480 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



were found quantities of very coarse earthenware, and also much 

 finer pottery, embellished with geometrical tracings, figures of ani- 

 mals, and even hieroglyphics, showing on the same spot the actual 

 slow transition from rudimentary arts to a high level of culture. 

 M. Morgan's view is that this Neolithic industry belonged to 

 an indigenous race, later conquered by a foreign people who intro- 

 duced metallurgy and the civilisation of the monuments. The 

 illustrations seem to show a double overlapping of flints surviving 

 amongst the intruders, and of animal designs figured by them 

 on the native pottery. 



These first intruders M. Morgan brings from Asia, because they 

 introduced bronze, which he supposes was invented in Central 

 Asia or South China. But the argument is inconclusive, and in 

 fact, considering the discordant views now current on the subject 

 of bronze, is for the present of no weight. On the other hand, 

 Maspero, Zaborowski, Mariette, Petrie and many other leading 

 authorities now hold that the new comers, with whom the pre- 

 historic metal period was ushered in, were, like the aborigines, 

 of African origin. The earliest memories of the people were 

 associated, not with Memphis, but with Abydos, where reigned 

 Thoth and Osiris ; and throughout the Old and Middle Empires 

 all the domestic and other animals figured on the monuments 

 were members of the African fauna. Such was the dog, a large 

 greyhound with straight ears like the caberu of Abyssinia, and the 

 greyhound still surviving among the Saharan Tibus and Tuaregs 

 in Egypt he was sacred to Anubis, whose priests were figured with 

 heads of the greyhound type. Such were also the cat, resembling 

 the Upper Nile wild breed, trained for the chase and mummified 

 in prodigious numbers; the ox, ass, gazelle, sheep, goat, duck, 

 goose, all of true African species. Neither horse nor camel, 

 Asiatic and not African animals, came in at first : the former did 

 not arrive till the New Empire, the latter apparently not till the 

 Ptolemaic period 1 . It is also noteworthy that of the 1 1 skulls from 

 El-Amrah measured by M. Fouquet all but one were distinctly 



1 Dr W. Cunningham says "unknown in the earliest period of Egyptian 

 greatness" (Western Civilisation, etc., Cambridge University Press, 1898). 

 But one might rather say in the very latest, for no reference appears to be 

 made to the camel in any extant documents much before the New Era. 



