music, and medicine were assiduously cultivated by both nations, and
there was direct intercourse between them, perhaps even before
historical time begins.

Rameses the Great (III.), called also Sesostris, fitted out not only war
ships but merchant vessels for the purpose of trading with India, in
B.C. 1235, and Wilkinson in his book on the Ancient Egyptians, tells us
that in 2000 B.C. there were no less than 400 ships trading to the
Persian Gulf. There is, after all, nothing surprising in this when we
remember the fact, which is, however, not generally known, I am afraid,
that under the reign of Pharoah Necho, a fleet of his ships safely
circumnavigated Africa, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, this
being in advance of the celebrated voyage of Diaz and Vasco da Gama by
no less than 2100 years.

No less than seven centuries before Thales went to study in Egypt,
astronomical calculations were inscribed on the monuments at Thebes, so
that we can see how modern by comparison the Greek philosophy appears.

In a note Wilkinson says that “The science of Medicine was one of the
earliest cultivated in Egypt. Athothes, the successor of Menes of the
first dynasty, is said to have written on the subject, and five papyri
on the subject have survived.

“They are of the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties.

“One known as the Papyrus Ebers, from its discoverer, is attributed to
the age of Kherpheres or Bikheres.

“The second, that of Berlin, found in the reign of Usaphais of the first