of the
European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.

The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the
possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore
leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit
the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the
earliest school of the human race.

The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers.
They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards
copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the
churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar
which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time
that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important
of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit
of future generations. They had invented the art of writing.

We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take
it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write.
As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is
quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who
can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and
who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make
use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have
gone before.

In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they
found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have
something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not
interested in "anything foreign" and did not inquire into the origin of
these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls
of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus
reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art
of making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt deprived
of its independence had become a store-house filled with important
historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no
earthly use to either man or beast.

Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But
in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to
visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upo