the North were thus not the descendants of the Neolithic people of the
South, but their conquerors; in fact, they dominated the indigenes both
of North and South, who will then appear (since we find the custom of
contracted burial in the North at Dashasha and Mêdûm) to have originally
belonged to the same race.

The conquering race is that which is supposed to have been of Semitic or
proto-Semitic origin, and to have brought elements of Sumerian culture
to savage Egypt. The reasons advanced for this supposition are the
following:--

(1) Just as the Egyptian race was evidently compounded of two elements,
of conquered "Mediterraneans" and conquering x, so the Egyptian language
is evidently compounded of two elements, the one Nilotic, perhaps
related in some degree to the Berber dialects of North Africa, the other
not x, but evidently Semitic.

(2) Certain elements of the early dynastic civilization, which do not
appear in that of the earlier pre-dynastic period, resemble well-known
elements of the civilization of Babylonia. We may instance the use of
the cylinder-seal, which died out in Egypt in the time of the XVIIIth
Dynasty, but was always used in Babylonia from the earliest to the
latest times. The early Egyptian mace-head is of exactly the same
type as the early Babylonian one. In the British Museum is an Egyptian
mace-head of red breccia, which is identical in shape and size with
one from Babylonia (also in the museum) bearing the name of
Shargani-shar-ali (i.e. Sargon, King of Agade), one of the earliest
Chaldæan monarchs, who must have lived about the same time as the
Egyptian kings of the IId-IIId Dynasties, to which period the Egyptian
mace-head may also be approximately assigned. The Egyptian art of the