380 EARLY EGYPTIAN CIVILISATION CHAP. xix. 



and lurking-places with their nails and fists, then with clubs, 

 and at last with arms, which, taught by experience, they had 

 forged. They then invented names for things, and words 

 to express their thoughts, after which they began to desist 

 from war, to fortify cities, and enact laws.' They who in 

 later times have embraced a similar theory, have been led 

 to it by no deference to the opinions of their pagan prede 

 cessors, but rather in spite of very strong prepossessions in 

 favour of an opposite hypothesis, namely, that of the superi 

 ority of their original progenitors, of whom they believe 

 themselves to be the corrupt and degenerate descendants. 



So far as they are guided by palaeontology, they arrive 

 at this result by an independent course of reasoning; but they 

 have been conducted partly to the same goal as the ancients, 

 by ethnological considerations common to both, or by re 

 flecting in what darkness the infancy of every nation is 

 enveloped, and that true history and chronology are the 

 creation, as it were, of yesterday. Thus the first Olympiad 

 is generally regarded as the earliest date on which we can 

 rely, in the past annals of mankind, only 772 years before 

 the Christian era. 



When we turn from historical records to ancient monu 

 ments and inscriptions, none of them seem to claim a higher 

 antiquity than about fifteen centuries, B.C. Those now extant 

 of Borne, Etruria, Greece, Judaea, and Assyria, carry us back no 

 farther into the history of past ages than the temples, obelisks, 

 cities, tombs, and pyramids of Egypt, and the exact date of 

 these last, after they have been studied with so much patience 

 and sagacity for centuries, remains uncertain and obscure. 

 Nevertheless, by showing the advanced point which the civili 

 sation of mankind had reached in the valley of the Nile, in 

 times which were regarded by the Greeks, more than two 

 thousand years ago, as lost in the night of ages, we may form 

 some estimate of the minimum of time which a people such 



