expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and Buto,
the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the
ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South
and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization
struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by
whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to
which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their
cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which
was followed in the emigration to Africa.

* The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch,
Ebers,--Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in
the train of E. de Rouge; but the most extreme position has
been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined
to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the
Babylonian. After having summarily announced this thesis in
his _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_, p. 12, et seq.,
he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, _Der
Babylonische Ursprung der agyptischen Kultur_, 1892, wherein
he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and
hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the
cults of Eridu, and would make the name of the Egyptian city
Onu, or Anu, identical with that of _Nun-H, Nun_, which is
borne by the Chaldean.

Some think that the people took the shortest road across the Isthmus
of Suez, others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated
itinerary. They would have them cross the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb,
and then the Abyssinian mountains, and, spreading northward and keeping
along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of to-day. A more minute
examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic
origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult
to maintain. The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the
characteristics of those white races which have been found established
from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent;
this population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the West
or South-West. In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race
which it drove back or destroyed; and there, perhaps, too, it afterwards
received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the
isthmus and the marshes of the Delta