572 ' RECENT RESEARCH IN EGYPT. 



different from any yet known in Egypt. We tried to fit them into 

 every gap in Egyptian liistory, but found that it was impossible to 

 put them before 3000 B. C. Later discoveries prove that they are 

 really as old as 5000 B. C. They show a very different civilization 

 from that of the Egyptians, whom we already know — far less artistic, 

 but in some respects evt^n more skillful in mechanical taste and touch 

 than the historical Egyptians. They built brick houses to live in, and 

 buried their dead in small chambers sunk in the gravels of the water 

 courses, lined with mats, and roofed over with beams. They show 

 several points of contact with the early Mediterranean civilization, and 

 appear to have been mainly north African tribes of European type. 

 Their pottery, in its patterns and painting, shows desig'ns which have 

 survived almost unchanged unto the present day among the Kabyles of 

 the Algerian Mountains. And one very peculiar type of pottery is 

 found spread from Spain to Egy])t, and indicates a widespread com- 

 mercial intercourse at that remote day. The frequent figures upon the 

 vases of great galley ships rowed with oars, show that shipping was 

 well developed then, and make the evidences of trading between differ- 

 ent countries easy to be accepted. 



Allof the above belongs to the age probably before 4700 B. C, which 

 is the age given for the first historical king of Egypt by the Greek 

 history of Manetho. A keystone of our knowledge of the civilization 

 is the identification of the tomb of Mena, the first name in Egyptian 

 history, the venerated founder of all the long series of hundreds of 

 historic kings. This tomb, about 15 miles north of Thebes, was found 

 by some Arabs, and shown to M. De Morgan, the director of the 

 Department of Antiquities. It was a mass of about thirty chambers, 

 built of mud brick and of earth. Each chamber contained a different 

 class of objects, one of stone vases, one of stone dishes, one of copper 

 tools, one <'f water jars, etc. And among the things are carvings of 

 lions and vases in roclv crystal and obsidian, large hard-stone vases, 

 slate palettes for grinding paint, pottery vases, and, above all, an ivory 

 tablet with relief carvings which show the names of the king. 



Besides this, M. Amelineau has found sixteen tombs of this same 

 general character at Abydos, which we can hardly now doubt belong 

 to the early kings of the first three dynasties, and some four or five 

 have been actually identified with the names of these kings in the 

 Greek history. 



So now instead of treating the first three dynasties as half fabulous 

 and saying that Egyptian art and civilization begin full blown at 4000 

 B. C, we have the clear and tangible remains of much of these early 

 kings back to 4700 B. C., and a stretch of some centuries of the pre- 

 historic period with a varied and distinctive civilization, well known 

 and quite different from anything later, lying before 4700 B. G. To put 

 the earlier part of this to 5500 B. 0. is certainly no stretch of probability. 



Goming down now into the historical period, a cemetery at Deshasheh 

 (about 80 miles south of Cairo) was thoroughly worked out last year, 



