the dry desert margin, and it was here, upon low tongues of desert hill
jutting out into the plain, that they buried their dead. Their simple
shallow graves were safe from the flood, and, but for the depredations
of jackals and hyenas, here they have remained intact till our own
day, and have yielded up to us the facts from which we have derived our
knowledge of prehistoric Egypt. Thus it is that we know so much of the
Egyptians of the Stone Age, while of their contemporaries in Mesopotamia
we know nothing, nor is anything further likely to be discovered.

But these desert cemeteries, with their crowds of oval shallow graves,
covered by only a few inches of surface soil, in which the Neolithic
Egyptians lie crouched up with their flint implements and polished
pottery beside them, are but monuments of the later age of prehistoric
Egypt. Long before the Neolithic Egyptian hunted his game in the
marshes, and here and there essayed the work of reclamation for the
purposes of an incipient agriculture, a far older race inhabited the
valley of the Nile. The written records of Egyptian civilization go back
four thousand years before Christ, or earlier, and the Neolithic Age of
Egypt must go back to a period several thousand years before that. But
we can now go back much further still, to the Palaeolithic Age of Egypt.
At a time when Europe was still covered by the ice and snows of the
Glacial Period, and man fought as an equal, hardly yet as a superior,
with cave-bear and mammoth, the Palaeolithic Egyptians lived on the
banks of the Nile. Their habitat was doubtless the desert slopes, often,
too, the plateaus themselves; but that they lived entirely upon the
plateaus, high up above the Nile marsh, is improbable. There, it is
true, we find their flint implements, the great pear-shaped weapons of
the types of Chelles, St. Acheul, and Le Moustier, types well known
to all who are acquainted with the flint implements of the "Drift" in
Europe. And it is there that the theory, generally accepted hitherto,