on was of extraneous origin and came from the east into the Nile
valley near Koptos, and finally the historical fact of an advance of the
early dynastic Egyptians from the South to the conquest of the North.
The latter fact might of course be explained as a civil war analogous
to that between Thebes and Asyut in the time of the IXth Dynasty, but
against this explanation is to be set the fact that the contemporary
monuments of the Southerners exhibit the men of the North as of foreign
and non-Egyptian ethnic type, resembling Libyans. It is possible that
they were akin to the Libyans; and this would square very well with the
first theory, but it may also be made to fit in with a development of
the second, which has been generally accepted.

According to this view, the whole primitive Neolithic population of
North and South was Miotic, indigenous in origin, and akin to the
"Mediterraneans "of Prof. Sergi and the other ethnologists. It was not
this population, the stone-users whose necropoles have been found by
Messrs. de Morgan, Petrie, and Maclver, that entered the Nile valley by
the Wadi Hammamat. This was another race of different ethnic origin,
which came from the Red Sea toward the end of the Neolithic period,
and, being of higher civilization than the native Nilotes, assumed the
lordship over them, gave a great impetus to the development of their
culture, and started at once the institution of monarchy, the knowledge
of letters, and the use of metals. The chiefs of this superior tribe
founded the monarchy, conquered the North, unified the kingdom, and
began Egyptian history. From many indications it would seem probable
that these conquerors were of Babylonian origin, or that the culture
they brought with them (possibly from Arabia) was ultimately of
Babylonian origin. They themselves would seem to have been Semites,
or rather proto-Semites, who came from Arabia to Africa by way of
the straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and proceeded up the coast to about the
neighbourhood of Kuser, whence the Wadi Hammamat offered them an open
road to the valley of the Nile. By this route they may have entered
Egypt, bringing with them a civilization, which, like that of the other
Semites, had been profoundly influenced and modified by that of the
Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia. This Semitic-Sumerian culture,
mingling with that of the Nilotes themselves, produced the civilization
of Ancient Egypt as we know it.

This is a very plausible h