their affairs, and still more the Sanitary Boards established under the Ordinance 18 of 1892. The ancient system of Village Councils was revived in 1871 with the declared intention of restoring to the people the administration of village affairs. But so little has this intention been carried out, that the elective system provided for by law has become a farce, elections are seldom notified, and the councillors are usually nominees of the District Mudaliyar and carry out his orders. On the judicial side these councils have been allowed to degenerate into petty police courts without their safeguards, and the idea of the village court has so far been lost sight of that the proceedings are recorded in English, a language unknown to the suitors. There has thus been no real attempt to train the people in self-government, and we have fallen far behind even India. It is necessary to observe here that Ceylon does not ask for independence but only claims self-Government as an integral part of the British Commonwealth of nations along with Canada, Australia, South Africa or Newfoundland. She bases her claim on her ancient history and civilization, on her loyalty to the British Throne and what is more, on the progress she has made even under the present cramping conditions. The evils of the excessively centralised British administration in Ceylon, which were strikingly revealed during the disturbances in 1915, have quickened and encouraged the demands of the people for a controlling voice in the administration of the country. In these circumstances, the case for constitutional Reform in Ceylon prepared by the Joint Committee of the Ceylon National Association and the Ceylon Reform League which only represents the minimum demands of the people appears to us to be very fairly put. The suggestions proposed follow the scheme which Lord Willingdon recommended for the Bombay Presidency and we make no apology for quoting them in full : (a) The Executive Council to consist of four members in addition to the Governor; and of the four, three to be Indians (two being chosen from the elected members of the Legislative Council) and to be in charge of Departments. (For "Indians" substitute "Ceylonese in the case of Ceylon). (b) A largely increased Legislative Council with a substantial elected majority of four-fifths (instead of two-thirds as in other Presidencies), the remaining one-fifth consisting of official members and of unofficial members nominated by the Governor to represent important minorities and other interests. (c) No division into reserved and transferred subjects either in the Executive Council or in the Legislative Council. (d) All legislation and resolutions to be subject to the veto of the Governor in cases in which he considers the peace, order and safety of the State is at stake. (e) The members of the Legislative Council should be elected on the basis of a territorial electorate with a wide franchise (say, male adult) and restricted female franchise. (f) The number of elected members should be about 40 (i.e. in the ratio of about one to every 100,000 inhabi tants) and of the nominated official and unofficial members about ten. (g) The Council should elect its own Speaker, the present arrangement under which the Governor is ex-officio President having proved, as anticipated by the Royal Commissioners, detrimental to the independence and efficiency of the Council and to the dignity of the office of the King's Representative. (h) The Council should have full control, as at present, over the Budget and over the administration. (i) The veto of the Governor in (d) should not be operative for more than twelve months and should not be repeated if on the expiration of that period the measure or resolution vetoed is passed in substance by the Council. (j) The Governor should be one who has had parliamentary experience and training in English public life and be thus qualified to discharge the duties of a constitutional, not as hitherto autocratic, ruler and to help in the smooth working of the political machinery under the altered conditions. We have no doubt that British statesmanship will rise equal to the occasion and by granting Ceylon her legitimate demands will make that Island more contented and prosperous and more devotedly attached to the British Throne. We need hardly say that in their efforts for political emancipation the people of Ceylon will have the complete support of the Indian people. A DREAM BY MR. K. C. CHATTERJEE. While sunk in slumber deep I lay at night, profound, peace But e'er in accents clear came soft and mild, That wail; so quick beside the window-blind I stood; flushed with the Sun Gods' setting hues As glows a rose resplendent, late at eve, The plain in front lay bathed in moon-beams bright, And lo, o'er there who strolls at dead of night? Alone she walks with queenly steps and pose; Her lovely face, lit with her rival's sheen, As fell her eyes on me, shed one clear smile But once, mine eyes-they closed a moment's space; When next they oped, I saw the moon-kissed plain Asleep as then, but Oh, the goddess gone! I.-EGYPT. BY MR. C. S. SRINIVASACHARI, M.A. HE valley of the Nile, a green contrast to the brown and sandy desert on all sides of it, presents a civilisation which extends back in definite historical computation to at least four thousand years before Christ. Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the third century B. C, divided the history of Egypt down to the Persian conquest into 26 dynasties grouped into three periodsthe Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Empire-which has been adopted by many of the modern Egyptologists. His chronology, placing the first dynasty about 5500 B. C., has not been universally accepted; but no one has gone below the minimum date of the Berlin School which begins the first dynasty from 3400 B. C. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 A. D. was accompanied by a group of savants, who gathered a large collection of antiquities including the famous Rosetta Stone which furnished the key to the Hieroglyphic writing and deciphered by Champollion in 1821. Since then much has been done in the way of archæological exploration and collection of antiquities by famous men like Lipsius, Maspero and Flinders Petrie ; and about 30 years back a new system of investigation was inaugurated by which everything large and small, found in the excavation of city, temple or grave, is made to yield its own information; and thus attention is directed to all topics, the arts and crafts, the customs, the literature and the religion of ancient Egypt. was Mr. Lewis Spence views the religion and mythology of ancient Egypt in the light of the sciences of Comparative Mythology and Religion; and he tries to collate the Egyptian religious ideas and gods, hitherto regarded as classic and inviolate, with barbarian and savage conceptions of Totemism, Fetishism, etc., and to reconstruct on this new basis, the nature and significance of the great Egyptian gods, Osiris, Isis, Thoth, etc. According to him, the evolution of the Egyptian religion must have gone through the usual processes of religious growth, and one can discern by means of numerous clues, more or less (1) The Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by L. Spence. Harrap & Co., 1915. 8/6. pp. 370. (2) Stories of Egyptian Gods and Heroes, by F. H. Brooksbank. Harrap & Co., 1914. pp. 256. (3) The Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria, by L. Spence. Harrap and Co., 1916 8/6. pp. 412. 88 strong, that it passed through the usual early phases of animism, and the animistic condition of mind which sees in every natural object a living entity. The Egyptian symbol for the soul is a man-headed bird-the idea partaking of the nature of animistic belief; and we find parallel examples and beliefs among the Aztecs, and the Boros of Brazil and in Malaysia. Fetishism also bulks largely in the early Egyptian religious conceptions; and many of the gods are represented as carrying the fetishes from which they might have been originally derived. Though many prominent Egyptologists have denied that Totemism entered as a great force into the religion of ancient Egypt, Mr. Spence is convinced of the totemistic nature of a large number of Egyptian deities-(e g., the cat-headed Bubastis, and the hawk-headed Ra or Sun-God)-which are signs of a decadent totemism, in which totems had become full-fledged divinities. There is no reason to suppose also that the later worship of animals in Egypt was due to other than totemistic reasons; and certainly the ability of the Egyptian gods to transform themselves into animals by magical formulæ is eloquent in many cases of their totemic origin. In what are known as the Pyramid Texts in which a large amount of material is found for the study of the Egyptian Pantheon, are given several accounts of the Egyptian ideas about the creation of the world. Beneath all these lies the belief of an eternal deity which produced the world and men from out of a primeval abyss. The Osirian cult, the most important in ancient Egyptian religion, to which are indirectly due both the conception of the pyramid, and the art of mummification. is based upon the idea that Osiris dwells peacefully in the under-world with the justified souls, judging the souls of the departed as they appear before him. The myth of Osiris; his civilising the Egyptians; his murder by Set, the god of Darkness; the grief of Isis, his wife, over his loss; her recovery of his body in a tamarisk tree; and the vengeance wreaked on Set by Horus, the son of Osiris; these are clearly and interestingly set forth by Mr. Brooksbank. From the particulars of this myth, Sir J. G. Frazer, in his monumental work' The Golden Bough' has argued that Osiris was one of those personifications of vegetation whose annual death and resurrection have been celebrated in so many lands-that he was a god of vegetation analogous to Adonis and Attis. In this connection Mr. Spence concludes: "Osiris in his character of the god of the dead, affords no great difficulties of elucidation; and in this one figure, we behold the junction of the ideas of the moon, moisture, the under-world and death-in fact all the phenomena of birth and decay." (p. 76.) Osiris came to be regarded not only as the god and judge of the dead, but also as the symbol of the resurrection of the body of man. Isis, the female counterpart of Osiris, whose cult was so popular and long-lived that it flourished even in the later ages of Greece and Rome, was one of the earliest and most important conceptions of the female god-head, and she may be regarded as the great corn-mother of Egypt, as well as the goddess of the wind. She had manifold attributes; and the Egyptians came to love her very intimately and believed that she had once been a veritable woman. The cult of Set was also of very great antiquity; and in later times he was regarded as evil personified, though this was not his original character. Ra, the great god of the Sun, occupied in the most ancient times, a very prominent position in the Egyptian Pantheon, and was regarded as in some way associated with creation; but he was later on superseded by Osiris who took over his titles, powers and attributes. The worship of Osiris was fundamentally African and Egyptian in character; while the cult of Ra probably possessed very many foreign elements. Specific deities like Baal and Astarte were also supplied to Egypt by Syrian and Semitic civilisations; and later, when there arose a considerable Greek population in Egypt, Greek ideas might have entered into the national faith," colouring the ancient gods and perhaps suggesting to Herodotus that resemblance which caused him to identify the divinities of Egypt with those of Greece. The life of a cultured Egyptian was one prolonged preparation for death; and hence the prominence gained by the pyramid which is in its inception nothing but a vast funeral cairn, by the process of mummification, and by the interminable ceremonial connected with funerals. Magic played a large part in the practice of Egyptian medicine, the science of which divided [ OCTOBER 1919 trological calendars and the casting of horoscopes were generally in vogue. II. BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. Mr. Lewis Spence devotes another volume to the elucidation, from the point of view of compara tive science, of the wonderful mythology and religion, of ancient Babylonia and AssyriaBabylonia looming large and dark behind the beauty of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and Assyria stark and strong, a nation of aggressive warriors and religious devotees. The book deals exhaustively with the various aspects of Babylonian culture, religion and myths; and we are shown the scientific value of Babylonian religion which represents "Semitic polytheism in evolution, and in a state of prosperity, though hardly in decay." The Semitic conquerors of Babylonia (cires 3800 B. C.) mingled with and fully absorbed the aboriginal Akkadians or Sumerians who most probably belonged to the Mongolian ethnic division of the human species; and the Semites readily accepted the Sumerian civilisation and adopted the Sumerian system of writing; and the first phase of the Babylonian civilisation of which we have a knowledge is a mixture of the two, King Sargon of Akkad is the first great Babylonian conqueror, and is also famous as the first founder of a Babylonian library. Khammurabi (circa 2340 B. C.) welded into one homogeneous unit the various elements of his empire, with his capital at Babylon itself. The great legal code which he formulated, of which a copy was recently unearthed at Susa, is a monument of wisdom and extinction of the First equity. After the Dynasty of Babylon and the later Sumerian and Kassite lines, the high-priests of Asshur in the north, who had gradually made themselves independent, overthrew Babylon and set up the Assyrian dominion (circa 1300 B. C.) Tiglath Pileser, the famous Assyrian conqueror and his successors, Assur-Nasir-Pal and Shalmaneser, were all noted for their insatiable thirst for military glory. What is popularly known as the Second Assyrian Dynasty began about 740 B. C. under Tiglath Pileser III. who made his army irresistible and organised a great scheme of provincial administration. His son was Senna the human body into 36 portions, each of which cherib of Biblical fame whose campaign against was presided over by a dæmon; and if the dæmon who attacked a specific part was properly invoked, it was regarded as certain that a cure should result. It has also been stated with great probability that alchemy originated in Egypt. As the King of Judæa was a failure recorded in Scripture and sung by Byron in his Hebrew One of the members of this dynasty Melodies. was Sardanapalus who appeared to the Greeks of a later age as an effeminate weakling, but who OCTOBER 1919] ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA, was a vigorous and powerful monarch, and carried The last kings of Assyria were Nebuchad- to The Babylonian gods have an elemental origin, as opposed to the totemistic or fetishistic origin of the deities of other countries. The Babylonian-Assyrian religion casts a flood of light on the early Jewish faith; and several scholars have come to the conclusion that the Hebrews gained an opportunity of forming for themselves, during a complete and their Babylonian captivity, harmonious conception of the world. Babylonian influence was also very marked upon other Semitic cults, especially on those of the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. The Babylonian myth of creation resembles in many respects so many other creation stories, as those contained in the Genesis, in the Egyptian papyri, and in the Popol Vuh of the Mayas of Central America. In the beginning, "there was a waste of only chaotie darkness brooding over waters; heaven and earth were not as yet; nought existed save the primeval ocean.... from whose fertile depths came every living thing...." There was a stirring in the darkness, and the great gods of good and evil, light and darkness. arose; and the legend of the combat between Merodach and Tiawath, the dragon, is the primeval strife between light and darkness. Man was formed from the blood of Merodach mingled with earth; and hence he possessed reason and had a spark of the divine in him. Then did the darkness from light, Merodach divide from the earth, and separate the heavens order the details of the entire universe. The cosmology of Babylon is on a par with those of Scandinavia, China and many of the North American Indian tribes; but it does not reach as high an imaginative level as those of ancient Egypt and India, or of the Mayas of Central America. Babylonian religion and society were alike based on a fusion of two races, Akkadian and Semitic; and as we now know the religion from priestly texts and inscriptions, it was something more than a popular traditional faith, artificially moulded by priest craft and state-craft for political purposes, out of elements drawn from a number of local worships. The representations of some of their gods display their totemistic origin. Ishtar (Astarte) was undoubtedly a goddess of Semitic origin and was the great mother, who symbolised the fertility of the earth and fostered all vegetation and agriculture. Ishtar was always associated with Tammuz as her consort; and her love for him represents the moving of the sun-god of spring time by the goddess of fertility. The god is slain by the relentless heat of summer and Ishtar, like Isis of Egypt, enters the under-world in search of her youthful husband, to obtain the waters of life and to revive him. This myth furnished the groundwork of certain myths of classical Greece and Rome. -And all these tales might be regarded as "the correlates of certain ritualistic practices designed to bring about change of seasons and other natural phenomena, by means of sympathetic magic." com The Assyrian religion struggled on until the beginning of the Christian era when it was pletely crushed by the attacks of Hellenic scepticism, pagan caprice and Christian propaganda. But it was virile, ancient and deeply entrenched in the love of a people who were great theologians, great builders and great soldiers, though now nothing is left behind them, except a few mounds containing but very poor vestiges of their once great splendour. I BY MR. K. T. PAUL, B.A., L.T., O.B.E. Y entry into local politics took place when I was invited by a few Brahmin friends to stand for their ward. My opponent was a prominent Brahmin vakil (that is a pleader) who afterwards became chairman of the municipality. I was defeated by less than 10 per cent. of the votes, which means, of course, that a large number of Brahmins voted for me. Brahmin feeling was certainly used against me, but not, I have good reason to believe, by my gallant opponent. The large measure of support I received was therefore due to what may be called the general common-sense of the Brahmin citizens. I then entered the municipal council through the "mixed" ward and was elected for two terms. All through my experience, in the many questions of varying importance which came up for decision caste feeling had influence every now and then but it was fought down successfully by a group of our friends, Brahmins and nonBrahmins, who stood on the larger ground of unity. During the brief time (a few months) when I acted as chairman, my experience was the same. The gentlemen who were elected chairmen after me were both Brahmins, (namely, Mr. P. T. Subramania Iyer and Mr. Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari. The former an orthodox conservative religious Hindoo, the latter of the modern reforming class. Both of them were undoubtedly men of fair play and justice in the treatment of non-Brahmin interests.) A significant incident in the administration of the latter may be cited. A Panchama menial employee of the municipality was transferred to the Brahmin ward. His duty was to open the water taps. This was objected to by a Brahmin councillor, who raised the point in the council, and wished to put pressure on the chairman to get the man re-transferred. Another Brahmin councillor was firmly against it on the sole ground of justice and was supported by the chairman, who was himself a Brahmin. Finally the decision of the council was in favour of the Chairman's action. I have also had facilities to observe the way in which caste spirit operates in the elections to the Legislative Council of Madras, and in the administration of the Revenue, Judicial and other Government Departments in my own district, and I have noted the phenomena in some of the other districts also in the course of my many tours in the last fourteen years. My personal conclusions are: From the Evidence before the Joint Committee. First, in South India Brahmins were early in possession of most of the Government posts and Jargely of the Bar, and therefore of public influence, and undoubtedly used their advantages for holding on to their dominance. Secondly, the non-Brahmin communities took a long time to shake off their traditional subserviance to Brahmin leadership, reinforced as it was by the advantages indicated above. When, by reason of considerable spread of English educa tion, non-Brahmins gained independence of thought and realised the situation, the resentment was naturally very great and even violent. Thirdly, all the while, however, it is undoubted that there were individuals on both sides who stood for fair play, justice and unity. With the rise of nationalism their number is increasing almost every day. For instance, even in the periods of heated controversy, in several towns "cosmopolitan dinners" were held, promoted by members of both classes who were determined to promote unity. These were attended by Brahmins and non-Brahmins, and also Muhammedans and Christians. Fourthly, as to the Panchamas, their grievance is not specially against Brahmins. At the same time they are still too far behind the stage of education and material well-being to take care of their own interests. It will not do to expect any of the castes as castes to god-father the Pancha mas. Fifthly, Indian Christians should be treated separately from all these three classes, Brahmin, non-Brahmin and Panchama. Whatever the its source of the recruitment of my community, interests, needs and even laws are in many important points distinct from the others. Personally, 1 am opposed to such a distinct separation, and am working against it. Meanwhile things have to be taken as they are and dealt with accordingly. While this is so, it is certainly wrong to say that the Indian Christian community would need the special protection of the British Government as against Brahmins or other Hindoo castes. The indigenous Christian commu nity of Travancore, called "Syrian Christians," have for centuries not only flourished in peace and religious freedom, but also flourished under a Hindu kingdom which is certainly to-day the most backward in its caste feeling. So also did the Roman Catholic community under the Naiks of Madura and the Lutherans and Anglicans under the Maratha rulers of Tanjore. |