Note 2 — Chapter III · WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS?

Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of this Chapter by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The following appear to be the steps in the process, by which they endeavour to reach this conclusion. There was, in remote times, on the banks of the Euphrates, a Priest Class, which, on the supposition that in its sacred and literary language, there are some traces of the early Turanian form of speech, might have had a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is rather an eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.) This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably, have had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of Egypt. (There is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its antiquity was as great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.) Therefore the Egyptians might have had a Turanian origin. To put the argument abstractedly: We may imagine two presumable possibilities; the first of which possesses little probability, and the second still less; and then by the juxta-position of the two reach a desired conclusion. In other words, some degree of probability will be the product of the multiplication of the non-probability of a first assumption by the improbability of a second. This is the form of argument by which probability is inferred from the accumulation of improbabilities.

Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may have in store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an unlikely supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and Religion were, aboriginally, Turanian.