i 5 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



English, geologist, sank ninety-six shafts in f our rows at intervals 

 of eight English miles, at right' angles to the Nile, in the neigh- 

 borhood of Memphis. From these pottery was brought up from 

 various depths, and beneath the statue of Rameses II at Mem- 

 phis at a depth of thirty-nine feet. At the rate of the Nile de- 

 posit a careful estimate has declared this to indicate a period of 

 over eleven thousand years. As eminent a German authority in 

 geography as Peschel characterizes objections to such deductions 

 as groundless. However this may be, the general results of these 

 investigations, taken in connection with the other results of re- 

 search, are most convincing. 



And, finally, as if to make assurance doubly sure, a series of 

 archaeologists of the highest standing, French, German, English, 

 and American, have within the past twenty years discovered relics 

 of a savage period, of vastly earlier date than the time of Mena, 

 prevailing throughout Egypt. These relics have been discovered 

 in various parts of the country, from Cairo to Luxor, in great 

 numbers. They are the same sort of prehistoric implements 

 which prove to us the early existence of man in so many other 

 parts of the world at a geological period so remote that the figures 

 given by our sacred chronologists are but trivial. The last and 

 most convincing of these discoveries, that of flint implements in 

 the drift, far down below the tombs of early kings at Thebes, will 

 be referred to later. What such discoveries prove, we shall con- 

 sider in the next chapter.* 



* As to Manetho, see for a very full account of his relations to other chronologists, 

 Palmer, " Egyptian Chronicles," vol. i, chap. ii. For a more recent and readable account, 

 see Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, English edition, London, 1879, chap. iv. For 

 lists of kings at Abydos and elsewhere, also the lists of architects, see Brugsch, Pahner» 

 Mariette, and others ; also illustrations in Lepsius. For the various race types given 

 on early monuments, see the colored engravings in Lepsius, Denkmaler ; also Prisse 

 d'Avennes, and the frontispiece in the English edition of Brugsch ; see also statement re- 

 garding the same subject in Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For the fullness of development 

 in Egyptian civilization in the earliest dynasties, see Rawlinson's Egypt, London, 1881, 

 chap, xiii ; also Brugsch and other works cited. For the perfection of Egyptian engineer- 

 ing, I rely not merely upon my own observation, but on what is far more important, the tes- 

 timony of my friend the Hon. J. G. Batterson, probably the largest and most experienced 

 worker in granite in the United States, who acknowledges, from personal observation, that 

 the early Egyptian work is, in boldness and perfection, far beyond anything known since, 

 and a source of perpetual wonder to him. As to the perfection of Egyptian architecture, 

 see very striking statements in Fergusson, History of Architecture, Book I, chap. i. As 

 to the pyramids, showing a very high grade of culture already reached under the earliest 

 dynasties, see Liibke, " Ges. der Arch.," Book I. As to sculpture, see for representations 

 photographs published by the Boulak Museum, and such works as the Description de 

 l'Egypte, Lepsius's Denkmaler, and Prisse d'Avennes ; see also as a most valuable small 

 work, easy of access, Maspero, Archaeology, translated by Miss A. B. Edwards, New York 

 and London, 1887, chaps, i and ii. See especially in Prisse, vol. ii, the statue of Chafre 

 the Scribe, and the group of u Tea " and his wife. As to the artistic value of the Sphinx, 

 see Maspero, as above, pp. 202, 203. See also similar ideas in Liibke's History of Sculpt- 



