, and they used
these "canned words" to send messages to friends, to keep business
accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that
future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past.

THE NILE VALLEY

THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE

THE history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food.
Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home.

The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at an early date.
From the interior of Africa and from the desert of Arabia and from the
western part of Asia people had flocked to Egypt to claim their share
of the rich farms. Together these invaders had formed a new race which
called itself "Remi" or "the Men" just as we sometimes call America
"God's own country." They had good reason to be grateful to a Fate which
had carried them to this narrow strip of land. In the summer of each
year the Nile turned the valley into a shallow lake and when the waters
receded all the grainfields and the pastures were covered with several
inches of the most fertile clay.

In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it
possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of
which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not
in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps
carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks
and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it
throughout the land.

While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend sixteen hours
out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself and the members of
his tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the inhabitant of the Egyptian city
found himself possessed of a certain leisure. He used this spare time
to make himself many things that were merely ornamental and not in the
least bit useful.

More than that. One day he discovered that his brain was capable of
thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing to do with the problems
of eating and sleeping and finding a home for the children. The Egyptian
began to speculate upon many strange problems that confronted him.
Where did the stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which
frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise with such
regularity that it was possible to base the calendar upon the appearance
and the disappearance of the annual floods?