who ruled in Sais when Lower Egypt made itself independent of Thebes, and even in the heads of Theban kings when sculptured in stone belonging to the lower country. This form of skull is distinguished by a retreating forehead, a forward mouth, and an undue length of line from the chin to the back of the head. A race of people with this form of skull, who bear the name of the Galla tribe, yet hold undisturbed possession of the country to the south of Abyssinia. Hence it would seem to have been originally peculiar to the whole of eastern Africa, between the Negroes on the south

Fig. 1.

and the Arabs on the north. The more intellectual form of skull we note in the statues of Rameses II. (see Fig. 2), and the other great kings of Thebes, and in the statues of the gods of the same district. This is marked by a more upright forehead and a nose almost aquiline; and it seems to have belonged to a race of foreigners who brought into Egypt its language, its civilisation, and its religion. This diversity of race gave rise to a division of the people into castes, as long as they were under one sceptre; thus the nobles who owned the land were the soldiers and priests,

while the common people, the lower caste, were the labourers who tilled the soil and paid the taxes. The skulls of the mummies do not speak so clearly on these points, first

Diodorus

lib. i. 28.

because they belong almost exclusively to families of Siculus, the priestly or upper class, and secondly because they are too modern to show us the Egyptians free from the mixture of Morton's Arabs, Phenicians, and Crania Greeks, who freely settled Egyptiaca. among them. The inhabitants of Lower Egypt were further mixed with a large number of Phenicians, from the neighbouring parts of Syria, and not a few Greek traders on the coast. Indeed the difference of gods that they worshipped shows that the people of the Delta were not wholly the same in race as the Copts of Upper Egypt, while from the same reasons we see that the inhabitants of the oases were colonists from Thebes.

Fig. 2.

xviii. 47.

(4) The soil and climate of Egypt cannot but have had a large share in moulding the character of the people. It is a country almost without rain and wholly without brooks; in which every spot is barren that is not overflowed in the autumn by the waters of its one river, which scatters blessings along its banks, alike on the grateful and on the ungrateful, from Syene to the Mediterranean. The Pliny, lib. rains from the mountains to the south of Abyssinia, flowing through Meroë, Ethiopia, and Nubia, reach Egypt in the middle of June, when the Nile begins to rise at Syene. The little plains which fringe its banks through the Thebaid to a greater or less width are first overflowed, and, during the months of August, September, and October, the fields in the Delta become a sheet of water, leaving the villages on the raised mounds standing like so many islands in the ocean. The river is then red with Abyssinian soil, and when the fields are again left dry, in the beginning of November, they are found covered with a rich

mud, and need little or no labour from the husbandman. He values his land by the quantity of water upon it, and the sacred stone which bounds his field (see Fig. 3) measures at

Fig. 3.

the same time the height of the overflow. No further manure is wanted, nor a sabbath year in which the ground may lie fallow. The husbandman has only to sow the seed and gather in the harvest; except indeed when his industry leads him to widen the valley and cultivate the borders of the desert, where he then has the more laborious task of watering, by means of trenches and hand pumps, the fields which the overflow would not otherwise reach. As soon as the wheat and barley are gathered, the Indian corn and rice are sown, to grow during the inundation, and to be gathered before the former crops are again put into the ground. Vegetation is rapid in the winter months, when with us all nature is dead and our fields covered with snow; while in the months of our cheerful spring the climate of Egypt is painfully sultry and the fields parched with drought. The necessary clothes and houses are easily supplied in such a warm climate; and herds of cattle are not wanted in a country almost too hot for animal food and animal clothing. The two crops of grain and the supply of fish from the river, and yet cheaper onions and lentils, easily fed twice as many persons as could live in an equal space in Europe; and the same mud that manured the field was baked in the sun to form the hut in which the husbandman slept at night. There are few trees in the country, and wood is but little used; no seaworthy ships could be built till timber was afterwards brought from the forests of Cilicia or of Lebanon, though the Nile was safely navigated in barges built of the large rushes that grow on its banks. Building stone of several kinds is at hand; limestone from both sides of the river from Toora and Memphis up to Silsilis, sandstone from Silsilis and Heliopolis, granite from Syene, and transparent alabaster from Antinoopolis for works of greater delicacy; and such is the dryness of the air, that works of art, though uncovered from the weather, remain for ages untried by changes from hot to cold, or from wet to dry, and uninjured but by the hand of man. The wild birds and beasts are as peculiar as the

climate and the surface of the country. The stunted shrubs and herbage of the desert furnish food to several kinds of deer; the river feeds the crocodile, the river horse, and numerous web-footed swimming birds; while the canals and marshes on its banks are frequented by a great variety of long-legged wading birds. Of the grass-eating animals, the buffalo seems the one most at home; of the grain-eating birds, there are very few beside the quail. The flesh-eaters, such as the eagle, the vulture, the hawk, the hyena, the jackal, and wolf, find their food wherever man or the other animals have been before them. When nations began to trade, the great source of wealth to Egypt was in the Nubian gold mines. By the help of these mines, the city of Thebes, which had the command of them, was for five hundred years the richest city in the world; and when this supply of gold ceased, Upper Egypt took the more natural rank of a province governed by the Delta.

(5) The Nile was not valued by the husbandman only; it was the longest inland navigation known to the ancients, and while the art of managing a vessel at sea was in its infancy, while ships were rowed timidly along the coast, the River of Egypt was a most important route for trade. The art of boatbuilding would be sooner learnt among the canals formed by the Nile's overflow than in the rocky creeks of Greece or among the breakers on the Tyrian shore. The husbandman who every autumn found the ditches round his fields too wide and too deep to be crossed on foot, would soon find out how

Fig. 4.

to make a bundle of rushes into a raft (see Fig. 4); and the rushes on which he crossed the overflow would afterwards carry him over the deeper river in equal safety. For nine

months in the year the north wind blows strongly along the valley against the stream during the daytime, making it as easy for the large boats of burden to sail one way by day as to float the other by night. Thus even before the Nile became the route by which the wealth of India was exchanged for that of Europe, it enabled the husbandman to barter his corn for the manufactures of the city, and indeed enabled the people to live together in cities in greater numbers and in greater comfort, from the ease with which those cities could be fed. With these advantages, Egypt, like Mesopotamia, became one of the earliest countries civilised, one of the first in which a man thought it worth while to mark out a spot of land, and say, This is mine; and where his neighbours, while doing the same, acknowledged the justice of such a title to what he claimed. Men naturally settled, and multiplied, and cultivated the arts of civilisation, on a spot where food was so easily raised, and industry so much encouraged by the abundance with which it was rewarded. Being very much hemmed in on all sides by the desert, the population soon felt itself crowded, and found it necessary to study and improve the arts of producing food. Improvement in the other arts followed almost of course.

(6) While the neighbouring parts of Arabia and Syria were peopled with a few scattered herdsmen, who moved their flocks from valley to valley in search of wild pasture, Egypt was becoming crowded with tillers of the soil, and the banks of the Nile dotted with villages. While the trade of their neighbours was limited to light burdens on camels' backs, the Egyptian corn, and even building stone, floated easily from place to place in the largest quantities. Of course the advantages and rights of property, the science of law, and the arts of government, would be much sooner studied and better understood among a settled nation of husbandmen, than among the Assyrian hunting tribes, the descendants of Nimrod, or among the marauding shepherd races, such as the Arab children of Abraham, whose flocks would graze over the neighbouring corn-fields as over wild pasture; and though Israelites might quote the case of Cain and Abel, where it was the tiller of the ground that murdered the owner of the flocks, yet we may be sure that it was a more common case for the husbandman to be the injured