History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 | Page 8

were built, not of stone, but of crude brick, with their
external walls panelled and pilastered. Professor Hommel's theory, which brings
Egyptian civilisation from Babylonia along with the ancestors of the historical Egyptians,
has thus been largely verified.
But the historical Egyptians were not the first inhabitants of the valley of the Nile. Not
only have palaeolithic implements been found on the plateau of the desert; the relics of
neolithic man have turned up in extraordinary abundance. When the historical Egyptians
arrived with their copper weapons and their system of writing, the land was already
occupied by a pastoral people, who had attained a high level of neolithic culture. Their
implements of flint are the most beautiful and delicately finished that have ever been
discovered; they were able to carve vases of great artistic excellence out of the hardest of
stone, and their pottery was of no mean quality. Long after the country had come into the
possession of the historical dynasties, and had even been united into a single monarchy,
their settlements continued to exist on the outskirts of the desert, and the neolithic culture
that distinguished them passed only gradually away. By degrees, however, they
intermingled with their conquerors from Asia, and thus formed the Egyptian race of a
later day. But they had already made Egypt what it has been throughout the historical
period. Under the direction of the Asiatic immigrants and of the eugineering science
whose first home had been in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, they accomplished those
great works of irrigation which confined the Nile to its present channel, which cleared
away the jungle and the swamp that had formerly bordered the desert, and turned them
into fertile fields. Theirs were the hands which carried out the plans of their more
intelligent masters, and cultivated the valley when once it had been reclaimed. The Egypt
of history was the creation of a twofold race: the Egyptians of the monuments supplied
the controlling and directing power; the Egyptians of the neolithic graves bestowed upon
it their labour and their skill.
The period treated of by Professor Maspero in these volumes is one for which there is an
abundance of materials sucli as do not exist for the earlier portions of his history. The
evidence of the monuments is supplemented by that of the Hebrew and classical writers.
But on this very account it is in some respects more difficult to deal with, and the
conclusions arrived at by the historian are more open to question and dispute. In some
cases conflicting accounts are given of an event which seem to rest on equally good
authority; in other cases, there is a sudden failure of materials just where the thread of the
story becomes most complicated. Of this the decline and fall of the Assyrian empire is a
prominent example; for our knowledge of it, we have still to depend chiefly on the

untrustworthy legends of the Greeks. Our views must be coloured more or less by our
estimate of Herodotos; those who, like myself, place little or no confidence in what he
tells us about Oriental affairs will naturally form a very different idea of the
death-struggle, of Assyria from that formed by writers who still see in him the Father of
Oriental History.
Even where the native monuments have come to our aid, they have not unfrequently
introduced difficulties and doubts where none seemed to exist before, and have made the
task of the critical historian harder than ever. Cyrus and his forefathers, for instance, turn
out to have been kings of Anzan, and not of Persia, thus explaining why it is that the
Neo-Susian language appears by the side of the Persian and the Babylonian as one of the
three official languages of the Persian empire; but we still have to learn what was the
relation of Anzan to Persia on the one hand, and to Susa on the other, and when it was
that Cyrus of Anzan became also King of Persia. In the Annalistic Tablet, he is called
"King of Persia" for the first time in the ninth year of Nabonidos.
Similar questions arise as to the position and nationality of Astyages. He is called in the
inscriptions, not a Mede, but a Manda--a name which, as I showed many years ago,
meant for the Babylonian a "barbarian" of Kurdistan. I have myself little doubt that the
Manda over whom Astyages ruled were the Scythians of classical tradition, who, as may
be gathered from a text published by Mr. Strong, had occupied the ancient kingdom of
Ellipi. It is even possible that in the Madyes of Herodotos, we have a reminiscence of the
Manda of the cuneiform inscriptions. That the Greek writers should have confounded the
Madâ or Medes with the Manda