XII.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 483 



other Eastern Hamites : "The persistence of the race is therefore 

 shown in this historical and most ancient people, which has had 

 vicissitudes and interminglings enough to infer a complete change 

 in its physical characters and the effacement of its old ethnic 

 elements'." 



Thanks to this amazing stability of the early types, Egypt is a 

 region of quite exceptional interest to the anthropo- 

 logist. Owing to the remarkable continuity of its e ^. PC 

 now changeless climate, and of a historic record 

 unbroken for over 7000 years, it affords a better illustration than 

 most other lands of the still obscure principle of convergence in 

 biological forms. That plants and animals should, under the 

 environmental conditions, have undergone but slight change since 

 Pharaonic days is perhaps no more than might be expected. 

 But that the Retus type itself should have emerged in its integrity 

 from such secular interminglings of peoples the problematical 

 Hyksos and Hittites, Petrie's "New Race," blue-eyed Libyans, 

 continuous Ethiopic infiltrations, early and later Arabs and 

 kindred Assyrian Semites, Persian, Greek, and Roman "Aryans," 

 Levantines, Turks, Circassian Mamluks, Albanians, Franks and 

 others is indeed a wonder perhaps best explained on the assump- 

 tion that in certain cases environment is an all-potent crucible, 

 in which foreign ingredients are fused in the general amalgam. 

 It is not to be supposed, for instance, that the Moslem Arab 

 bedouins have ever formed unions with the native Christian Kopts, 

 direct descendants of the old Egyptians. Yet when the wooden 

 statue of an official under Khephren (4200 B.C.) was brought to 

 light, it was at once named the "village Sheikh," because of its 

 striking resemblance to the then living local headman 2 . "The 

 Egyptians themselves have come down from the Old Empire 

 through all the vicissitudes of conquests, mixtures of races, 

 changes of religion and language, so little altered that the fellah 

 of to-day is often the image of the Egyptians who built the 



1 Africa, etc. p. 67. 



2 Maspero also remarks that "the profile copied from a Theban mummy 

 taken at hazard from a necropolis of the i8th dynasty, and compared with the 

 likeness of a modern Luxor peasant, would almost pass for a family portrait" 

 (Dawn of Civ. p. 48). 



31 2 



