Confounding Posterity by N. Y. Times

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 11, 1879

Confounding Posterity.

By N. Y. Times

WHILE, as a matter of taste, there cannot be two opinions in regard to the removal of the Egyptian obelisks from Egypt, very grave objections may be made to it in the interests of archæology. In the dim future, the wide distribution of obelisks will give rise to a variety of conflicting but equally erroneous theories. No one in that remote and presumably intensely scientific age will believe that the Romans, the French, the English and the Americans were guilty of carrying off obelisks. In the year 3000 there will be archæologists who will insist that the obelisk builders were a race that at one time extended over Europe, Africa, and America, and erected obelisks as mile-stones. Others will claim that the obelisks were not the work of human hands, but were produced by crystallization in the polar regions, and were distributed over the earth by the action of glaciers during the glacial period. Reams of arguments will be written by the defenders of these rival theories, the former of which will doubtless be upheld by the believers in religion, while the latter will be supported by the positivists. The religious archæologist will trace resemblance between the hieroglyphics of the engraved obelisks and the scratches made by the small boy of the present age on the sides of the school-house and its contiguous fences, and will thus strengthen his theory of the wide distribution of the obelisk-building race. The Positivists will of course, deny that hieroglyphics prove the existence of conscious hieroglyphic cutters, and will persist that crystallization determined the form of the obelisk, and that the grinding of their surfaces during the slow motion of the glaciers marked them with the so-called hieroglyphics.—N. Y. Times.