4/6 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



It will be noticed that the Tibu domain, with the now 

 absolutely impassable Libyan desert 1 , almost corn- 

 Egyptian pletely separates the western from the eastern 

 section of the Hamites proper. Continuity, how- 

 ever, is afforded, both on the north along the shores of the 

 Mediterranean to the Nile Delta (Lower Egypt), and on the south 

 through Darfur and Kordofan to the White Nile, and thence 

 down the main stream to Upper Egypt, and through Abyssinia, 

 Galla and Somali lands to the Indian Ocean. Between the Nile 

 and the east coast the domain of the Eastern Hamites stretches 

 from the equator northwards to Egypt and the Mediterranean. 



It appears therefore that Egypt, occupied for many thousands 

 of years by an admittedly Hamitic people, might have been reached 

 either by the Western Hamites by the Mediterranean route, or by 

 the Eastern Hamites down the Nile. But it may be suggested 

 that the Hamites were specialised in the Nile valley itself, and 

 spread thence over North Africa, in which case Egypt need not, 

 so to say, have been reached at all, but should be regarded as the 

 cradle of the race. The point is insoluble, because, when appeal 

 is made to the evidence of the Stone Ages, we find nothing to 

 choose between such widely separated regions as Somaliland, 

 Upper Egypt, and Mauritania, all of which have yielded super- 

 abundant proofs of the presence of man for incalculable ages, 

 estimated by some palethnologists at several hundred thousand 

 years. When the Nile flowed in a bed 400 or 500 feet higher 

 than its present level it was inhabited by men who can scarcely 

 be called primitive, for they were able to manufacture those won- 

 derful stone implements discovered by Burton, de Morgan, Petrie, 

 and others, to reproduce which would baffle the skill of hundreds 

 of rude tribes still living in Africa, Australia, and South America. 

 If it be asked, were these men Hamites ? we can but answer, yes, 

 Hamites /;;/ Werden, Hamites in process of specialisation, a 

 process, it must be inferred, going on simultaneously in Somali- 

 land, in Upper Egypt, and Mauritania, in fact, in the whole of 



1 From the enormous sheets of tuffs near the Khargheh Oasis Dr Zettel, 

 geologist of G. Rohlfs expedition in 1876, thinks that even this sandy waste 

 may have supported a rich vegetation in Quaternary times. 



