18 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



in history (4241 B. c.), as established by the Egyptian calen- 

 dar with its year of twelve months and three hundred and 

 sixty-five days. 



What is known concerning earliest civilized Egypt, there- 

 fore, pictures a society in which the rudiments of the practi- 

 cal sciences were well es- 

 tablished not later than 

 4500 B. c. If it is true 

 that Egyptian civilization 

 antedates that of Meso- 

 potamia, the latter, al- 

 though o f independent 

 origin, probably received 

 from Egypt more than it 

 gave. Most authorities 

 maintain that civilization 

 had its earliest beginnings 

 in Egypt. It may have 



FIG. 4. Profile of a Pre-historic Egyptian. arisen independently in 

 Restored by Elliot Smith from an Mesopotamia and in the 

 early preKlynastic skull. (Redrawn Far Eagt t j^er date, 

 from Breasted.) 



But with our present data 



we must look to the Nile valley for the earliest known transi- 

 tion from palaeolithic and neolithic men to those whose ac- 

 complishments mark the earliest beginnings of extensive 

 scientific knowledge. There seems to exist in northern 

 Africa, a continuity through the palaeolithic savagery 

 and the neolithic barbarism of the Ice-Age, to a cultural 

 level which was the forerunner of the Greco-Roman, and 

 hence of our own western civilization. 



It appears that Egyptian craf tmanship was of the greatest 

 significance to the Greeks, who received their earliest models 

 largely from this source. The civilization of Greece, which 

 was the first emergence of a strictly European people from 

 barbarism, now appears to have been initiated by contact 

 with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures through the 



