, or even knowledge of, the great nations of the Euphrates valley
or the peoples of Palestine. The Babylonian king Naram-Sin invaded the
Sinaitic peninsula (the land of Magan) as early as 3750 b. c, about
the time of the IIId Egyptian Dynasty. The great King Tjeser, of that
dynasty, also invaded Sinai, and so did Snefru, the last king of the
dynasty. But we have no hint of any collision between Babylonians and
Egyptians at that time, nor do either of them betray the slightest
knowledge of one another's existence. It can hardly be that the two
civilized peoples of the world in those days were really absolutely
ignorant of each other, but we have no trace of any connection between
them, other than the possible one before the founding of the Egyptian
monarchy.

This early connection, however, is very problematical. We have seen that
there seems to be in early Egyptian civilization an element ultimately
of Babylonian origin, and that there are two theories as to how it
reached Egypt. One supposes that it was brought by a Semitic people of
Arab affinities (represented by the modern Grallas), who crossed the
Straits of Bab el-Man-deb and reached Egypt either by way of the Wadi
Hammamat or by the Upper Nile. The other would bring it across the
Isthmus of Suez to the Delta, where, at Heliopolis, there certainly
seems to have been a settlement of a Semitic type of very ancient
culture. In both cases we should have Semites bringing Babylonian
culture to Egypt. This, as we may remind the reader, was not itself of
Semitic origin, but was a development due to a non-Semitic people,
the Sumerians as they are called, who, so far as we know, were the
aboriginal inhabitants of Babylonia. The Sumerian language was of
agglutinative type, radically distinct both from the pure Semitic idioms
and from Egyptian. The Babylonian elements of culture which the early
Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of
Sumerian origin. Sumerian civilization had profoundly influenced the
Semitic tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest of Babylonia,
and when the Sumerians became more and more a conquered race, finally
amalgamating with their conquerors and losing their racial and
linguistic individuality, they were conquered by an alien race but not
by an alien culture. For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the
Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. That is as
much as to say that a great deal of what