14 
Professor Petrie said he was anxious to give the 
audience an outline of the method whereby they were 
able to reach back to some definite and exact knowledge 
of the ages before those which had a written history. 
It might seem somewhat of a paradox to speak of 
history before writing because to most people history 
was written history, but he knew of no word which 
would express the fact that knowledge had been gained 
of history which was not written, and so he had fallen 
back on this title. He would remind them that it was 
possible to have a highly civilized people without the 
art of writing, and that the want of that art did not 
reflect on their civilization or entitle people of to-day 
to look upon them as savages. In the early times in 
Egypt—times which were before anything that could 
be called civilization—rude flint implements were used. 
These palzolithic flints had been found scattered over 
the desert and all over the Nile Valley, sometimes 
10 feet below the surface in the Nile gravel, where they 
‘must have been deposited when the Nile filled the 
whole of the valley, long before the prehistoric period. 
He pointed this out as an instance of how much could 
be recovered of things bearing upon a period of which 
little or nothing was known. He had now definite 
proofs of three periods in the history of palzolithic man. 
In all probability Egypt was one of the last homes of 
palzolithic man. Relics of the earliest times showed 
that there were in Egypt two definite peoples—one of a 
long slender type, and the other of a type which was 
almost identical with the bushmen of the present day, 
and which might be called the Hottentot type. The 
continuous civilization of Egypt started about 7,000 
B.c., and it must have been 2,000 years before that that 
those two types existed there. Both the palzolithic 
and the neolithic periods were long before the time of 
written history. He showed one of the earliest groups 
of people, some of whom were covered with goat skins, 
