168 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



quarry and the mine reveal to us the fossil remains 

 of animals and plants great in their time, but long 

 since passed away, so do the spade and pick of the 

 excavator constantly turn up for us the bones and 

 the works of a fossil and prehistoric humanity. 



Egypt may be said to have no prehistoric period 

 and our task with it will be limited to showing that 

 its written history scarcely goes back as far as many 

 Egyptologists suppose and confidently affirm, and 

 that beyond this it has as yet afforded nothing. 

 Egypt, in short, old though it seems, is really a new 

 country. When its priests, according to Plato, taunted 

 Solon with the newness of the Greeks and referred to 

 the old western empire of Atlantis, they were probably 

 trading on traditions of antediluvian times, which had 

 no more relation to the actual history of the Egyptian 

 people than to that of the Greeks. 



The limestones and sandstones which bound the 

 Nile valley, sometimes rising in precipitous cliffs 

 from the bank of the stream, sometimes receding for 

 many miles beyond the edge of the green alluvial 

 plain, are rocks formed in cretaceous and early tertiary 

 times under the sea, when all Northern Africa and 

 Western Asia were beneath the ocean. When raised 

 from the sea-bed to form land, they were variously 

 bent and fractured, and the Nile valley occupies a 

 rift or fault, which, lying between the hard ridges of 

 the Arabian hills on the east and the more gentle 

 elevations of the Nubian desert on the west, afforded 

 an outlet for the waters of interior Africa and for the 



