of which woodcut No. 169 is a type, without feeling that there was a connection, and an intimate one, at the dolmen period, between the people on the northern with those on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, which can only be accounted for in one of three ways.
Either it was that history was only repeating itself when Marshal Bougeaud landed in Algeria in 1830, and proceeded to conquer and colonise Algeria for the French. Or we must assume, as has often been done, that some people wandering from the east to colonise western Europe left these traces of their passage in Africa on their way westward. The third hypothesis is that already insisted upon at the end of the Scandinavian chapter, which regards these rude-stone monuments as merely the result of a fashion which sprung up at a particular period, and was adopted by all those people who, like the Nasamones, reverenced their dead and practised ancestral worship rather than that of an external divinity.
Of all these three hypotheses, the second seems the least tenable, though it is the one most generally adopted. The Pyramids were built, on the most moderate computation, at least 3000 B.C.[1] Egypt was then a highly civilized and populous country, and the art of cutting and polishing stones of the hardest nature had reached a degree of perfection in that country in those days which has never since been surpassed, and must have been practised for thousands of years before that time in order to reach the stage of perfection in which we there find it. Is it possible to conceive any savage Eastern race rushing across the Nile on its way westward, and carrying their rude arts with them, and continuing to practise them for four or five thousand years afterwards without change? Either it seems more probable to assume that the Egyptians would have turned them back, or if they had sojourned in their land like the Israelites, and then departed because they found the bondage intolerable, it is almost certain that they would have carried with them some of the arts and civilization of the people among whom they had dwelt. If such a migration did take place, it must have been in prehistoric times
- ↑ 'History of Architecture,' i. p. 81.
