contrast to the desert sands and barren hills that rim the valley.

[Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPT]

CLIMATE.--In Lower Egypt, near the sea, the rainfall in the winter is
abundant; but the climate of Upper Egypt is all but rainless, only a few
slight showers falling throughout the year. This dryness of the Egyptian
air is what has preserved through so many thousand years, in such
wonderful freshness of color and with such sharpness of outline, the
numerous paintings and sculptures of the monuments of the Pharaohs.

The southern line of Egypt only just touches the tropics; still the
climate, influenced by the wide and hot deserts that hem the valley, is
semi-tropical in character. The fruits of the tropics and the cereals of
the temperate zone grow luxuriantly. Thus favored in climate as well as in
the matter of irrigation, Egypt became in early times the granary of the
East. To it less favored countries, when stricken by famine,--a calamity
so common in the East in regions dependent upon the rainfall,--looked for
food, as did the families of Israel during drought and failure of crops in
Palestine.

DYNASTIES AND CHRONOLOGY.--The kings, or Pharaohs, that reigned in Egypt
from the earliest times till the conquest of the country by Alexander the
Great (332 B.C.), are grouped into thirty-one dynasties. Thirty of these
we find in the lists of Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived in the third
century B.C., and who compiled a chronicle of the kings of the country
from the manuscripts kept in the Egyptian temples.

We cannot assign a positive date to the beginning of the First Dynasty,
chiefly because Egyptologists are at a loss to know whether to consider