600 THE METHODS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH. 



haired Basques, and in ]5ritain itself tbey seem to have survived in the 

 Silurians of Glamorganshire (described by the Eoman T^'riters) and in 

 the small black haired people of south Wales and parts of Ireland. 

 Traces of the Basque language have been said to be found in the Celtic 

 languages, but this particular branch of the field has been hitherto 

 very little explored, nor have the local place names in those districts 

 where the race may be supposed to have survived. Here, then, we 

 seem to have a clue which points to the men with the long heads having 

 come from tbe southwest. The Basques have their nearest relations in 

 north Africa, where a race wliich buried and did not l)nrn its dead once 

 occupied the country, whose remains are still to be found among the 

 Berbers and the Kabyles of the Atlas range and among the Guanches 

 of the Canary Islands. And these races of the Atlas take us on again 

 to the valley of the IStile, where the early Egyptians are now ] ecognized 

 to have had close relations of blood, etc., with them, and who were, as 

 you know, almost fanatically devoted to the practice of burial, as con- 

 trasted with burning in disposing of their dead. In this behalf it is 

 curious to remember the distribution of the so-called cromlechs, which 

 are merely chambei'ed tombs of another form. They are found all round 

 the northern part of Africa, in Spain, in the maritime parts of Gaul, and 

 all over Britain, where they have not been displaced by the ]i)low and 

 harrow. They abound in Holland and occur again in Scandinavia, 

 specimens of their primitive stock having migrate<l from west to east 

 iu Europe along the seaboard. This line of migration leads us to the 

 Nile Yalley as a goal, and it seems to some of us that the earliest 

 inhabitants of that valley were first cousins of our long barrow men. 

 There, under favorable conditions of a pure climate and access to the 

 necessary tools and weapons of culture, there developed a race which, 

 although unacquainted with metals, produced a wonderful culture — 

 that of the Egyptians of the old empire. 



We have as yet found no traces of a beginning of this culture on the 

 spot, and until quite recently, when Professor Petrie has made some 

 remarkal)le discoveries at Coptos, which may throw some light on this 

 issue, we seem to have in the monuments of the fourth and fifth djniasty 

 every kind of excellence we associate with Egyptian art fully devel- 

 oped, including its hierogly])hical writing, its strange mythology, etc., 

 and all the while Egypt Avas still in what the Scandinavian antiquaries 

 describe as the Stone age. 



Whether tliis art was imported with the race which developed it in 

 the jSIile Yalley, or was entirely indigenous, we do not know. It may 

 be that it was the discovery of the ancestors of the tribes who are now 

 represented by the Bishirins, Hadandowahs, and other wild tribes of 

 the eastern Soudan, orl)y the Berbers of the Atlas range, who border 

 the Nile Valley on either hand, and nuist have done so for a very long- 

 period. One thing seems clear, that for a very considerable period the 

 art of the Nile Valley was isolated, and does not seem to have affected 



