2 THE GLIDDON MUMMY-CASE. 



Denk. ii, pi. 64), are all the traces I have been able to detect of a Stone age in 

 Egypt. The implements belong to the period when writing was invented, and 

 instead of being used in Egypt, may have been traditional forms derived from the 

 parent country eastward. 



The throne on the mummy-case, narrow and straight-backed, seems also to belong 

 to the commencement of the art of writing ; and may indicate nothing beyond the 

 rule of a chief, or the Bedouin form of government.' 



The twice-curved tJir owing-dub of the mummy-case is figured also on the Abusir 

 tomb, and occa3ionally in the hand of Egyptians as late as th« Seventeenth dynasty 

 (Leps. Denk. ii, pi. 3, and iii, pi. 5 and 9). The pattern is clearly Mesopotamian: 

 a similar throwing-club is in the hand of the Asiatic strangers at Benihassan, in the 

 sixth year of Sesostris, B. C. 2121 ; and is the only kind figured on the Assyrian 

 monuments. 



By an exception among the birds, the plumage of the falcon remains uncolored, 

 the real object represented (as suggested to me by Mr. Birch in London) being a 

 hanner or standard : a sense of nationality is implied, with military organization, 

 and foreign wars. 



The two appendages of the perch are distinctly feathers, and imply the art of 

 falconry : an art to the present day found by Layard among the Bedouins along the 

 Euphrates. 



A more Southern country is indicated by the Jcneading-trough ; the checkered 

 workmanship being the same as in the shallow baskets to the present day brought 

 down the Nile, and ascertained by myself to be manufactured at the southern 

 extreme of Arabia. 



The flag-shaped fan has a narrower flap than at the present day ; in those 

 observed by myself at the first cataract of the Nile, and made around Mocha in 

 Southern Arabia, of strips of leaves of the doum-palm, Hyphfene crinita.^ 



' Even Arab writers speak of a period when Greece was uninhabited ; and notwithstanding recent 

 discoveries, there is yet room for doubt, whether in the days of the Egyptian liing Snophru there was 

 a human being in Europe. 



Seti Mienptah ruled Egypt from B. C. 1396 to 1366, and his tomb at Thebes contains the hiero- 

 glyphic sign of a northern animal, the heaver ; also the earliest figures of northern people, possibly 

 Europeans, having egret-plumes on the head, and wearing an ox-hide bordered and banded with 

 swan's down ; there are no traces of woven cloth. 



The Stone-age relics of Switzerland and Northern Europe have not disclosed a state of society 

 anterior to cultivating flax and weaving cloth : these countries were certainly inhabited when amber 

 first reached the Mediterranean. Under Crotopus, who reigned in Greece from B. C. 1290 to 1269, 

 Phaethon's sisters were transformed into poplars, whose tears along the Rhine became amber; the 

 public being thus far enlightened respecting the amber trade. 



The extension of population and of civilization are two different things : the mummy-case con- 

 trasting with the condition of France during more than eight hundred years, rejecting civilization 

 from the Greek settlement of Rhodon on the Rhone under Rhodian rule of the sea (B. C, 918 to 

 895) to the intense barbarism witnessed in B. C. SY, by Posidonius. 



° A point yet farther south is indicated by the crested bird of hieroglyphic writing ; occurring 

 throughout, either entire or the head and neck only, but shown by the outline figure on the Abusir 

 tomb (Leps. Denk. ii, pi. 5) to be the Ibis cristata of Madagascar. In the present state of our 

 knowledge, the fact seems inexplicable. 



