THE ORIGIN OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION. 
By EpouarD NAvILiLe, D. C. I., Ll. D., ete. 
Who were the Egyptians? Were they a native race, born in the 
country which they inhabited, or did they come from abroad as 
immigrants? Were they a mixed population, and if so, can we dis- 
tinguish the various elements which formed the Egyptian nation? 
These questions have lately occupied most intensely the attention of 
Egyptologists. The excavations made during the last twenty years 
enable us to give an answer very different from the point of view 
advocated by such masters as Lepsius or E. de Rougé.? 
For these two pioneers in the field of Egyptian learning the Asi- 
atic origin of the Egyptians seemed a certainty, especially for Lep- 
sius, who had been very much struck by the fact that the oldest 
monuments known in his time were the pyramids and the tombs 
around them, while in Ethiopia, as far as the province of Fazoql, he 
found nothing but very late monuments. The conclusion he drew 
from what he saw was that the Egyptians had come through the 
Isthmus of Suez, and that after having settled first at Memphis they 
had extended in the valley of the Nile, the eA going up the 
river towards the south. 
This idea seemed justified at a time when nothing was known 
of the beginning of civilization, which appeared from the first as 
complete with all its special characters. As no trace had yet been 
discovered of its first steps, of a lower and primitive stage out of 
which the Egyptian culture might have emerged, it was natural to 
suppose that we had before us an importation from abroad, and that, 
if not the whole, at least the principal features of the civilization 
were a product of Asia, whence they had been brought by the first 
settlers in the valley of the Nile. 
One of the first to dispute the Asiatic origin of the Egyptians was 
M. Maspero, who in his History of Egypt (1895) states that “ the 
“Reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 
XXXVII, 1907, by permission of the council. 
b. de Rougé’s idea has been expounded by his son, J. de Rougé (Origine de 
la Race Egyptienne, Paris, 1895), ‘‘ The starting point of the Egyptian peoples is 
to be looked for in Asia, where they lived in the neighborhood of the ancestors 
of the Chaldeans.” 
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