THE PREHISTORIC EAST iji 



Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied 

 himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may 

 have been of human workmanship ; l but after a day's 

 collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself 

 that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were 

 other than accidental fragments. If they really are 

 flint knives they are older than the period we are 

 now considering, and must be much older than the 

 first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings. 2 These 

 gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so 

 consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. 

 Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy 

 evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt 

 Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes 

 had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over 

 Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the 

 mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and 

 other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 

 4 palaeolithic ' or historically antediluvian men, be- 

 longing, like the animals they hunted, to extinct 

 races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical 

 Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late 

 Miss Edwards's charming work, Pharaohs, Fellahs^ 

 and Explorers, she was taken to task by an eminent 

 Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. 

 On the evidence of two additional finds of flint 

 implements on the surface, he affirms the existence 



1 Journal of Archceo 7 ogical Society, 188 1. Haynes's Journal of tht 

 American Academy of Sciences. 



2 Dawson, Egypt and Syria, p. 149. 



