he hippopotamus
and the crocodile; birds; fish, the fahaka.

The Nile god: his form and its varieties--The goddess Mirit--The
supposed sources of the Nile at Elephantine--The festivals of Gebel
Silsileh-Hymn to the Nile from papyri m the British Museum.

The names of the Nile and Egypt: Bomitu and Qimit--Antiquity of the
Egyptianpeople--Their first horizon--The hypothesis of their Asiatic
origin--The probability of their African origin--The language and its
Semitic affinities--The race and its principal types.

The primitive civilization of Egypt--Its survival into historic
times--The women of Amon--Marriage--Rights of women and
children--Houses--Furniture--Dress--Jewels--Wooden and metal
arms--Primitive life-Fishing and hunting--The lasso and "bolas"--The
domestication of animals--Plants used for food--The lotus--Cereals--The
hoe and the plough.

The conquest of the valley--Dykes--Basins--Irrigation--The princes--The
nomes--The first local principalities--Late organization of the
Delta--Character of its inhabitants--Gradual division of the
principalities and changes of then areas--The god of the city._

[Illustration: 003.jpg CHAPTER ONE]

THE NILE AND EGYPT

_The river and its influence upon the formation of the country--The
oldest inhabitants of the valley and its first political organization._

* The same expression has been attributed to Hecatseus of
Miletus. It has often been observed that this phrase seems
Egyptian on the face of it, and it certainly recalls such
forms of expression as the following, taken from a formula
frequently found on funerary "All things created by heaven,
given by earth, _brought by the Nile--from its mysterious
sources._" Nevertheless, up to the present time, the
hieroglyphic texts have yielded nothing altogether
corresponding to the exact terms of the Greek historians--
_gift_ of the Nile, or its natural _product_.

A long low, level shore, scarcely rising above the sea, a chain of
vaguely defined and ever-shifting lakes and marshes, then the triangular
plain beyond, whose apex is thrust thirty leagues into the land--this,
the Delta of Egypt, has gradually been acquired from the sea, and is
as it were the gift of the Nile. The Mediterranean once reached to the
foot of the sandy plateau on which stand the Pyramids, and formed a
wide gulf where now stretches plain beyond plain of the Delta. The
last undulations of the A