CHAPTER I--THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC EGYPT

During the last ten years our conception of the beginnings of Egyptian
antiquity has profoundly altered. When Prof. Maspero published the
first volume of his great _Histoire Ancienne des Peuples des l'Orient
Classique_, in 1895, Egyptian history, properly so called, still began
with the Pyramid-builders, Sne-feru, Khufu, and Khafra (Cheops and
Chephren), and the legendary lists of earlier kings preserved at Abydos
and Sakkara were still quoted as the only source of knowledge of the
time before the IVth Dynasty. Of a prehistoric Egypt nothing was known,
beyond a few flint flakes gathered here and there upon the desert
plateaus, which might or might not tell of an age when the ancestors
of the Pyramid-builders knew only the stone tools and weapons of the
primeval savage.

Now, however, the veil which has hidden the beginnings of Egyptian
civilization from us has been lifted, and we see things, more or less,
as they actually were, unobscured by the traditions of a later day.
Until the last few years nothing of the real beginnings of history in
either Egypt or Mesopotamia had been found; legend supplied the only
material for the reconstruction of the earliest history of the oldest
civilized nations of the globe. Nor was it seriously supposed that any
relics of prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia ever would be found. The
antiquity of the known history of these countries already appeared
so great that nobody took into consideration the possibility of our
discovering a prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia; the idea was too remote
from practical work. And further, civilization in these countries had