Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/94

 by its nouns of number, and by some of the arrangements of its conjugations, it seems to have been attached to the Semitic family of languages. Some of the idioms of these Semitic tongues are found in Egyptian in a rudimentary state. From this it has been concluded that Egyptian and its cognate languages, after having belonged to that group, separated from it at a very early period, while their grammatical system was still in course of formation. Thus, disunited and subjected to diverse influences, the two families made a different use of the elements which they possessed in common.

There would thus seem to have been a community of root between the Egyptians on the one part and the Arabs, Hebrews, and Phœnicians on the other, but the separation took place at such an early period, that the tribes who came to establish themselves in the valley of the Nile had both the time and the opportunity to acquire a very particular and original physiognomy of their own. The Egyptians are therefore said to belong to the proto-Semitic races.

This opinion has been sustained with more or less plausibility by MM. Lepsius, Benfey, and Bunsen, and accepted by