MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



that time there was no delta 1 , or at least it was only in process 

 of formation, a kind of debatable region between land and 

 water, inhabitable mainly by crocodiles, and utterly unsuited to 

 become the seat of a culture whose characteristic features are 

 huge stone monuments, amongst the largest ever erected by man, 

 and consequently needing solid foundations, on terra fir ma. It 

 further appears that although Memphis is very old, Thebes is 

 much older, in other words, that Egyptian culture began in Upper 

 Egypt, and spread not up but down the Nile. Thus all Asiatic 

 claims are again excluded, unless indeed South Arabia formed 

 part of the land of Punt (Somaliland?) from which Petrie is in- 

 clined to bring the Retu. But South Arabia is not Babylonia, 

 so this will not help the ' Asiatics " who with Hommel will have 

 everything from Mesopotamia". 



In a question of origins going back to such a prodigious 

 antiquity, almost the first consideration is the climate, of which 

 Dr Eberhard Fraas 3 has made a special study. That the abori- 

 gines were not, as at present, so closely hemmed in- by the desert 

 sands, is evident, he says, from the fabulous development of the 

 stone industry during the Neolithic period in a region which 

 is now a wilderness, where scarcely a few bedouins can find 



j 



1 The Egyptians themselves had a tradition that when Menes moved north 

 he found the Delta still under water. The sea reached almost as far as the 

 Fayyum, and the whole valley, except the Thebais, was a malarious swamp 

 (Herod. II. 4). Thus late into historic times memories still survived that the 

 delta was of relatively recent formation, and that the J\etu (Romitu of the 

 Pyramid texts, later Rotu, Komi etc.) had already developed their social system 

 before the Lower Nile valley was inhabitable. Hence whether the Nile took 

 -20,000 years (Schweinfurth) or over 70,000, as others hold, to fill in its estuary, 

 the beginning of the Egyptian prehistoric period must still be set back many 

 millenniums before the new era. "Ce que nous savons du Sahara, lui-meme 

 alors sillonne de rivieres, atteste qu'il [the Delta] ne devait pas etre habitable, 

 pas etre constitue a 1'epoque quaternaire" (M. Zaborowski, Bid. Soc. d' ' AntJirop. 

 1896, p. 655). 



2 As shown by G. Bertin, "no Egyptian tradition, either on the monuments, 

 or on papyri, or preserved by classical writers, ever points to Asia as their first 

 country," and he refers to Dr S. Birch's remark at the First Congress of 

 Orientalists that "no evidence whatever supported the hypothesis of the emigra- 

 tion of the Egyptians from Asia" (Jour. Anthrop. Inst. xi. p. 436). 



3 Corresp. BL d. d. Ges. f. Anthrop. Feb. 1898, p. 10 sq. 



