of Scandinavia, made his appearance in Cashmere, about the year 1014 B. C. "The Cashmerians, who boast of his descent in their kingdom, assert that he appeared two centuries after Chrishna, the Indian Apollo." This Chrishna is distinguished from Ram, or Bacchus, by his affinity with the Preserving Deity, Vishna-Ram having more the attributes of a demi-god, or hero; both are celebrated in epic poems, and their characters and exploits seem to have been partly founded on the tradition of Sesostris' expedition; but the Hindoos have no true history, and their chronicle of Delhi kings is of no historic value, except that it gives a fair picture of the spirit of their origins, and presents a point of connection by which their institutions may be traced to those of Egypt. If any one will take the pains to make a minute comparison between the religion of the modern Hindoos, as it is faithfully pictured in the work of Ward, the missionary, with the account given by Wilkinson, in his learned work on the Customs and Manners of the Egyptians, he will probably entertain no doubts of the identity of Indian and Egyptian heathenism; nor of the origin of the institution of caste, a form of society peculiar to the Hindoos and ancient Egyptians; and seeming to have arisen from the conquest of a feeble race by a people intellectually and physically their superiors. The fairest conjecture admits the probability of a mixture of these nations, and the resemblance of their features, and habit of body, might suggest it without aid of history.

"The mountaineers of Bengal and Bahar," says Sir William Jones, "can hardly be distinguished from the modern Abyssinians, in some of their features; and the ancient Hindoos, according to Strabo, differed in nothing from the Africans but in the straightness of their hair." We know that the hair of the Egyptians was not like that of a negro; but the hair of the Hindoos is very straight; a difference easily anticipaed, from the mixture of Asiatic with Egyptian blood. The eastern Asiatics having uniformly straight hair. The natives of Sennaar, as is apparent from the shape of their skulls, had a feature

and constitution intermediate between Hindoo and Arab, but Sennaar is a part of ancient Ethiopia, which was inhabited by a race akin to the Egyptian, and living under the same laws and institutions with that people; but we find the name Ethiopian applied, by Homer, to a people of the extreme east, who are named by the poet in the same breath with the Ethiopians of the extreme south. Memnon, the son of Aurora, or of the East, led an army of Ethiopians to the siege of Troy; which happened nearly three centuries after the Indian expedition of Sesostris; a long enough period to have allowed his military colonies to become a great nation. The fleet of this conqueror sailed about Arabia, and may easily have ascended the Indus, though tradition says that they were stopped by the shoals of the Persian gulf; but the desert shores of Gedrasia would be a more probable and effectual hindrance, than the ordinary difficulties of navigation. It is conjectured that the warlike expeditions of Sesostris were intended to open the way for Egyptian commerce; which soon after, if not previous to, that monarch's reign, reached India; and since, in that day, military as well as sacerdotal colonies were established by every trading nation for the protection of their commerce,§ and we know that the revenue of Egyptian sovereigns was drawn chiefly from the monopolies which they held, of foreign trade, the expedition of Sesostris, like the exploits of the Tyrian Hercules, reduces itself from a romance to the semblance of reality, and wears even a soberer aspect than the excursions of Alexander.

The language of India bears only a remote resemblance to the Coptic, or Egyptian, Sanscrit being of the same group with Persian and Greek, and the language of Egypt with Arabic and Hebrew; we have beside, the traditions of the Zendavesta, in which Indostan is enumerated among the nations blessed by Ormuzd, and peopled by a race, of which the Medes and Persians were a branch. The language of conquerors, if they are few in number, must be blended with that of the conquered territory; excepting in words of religious signifi

(Translated.)

cance, such as names of deities; and, accordingly, the names of several Hindoo deities may be identified with those which had the same meanings in Italy and Egypt; and it is only in the caste of Hindoo soldiers that a physical resemblance can be traced to the Egyptians, who are pictured on the Theban tombs: these represent a race rather agile than stout, excellent at the bow, and in the chariot; with persons beautifully formed, docile, complacent, and active, and something under the full height; a description which applies equally to the soldiers of Sesostris or the modern Rajepoots of Agimere. It would be easy, on the other hand, to show decided differences, between the modern Brahmin and his ancient counterpart in Egypt; for the Egyptian priesthood never acquired that ascendency over the military order which the Brahmins gained even centuries ago; nor would any parallel hold between the Copts of modern Egypt and the Hindoos. It is, then, sufficient, if we admit a mixture only of Egyptian, or of Ethiopian, blood, with the aboriginal Indian, and suppose that only the military and priestly orders, in Hindostan, were established by the colonies of Sesostris. Allowing a still larger liberty of conjecture, it might be surmised, that when the Egyptians (2000 B. C.) were driven by the shepherds of Canaan, into the narrow region of Ethiopia, where they were received and entertained by their allies, the Ethiopians, and remained with them for more than two centuries, while the shepherd kings ruled over the artisans and laborers of Egypt, a portion of this overflow, pent in Sennaar, and the narrow vales of Abyssinia, would naturally seek liberty in emigration; a common event in those ages, when whole nations were removed from their ancient seats, either by the will of conquerors, for the sake of populating new regions or cities, or, upon the pressure of other races, forcing them to give room. It may be, that, at this time, India received her first colony from Ethiopia.

But there is internal evidence, that the religion of India took only its form, from that of the Egyptians, but differed in its original spirit: for the superstition of the Nile degenerated into animal worship, that of India into a worship of idols, of the elements, and of the heavenly bodies; nor did the less scientific mind of the

Hindoos suffer that regular distinction and gradation of deities which is charac teristic of Egyptian theology: the Hindoo wastes his enthusiasm in ecstatic contemplation, and the repetition of formulas; the Egyptian exhausted his in splendid ceremonies, processions, gifts, the founding of prodigious tombs and temples, and in every kind of supersti. tious action. The Egyptians seem to have been a more intelligent and less imaginative people than the Hindoos, and greatly superior to them in courage and character: for that panic of Alexander's army, which checked their approach to Delhi, does not prove that the Hindoos of ancient times were in any respect superior to their descendants; nor were they ever a conquering nation: but the Egyptians indulged a military spirit, and for many centuries, until the time of Nebuchadnezzar, were the most powerful people of the Mediterranean: they colonized and civilized Greece, north Africa, parts of Asia Minor, and perhaps Italy; besides that they were the inventors of every civil and military art, even of navigation; unless that honor be given to the Phoenicians of Tyrus and Aradus. The houses of India are built after the ancient Egyptian fashion, and amultitude of superstitions are entertained there-such as putting gold in the mouth of a corpse, worshipping the water-lily, offering monthly gifts to the manes of ancestors, which can have come only from the Egyptians: add to this the sacredness of rivers in India, originating in the sense of their fertilizing influence, which is a superstition purely Egyptian, for the Ganges overflows, only, but does not fertilize like the Nile.

Religion, in India, inclines also to the worship of human gods and heroes; but the earlier Egyptians excluded hero worship, and denied that any of their gods had ever worn a human shape. The Hindoo heaven is the court of a sovereign king, and the orders of their gods are like the orders of their priests, ascending by ranks from menials to sages and Sanyassis; and they assume even, an uninterrupted succession of ranks, from the meanest slave to the Brahmin, sage, hero, demi-god, ærial spirit, deity, Brahma himself; and the Zendavesta of Zeratusht, in the same spirit, pictures a heaven the exact counterpart of the Persian court. But the Egyptian theogony

more refined, personifies the faculties of Reason, Understanding, Memory, Affection, the Passions and the Ideas of the Universe, Ether, the Spaces, the Spheres, Earth, Life; enfolding a very perfect psychology, and the purest science of their day, in a system which began with the identity of God with his work, and ended in personifying every least species of existence. It is extremely remarkable, that there is no clear instance of the worship of a human being by any whole people of the Shemetic race; but, on the contrary, India, Persia, Thibet, Greece, Rome, and most of the Japetian, or Indo-Teutonic family have made prayers and sacrifices, to saints and heroes a material part of their religion, and, in heathen ages, have exalted human beings to the office of protecting deities, and have ascribed human vices to the divine Idea. The Persians, even, though they entertained the purest form of heathenism, and abhorred the worship of idols, seem to have venerated their king as the visible symbol of Ormuzd; and Ormuzd himself is no more, in the Zendavesta, than the human principle of goodness, opposed in eternal war to the power of evil. The Hindoos, as in their language, so in their religion, may certainly be taken for the type and extreme representatives of this tendency; for with them a whole class (the Brahminical) is sacred and an object of worship; and their imagination subdues and swallows up their character; a defect the extreme opposite to that of the Hebrews, whose every word has a purely moral significance; and their fancy is made utterly subservient to the diviner emotions.

In the total absence of historical testimony, these evidences have been collected, with a view to some reasonable conjecture concerning the origin of the Hindoos; and they seem enough not only to separate them, as a nation, from the family of Shem, but to make them the type of that of Japhet; admitting, however, the mixture of Ethiopian blood, with that of a nation descended from the ancestors of the Persians and Bactrians, and the adoption by the mixed race of a theology and superstition, Egyptian in its form, but Indian in its spirit; begun in the worship of elements, and ending in the adoration of living persons.

THE HINDOO CHRONICLE.

THE Puranas, or books of Mythical history, reckoned by the Hindoos among

their sacred writings, describe the actions of kings and heroes, who ruled over India before the era of Yoodhisthiru; but these were the fabulous children of the sun and moon, and their history is accounted false by the Hindoos themselves. Passing over the events of these mythical ages such as the achievements of Ram, who, with an army of apes led on by a prince of the winds, conquered all Hindostan, and threw a bridge of rocks over the sea to connect Ceylon with the continent; or the amorous adventures of Crishna, whose loves and atrocities are related in the Bhagavat, the story book of devout Hindoos-the authentic chronicle of India begins with the name of Yoodhisthiru, who probably ascended the throne about 1500 B. Č. and may have been one of the generals of Sesostris. Thirty-one kings of his race succeeded each other on the throne of Delhi, and their joint reigns cannot have much exceeded 700 years. The monarchs of this dynasty ruled over a part only of northern Hindostan.

The whole sacred region named Mediami, or the Midst of the World, which included all that part of Asia which lies south of the Himmaleh, is said to have been the portion of Bharat, one of the nine brothers who originally divided the world among themselves: nine being esteemed the most sacred of numbers, may signify, in this connection, the number of the dominant or royal virtues.

Mediami, named by the Greeks India, and by the Persians Sindoostan, the territory beyond Sind or the Indus, is divided by the Chronicler into nine regions, one for each cardinal point, four for the intermediate parts, and one for the center; but this division includes Chin India, and a part beyond the mountains. In the middle province, he places Benares the most sacred of cities, time out of mind the seat of Sanscrit learning, and equal in celebrity to On, or Heliopolis, of whose college Moses is said to have been a priest. Ceylon, the ancient Lanka, called by the Greeks Silan or Taprobane, is counted among the provinces of the south. Kalinga in Golconda, is a province of an intermediate region; Mahratta, Nipal, and even China, are named as portions severally of intermediate and northern divisions; as though China were originally civilized from Hindostan-a probable inference when it is known that civilization began in the western provinces of the Chinese empire,

and that the ancient religion of the Chinese resembles, in many particulars, that of the Hindoos, and that even Buddhism, the great heresy of India, prevails very commonly among the Chinese.

The dynasty of Yoodhisthiru were all Chastrias, or Ketris, of the pure blood; being of the military caste, undebased by mixture with the inferior orders; in other words, the conquering people whom we have supposed to be Ethiopians, or Egyptian nobles left in India by Sesostris, maintained the purity of their blood for thirty-one generations. The dynasty which succeeded were of a less noble extraction, being the race of Nanda, who sprang from the marriage of a shodra, or servile woman, with a noble of the pure blood. From the fourteen kings of this dynasty, the Rajepoots are descended. These are warlike tribes inhabiting the mountainous and desert parts of central Hindostan. The Rajepoots and Rohillas, throughout all India, though degenerate, remain to this day superior in stature and beauty of person to Hindoos of a meaner caste; Rayas (the native kings and magistrates) are always of the Chastria blood, but all functions that require intelligence, rather than strength or courage, are assumed by the members of the priestly or sacred caste; as was the usage in Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, and even before the institution of monarchy in that nation. Occupations being esteemed less liberal, as they require a laborious use of the limbs without exercise of the intellect or genius, those are regarded as the noblest which task only the qualities of mind and character, and for that reason the function of authority which is to enforce obedience by the mere majesty of character, is felt to be the noblest of all; but next in order to the ruler caine, anciently, the counsellor and the judge, to whom, also, character gave their worth, but in a manner mixed and overcharged with the feelings and sentiments of humanity; since the counsellor represented only the desire and aspiration of the race, their honor and dishonor, hope and fear, hate and affection; while in the judge, as at our day, all men looked for a spirit of universal humanity, tempered by veneration for the law and custom of his nation; but the RULER, whether chosen by a popular vote, or exercising power by hereditary right, stood for the visible authority and power of his people.

The third dynasty, which included

fifteen kings, were of the sect of Buddha, and the fourth dynasty, which included ten kings, was terminated by an usurper; to whom succeeded Vicramaditya, about the year 56, B. C. His descendants ruled in Delhi until the beginning of the twelfth century, when the Hindoo kingdom of Delhi, harassed and diminished by a series of Moslem invasions, ceased finally to exist; but in other parts of India, other dynasties of the ancient race remained undisturbed in their possessions; some, even to this day, though their power has become merely nominal. Yoodhisthiru is fabled to have reigned 112 years in all, his reign being divided by an usurpation into two periods of 76 and 36, with an interval of thirteen years.

The Chronicle relates that Pareekshita, who succeeded Yoodhisthiru in the first dynasty (1375 B. C.), was killed under the curse of Brahma, by a serpent. His successor, Janama Jaya, attempted to perform a grand sacrifice of serpents, to avenge the death of his father; but the king of the serpents fled to Indra, (the Jove, or Diespiter of Indian Mythology) and the sacrifice was impeded by the prayers of a Brahmin, nephew to the king of the serpents. Whereupon, Janama Jaya performed the Aswamada, or grand sacrifice of the horse, by which monarchs obtain the hope of universal empire; (for, according to the Vedas, every sacrifice has a particular and proper value attached to it, and within its proper limits is infallible.) While the king was engaged in this ceremony, and had already severed the head of the victim from its body, Indra, the god of Ether, passed into the head, and caused it to perform ludicrous movements; a young Brahmin, observing that the head leaped about, laughed irreverently: and the king, greatly enraged, slew him upon the spot.

This fable seems not devoid of meaning; for the snakes may signify a sect of native priests; and the Hindoo Shastras, or sacred books, class the snakes in the order of Brahmins. The king, exercising severity against them, because of his father's death, is prevented by Indra, the god of storms, in whose territory (the mountains), the king had taken refuge; and to this day the flanks of the Himmalaya are the refuge of warlike tribes who acknowledge no subjection to the rajas of the Ganges.

The king, it is related, in expiation for

the murder of the young Brahmin, caused the interminable epic called Mahabarata, to be read aloud to him, and having heard it patiently, died soon after: an instance among the few others in history, of the death ensuing upon the endurance of a great deal of bad verse. The Mahabarata relates the adventures and miracles of heroes and incarnate deities, and is a mixed mass of mysticism, mythology and romance, but must have been composed long after the time of Jamana Jaya, for it contains his history. Epic narratives were written in the Egyptian language, and were probably the germ from which Indian epic poetry was afterward developed; nor is it unlikely that at this period the letters and numbers invented in Egypt, were imparted to the native priests of India by their Egyptian conquerors: but a people who have no true history, and seem willing to confound all events in mystery and fable, would easily neglect the traditions of the origin of their institutions, substituting (as all other nations have done except the Hebrews) a fabulous derivation from the gods, or from the earth.

The last king of this dynasty was slain by his nobles, and was succeeded by Visharada, the thirty-second in order from Yoodhisthiru. This king was of the impure race of Nanda, a celebrated warrior who ruled in Magada, in east Hindostan. The last monarch of the house of Nanda gave himself up to the influence of intoxicating drugs, and fell by the hands of his minister, Veeravahoo, who was a Buddhist. Under this king and his successors, for fifteen generations, the sect of Buddha became powerful in Hindostan, to that degree that the ancient religion fell into neglect and disrepute. "The Buddhists deny the truth of every thing invisible," (being what are now named Materialists,) and affirm that no evidence can be trusted except that of the external senses. "They deny the existence of a Creator, declaring that all things arose by chance, and cease by chance; that there is no future state, either of reward or punishment; that as the trees in an inaccessible forest grow without a planter, and die without a destroyer, so the world springs up and dies, as a matter of course;" a doctrine

originating in a disease, or defect of the intellect, which causes it to fail in discovering the harmony and oneness of all things and all events. The origin of this sect is related in the following myth.

Indra, the king of Ether (Contemplation), went in company with Virochana, a royal demigod, to the presence of Brahma, (the Supreme Reason),† and inquired of him concerning the nature of mind and body. Brahma, absorbed in meditation, with closed eyes, returned no answer, but laid his hand upon his breast. A basin of water stood before him. The king and Indra at that moment saw his image in the water, and were satisfied with the omen, but conceived different ideas from it. Indra, that Brahma signified by his shadow, the instability, and unreality, of the visible world; that the world and the body are but a shadow, but the soul a true essence, and that this is Brahma. But Virochana thought that Brahma intimated the unreality of the spirit-that the self conscious soul, rather, is but a shadow, and this world the only true being. Thus it happened that Virochana adopted the Buddhist atheism, which denies the spirit, and identifies God with matter: but Indra, the Brahminical faith, which resolves all things into God.

The last king of this family, was murdered by his minister, who usurped the throne, and began a new dynasty. His name was Mayoora. Nine kings of the race of the usurper reigned in Delhi. The Brahmins recovered their importance upon the accession of Mayoora, and their Buddhist antagonists were persecuted and driven out of Hindostan.

The last king of this dynasty was succeeded by Shakaditya, a chief from the mountains of Kemaon, who slew the reigning monarch and usurped his throne. Shakaditya reigned in Delhi fourteen years. Vicramaditya was now king in Malwa; and hearing of the cruelties of the usurper, came upon Delhi with an army, and slaying Shakaditya, possessed the kingdom.

Vicramaditya reigned eighty years in Delhi, if the chronicle speaks truth, and excelled all his predecessors in power,