History of Egypt | Page 3

and where the fertilizing
Nile water cannot be taken by means of canals, there cultivation ends

and the desert begins. Before Egyptian civilization, properly so called,
began, the valley was a great marsh through which the Nile found its
way north to the sea. The half-savage, stone-using ancestors of the
civilized Egyptians hunted wild fowl, crocodiles, and hippopotami in
the marshy valley; but except in a few isolated settlements on
convenient mounds here and there (the forerunners of the later villages),
they did not live there. Their settlements were on the dry desert margin,
and it was here, upon low tongues of desert hill jutting out into the
plain, that they buried their dead. Their simple shallow graves were
safe from the flood, and, but for the depredations of jackals and hyenas,
here they have remained intact till our own day, and have yielded up to
us the facts from which we have derived our knowledge of prehistoric
Egypt. Thus it is that we know so much of the Egyptians of the Stone
Age, while of their contemporaries in Mesopotamia we know nothing,
nor is anything further likely to be discovered.
But these desert cemeteries, with their crowds of oval shallow graves,
covered by only a few inches of surface soil, in which the Neolithic
Egyptians lie crouched up with their flint implements and polished
pottery beside them, are but monuments of the later age of prehistoric
Egypt. Long before the Neolithic Egyptian hunted his game in the
marshes, and here and there essayed the work of reclamation for the
purposes of an incipient agriculture, a far older race inhabited the
valley of the Nile. The written records of Egyptian civilization go back
four thousand years before Christ, or earlier, and the Neolithic Age of
Egypt must go back to a period several thousand years before that. But
we can now go back much further still, to the Palaeolithic Age of Egypt.
At a time when Europe was still covered by the ice and snows of the
Glacial Period, and man fought as an equal, hardly yet as a superior,
with cave-bear and mammoth, the Palaeolithic Egyptians lived on the
banks of the Nile. Their habitat was doubtless the desert slopes, often,
too, the plateaus themselves; but that they lived entirely upon the
plateaus, high up above the Nile marsh, is improbable. There, it is true,
we find their flint implements, the great pear-shaped weapons of the
types of Chelles, St. Acheul, and Le Moustier, types well known to all
who are acquainted with the flint implements of the "Drift" in Europe.
And it is there that the theory, generally accepted hitherto, has placed

the habitat of the makers and users of these implements.
The idea was that in Palaeolithic days, contemporary with the Glacial
Age of Northern Europe and America, the climate of Egypt was
entirely different from that of later times and of to-day. Instead of dry
desert, the mountain plateaus bordering the Nile valley were supposed
to have been then covered with forest, through which flowed countless
streams to feed the river below. It was suggested that remains of these
streams were to be seen in the side ravines, or wadis, of the Nile valley,
which run up from the low desert on the river level into the hills on
either hand. These wadis undoubtedly show extensive traces of strong
water action; they curve and twist as the streams found their easiest
way to the level through the softer strata, they are heaped up with great
water-worn boulders, they are hollowed out where waterfalls once fell.
They have the appearance of dry watercourses, exactly what any
mountain burns would be were the water-supply suddenly cut off for
ever, the climate altered from rainy to eternal sun-glare, and every plant
and tree blasted, never to grow again. Acting on the supposition that
this idea was a correct one, most observers have concluded that the
climate of Egypt in remote periods was very different from the dry,
rainless one now obtaining. To provide the water for the wadi streams,
heavy rainfall and forests are desiderated. They were easily supplied,
on the hypothesis. Forests clothed the mountain plateaus, heavy rains
fell, and the water rushed down to the Nile, carving out the great
watercourses which remain to this day, bearing testimony to the truth.
And the flints, which the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the plateau-forests
made and used, still lie on the now treeless and sun-baked desert
surface.
[Illustration: 007.jpg THE BED OF AN ANCIENT WATERCOURSE
IN THE WADIYÊN, THEBES.]
This is certainly a very weak conclusion. In fact, it seriously damages
the whole argument, the water-courses to the contrary notwithstanding.
The palæoliths are there. They can be picked up by any visitor. There
they lie, great flints of the Drift types, just