of him in existence; compare the quartzite sandstone statue of him, which was made for Prince Shashanq, in the British Museum (South Eg. Gallery, No. 766). He is represented in the form of a man with a woman's breast, and wearing a cluster of water plants on his head. He carries in front of him an offering table loaded with food and drink of all kinds, and the bodies of water-fowl hang by his side. The plant worn by the Nile-god of the North was the lotus, and that by the Nile-god of the South the papyrus. Under the New Empire the Vignettes in the Book of the Dead represent the shrine and throne of Osiris as placed on the waters of the celestial Ocean Nenu, or Nu; and in late times the Nile was said to be Osiris himself, whose seed fecundated the soil of Egypt, which was at the same time identified with Isis.

The true cause of the Inundation was known to Aristotle, who attributed it to the melting of the snow on the mountains in Central Africa and the rains in Abyssinia (see Partsch, Ueber das Steigen des Nil, Leipzig, 1900). Eratosthenes considered the great Equatorial Lakes to be the source of the Nile, and Ptolemy the geographer held the same view. The first map in which the general arrangement of the Lakes is shown is that of F. Pigafetta, of Vicenza, a military engineer (born 1533, died 1603), which was published in 1580. The source of the Blue Nile was seen by Pedro Paez in 1615, by Jeronimo Lobo in 1626, and by Bruce in 1772. Salîm, an Egyptian officer, ascended the White Nile as far as Gondokoro about 1840. Lake Victoria was discovered by J. H. Speke in 1858; Sir William Garstin showed that this was the true source of the Nile, and not the Kagera River, as Kandt claimed (see his Caput Nili, Berlin, 1904, and Garstin's Report, Egypt No. 2, 1904). Lake Albert was discovered by Baker on March 16, 1864, and Lake Albert Edward by Stanley in 1875. The "White Nile " is the part of the Nile between Lake Nô and Khartûm; from Lake Nô to Lake Albert the Nile is called "Bahr al-Jabal," and from Lake Albert to Lake Victoria the I Victoria Nile" or the or the Somerset River." The Blue Nile, or Abâî, the Astapos of Strabo, joins the White Nile 1,560 miles from Lake Victoria, and the Atbarâ, the Astaboras of Strabo, joins it at Ad-Damar.

The Cataracts are six in number. No. 1 is between AswânPhilae, No. 2 ends a few miles south of Wâdî Halfah, No. 3 is at Ḥannek, No. 4 at Adramîyah, No. 5 at Wâdî al-Ḥamâr, and No. 6 at Shablûkah. The length of the Nile is about 3,470 miles.1

1 For a good account of the discovery of the Nile see Johnston, H., The Nile Quest. On the Nile generally see Sir W. Garstin's great Report on the Lake Area, etc., and Lyons, Physiography of the River Nile, Cairo, 1906; the map of the Nile Basin published by the Survey Department in Cairo in 1908 is the best in existence.

9

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

THE attempts made hitherto to identify the race to which the ancient Egyptian belonged have not been crowned with success, but it must be admitted that the subject is one of very great difficulty. The pre-dynastic mummies, by which alone we can gain any idea of the physical form of the primitive Egyptian, have been examined and dissected and commented upon by the professional anatomist and craniologist, but the different results which the experts obtain from the same specimens compel the archaeologist to regard them as inconclusive. And the same may be said of the statements that they make about dynastic mummies. The dried bodies and bones from the graves at Nakâdah give us an idea of the physical form and characteristics only of the better-class folk who lived in that district in the late Neolithic Period, for only they were "buried "; but of the great mass of the working and peasant classes, who were not "buried," they tell us nothing. And it is the same in the case of the mummies of the Dynastic Period, which were of kings or priests or high officials; only the better-class folk were "buried " in brick and stone mastabahs, pyramids and rock-hewn tombs, and what the people of the "lower orders" were like in the Delta and Middle and Upper Egypt we do not know. I am assuming that the Delta had been formed, and that men were settled in it and on both banks of the Nile from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean Sea. The primitive Egyptian-I mean the man who laid the foundations of the religious beliefs of the pre-dynastic and dynastic Egyptians, but not necessarily of their kings and rulerswas, I believe, an African. But from the earliest period his lands must have been invaded by peoples from the east and the west, and the north and the south, and his rulers seem, more often than not, to have been foreigners. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, from Uganda to the Mediterranean Sea, were from time immemorial a very mixed people, even as they are to-day, and for the greater number of the theories about their relationships and their migration, which have been propounded by the scientific experts, I have not succeeded in finding any foundation. Thus Erich Schmidt, as a result of his measurements of Egyptian skulls, identified three main types-the pure Egyptian, the Nubian, and a mixture of both. Among the brachycephalic skulls he distinguished the brachycephalic Egyptian and the brachycephalic Nubian.1 Ripley says, "From the Semites in the Canary Islands, all across northern Africa,

1 Aeg. Zeitschrift, Bd. XXXVI, p. 114, and see Stahr, Die Rassenfrage im antiken Aegypten. Virchow's views are stated in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1888, p. 767 f.

to central Arabia itself, the cephalic indices of the nomadic Arabs agree closely. They denote a head form closely allied to that of the long-headed Iberian race, typified by the modern Spaniards, South Italians and Greeks. It was the head form of the ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians also, as has recently been proved beyond all question." According to Dr. Elliot Smith the " Proto-Egyptian man was 5 feet 5 inches in height, and his woman nearly 5 feet; he was of slender build, and had dark hair, dark eyes and a bronzed complexion. His skull was long and narrow and his forehead narrow and slightly bulging. His cheeks were narrow and their bony supports flattened, his nose small, and broad and flattened at the bridge, his chin pointed, his jaw weak, and his teeth of moderate or small size." As the writer of these statements is a professional anatomist the archaeologist can only record them without comment, and hope that all such assertions are more correct than many of the statements which anatomists, craniologists and anthropologists make on archaeological subjects. According to Jéquier, who has studied all the available material and is qualified to discuss it, the indigenous Egyptians closely resembled the peoples who settled among them, and they were of comparatively sturdy build, with light complexions, and hair that varied in colour from fair to black; and their skulls were dolichocephalic, like those of the Berbers, and they resembled neither Semites nor Negroes. 3

The archaeological evidence available suggests that among the earliest invaders of Egypt from the west in the Pre-dynastic Period were the Libyans, who, entering Middle Egypt, brought with them a civilization that was somewhat similar to that of the peoples of Europe in the Neolithic Period, and was of a higher class than that of the Egyptians. The natives of the deserts on the east bank of the Nile (Hamites) also invaded the cultivated lands of the Egyptians, and their kinsfolk in Arabia and the countries beyond it to the east found it necessary to follow their example from time to time. The indigenous people were a non-warlike race, and were content to act as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the invaders, who seized what they wanted and held it by force of arms. Some of the invaders who came into Egypt from the east by way of the Wâdî Ḥammâmât appear to have been skilled in the art of working in metal, and the native armed with flint weapons went down before the metal battle-axe, club and dagger. At some time or other, probably during the Pre-dynastic Period, numbers of people from the east who possessed a civilization similar to that of the

1 Ripley, The Races of Europe, p. 387. His references for this statement are Bertholon, 1892, p. 43; Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, 1897a, Chap. I; and Fouquet, 1896 and 1897, on the basis of de Morgan's discoveries. 2 Ancient Egyptians, p. 47 ff.

See the Bulletin de la Société Neuchâteloise de Géographie, 1912,

P.

127 f.