; he dyes the hair to its natural color if he judges it necessary to do so, and he spreads a lightly colored varnish on the entire outside of the body, which revives the color of the skin and preserves the appearance of freshness; finally, the body is placed under glass to display it for the public, or it is buried in a coffin. One may thus maintain for thousands of years the remains of heroes or great statesmen.
