DISCOVERY OF PALEOLITHIC FLIXT IMPLEMENTS IN UPPER EGYPT. 359 



much more careful and extended search for prehistoric remains than had been enjoyed 

 by any who had previously looked for them. I searched the region thoroughly on 

 both sides of the Nile, for distances as great as it was possible to cover in journeys of 

 one day's length. The valley here is bounded on each side by hills of tertiary lime- 

 stone, filled with layers of flint, on the flanks of which the present surface soil rests 

 without any intervening pleistocene deposits. On the western side these hills are 

 pierced by numerous dry ravines, or wadys, through which the sands of the Libyan 

 Desert make their way down towards. the cultivable strip of alluvial soil on the bank 

 of the river. Although Upper Egypt is a rainless region, still occasionally — perhaps 

 once in twenty years — heavy rains occur, and great torrents tear their way down these 

 wadys into the Nile. Tn the bottom of such ravines, and sometimes on the summits 

 of the elevated plateaux of the hills, after long-continued and most laborious search- 

 ing, I was rewarded by finding several specimens of palaeolithic axes of the true St. 

 Acheul type. I found, besides, innumerable examples of all the different objects that 

 are commonly met with in other countries in which the existence of the " stone age " 

 is regarded as established. Such were nuclei, disks, scrapers, piercers, lance-heads, 

 arrow-points, knives, flakes, etc., together with some forms that were quite novel. All 

 these, without exception, had been fabricated by the process of chipping. I have, 

 indeed, seen polished stone implements that had been discovered in Egypt, but I 

 have never myself found a single one there. Quite a number of objects were met 

 with in the desert, on the east bank of the river : but the valley on this side is so 

 much wider, that I was not able to reach the hills in one day and have sufficient time 

 left for searching. Pleistocene deposits do not occur in the Nile Valley, so far as I 

 am aware, although they are reported to exist in various parts of the adjacent desert 

 of the Sahara, Quite recently, fine specimens of quartzite implements of the St. 

 Acheul type have been placed in the Museum of St. Germain, which were brought 

 back by M. Rabourdin, who came upon not less than eighteen sites of the manufacture 

 of stone implements in the course of his explorations of the Sahara. But in the valley 

 of the Nile it is only in such spots as those in which I obtained these implements 

 that we can hope to find now any relics of the " stone age." Most traces of early 

 man in Egypt must necessarily, at the present time, lie buried under hundreds of 

 feet of Nile mud, the accumulation of the annual inundations of the river for count- 

 less ages. 



The first notice of my discovery was contained in a note to the article, already 

 referred to, by Dr. Jukes Brown in the ''Journal of the Anthropological Institute" 

 for May, 1878. His information was obtained from a gentleman who had seen my 



