H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 181 
the winter and spring the people of Taka obtained their water from 
deep wells, extremely copious, dispersed all over the country, but at a 
considerable distance from each other. The people appeared to be 
ignorant of tillage; they had no regular fields, and the millet, their 
only grain, was sown among thorny trees. After the harvest was 
gathered the peasants returned to their pastoral occupations. When 
Burckhardt visited this region in the hottest part of the year, just 
before the period of the rains, the ground was quite parched up, and 
he saw but few cattle; the herds were sent to the Eastern Desert, 
where they fed in the mountains and fertile valleys, and where springs 
of water were found. After the inundation they were brought back to 
the plain. The quantity of cattle, Burckhardt believed, would have 
been greater than it was had it not been for the wild beasts which 
inhabited the district and destroyed great numbers of them. The 
most common of these wild animals were the lion and the leopard. 
The flocks of the encampment were driven in the evening into the 
area within the circle of tents, which were themselves surrounded by 
a thorny enclosure. Great numbers of asses were kept by all these 
Bedawin. They also possessed many camels. The trees are described 
as being full of pigeons. The Hadendoa were the only inhabitants of 
Taka seen by Burckhardt. Each tribe had a couple of large villages 
built in the desert on the border of the cultivable soil, where some 
inhabitants were always to be found, and to which the population, 
excepting those who tended the cattle in the interior of the desert, 
repaired during the rainy season. After the waters had subsided they 
spread over the whole district, pitching their camps in those places 
where they hoped for the best pasturage, and moved about from month 
to month, until the sun parched up the herbage. The settlers in the 
villages meantime sowed the ground adjoining the neighbouring desert. 
The camps consisted of huts formed of mats; there were also a few 
huts with walls, resembling those in the countries of the Nile, but 
smaller. Even the settlers, however, preferred living in the open under 
sheds to inhabiting these close dwellings. 
It has often been stated that civilisation in Egypt spread from 
the south, and considerable stress has been laid upon the fact that so 
many pre-dynastic and early dynastic remains have been found in Upper 
Egypt in the region between Edfu and Thinis, especially at Hierakon- 
polis and Naqada, and north of Naqada, in the neighbourhood of 
Abydos. Opposite Edfu is a desert route leading to the Red Sea; at 
Kaft, opposite Naqada, is the beginning of the road leading to Kosér, 
the port on the Rea Sea. It has been thought that the people who 
brought culture to Egypt reached the Nile Valley by one or by both 
these routes from a ‘God’s Land’ situated somewhere down the Red 
Sea coast. But throughout the whole history of Egypt culture has 
always come from the north, and spread southwards. 
From a study of the monuments of the First Dynasty that had 
been found at Abydos and elsewhere in Upper Egypt I ventured, nearly 
fwenty years ago,”° to suggest the existence in pre-dynastic times of 
a Delta civilisation which, in culture, was far advanced beyond that 
of Upper Egypt, and I pointed out that it was probably to a Delta 
