reviously known to exist at the same spot,
and believed to belong to Tiglath-Ninip and Assur-nazir-pal, are really
those of Shalmaneser II., and refer to the war of his seventh year.

But it is from Egypt that the most revolutionary revelations have
come. At Abydos and Kom el-Ahmar, opposite El-Kab, monuments have been
disinterred of the kings of the first and second dynasties, if not of
even earlier princes; while at Negada, north of Thebes, M. de Morgan has
found a tomb which seems to have been that of Menes himself. A new world
of art has been opened out before us; even the hieroglyphic system of
writing is as yet immature and strange. But the art is already advanced
in many respects; hard stone was cut into vases and bowls, and even
into statuary of considerable artistic excellence; glazed porcelain was
already made, and bronze, or rather copper, was fashioned into weapons
and tools. The writing material, as in Babylonia, was often clay,
over which seal-cylinders of a Babylonian pattern were rolled. Equally
Babylonian are the strange and composite animals engraved on some of the
objects of this early age, as well as the structure of the tombs, which
were built, not of stone, but of crude brick, with their external
walls panelled and pilastered. Professor Hommel's theory, which brings
Egyptian civilisation from Babylonia along with the ancestors of the
historical Egyptians, has thus been largely verified.

But the historical Egyptians were not the first inhabitants of the
valley of the Nile. Not only have palaeolithic implements been found on
the plateau of the desert; the relics of neolithic man have turned up
in extraordinary abundance. When the historical Egyptians arrived with
their copper weapons and their system of writing, the land was already
occupied by a pastoral people, who had attained a high level of
neolithic culture. Their implements of flint are the most beautiful and
delicately finished that have ever been discovered; they were able to
carve vases of great artistic excellence out of the hardest of stone,
and their pottery was of no mean quality. Long after the country had
come into the possession of the historical dynasties, and had even been
united into a single monarchy, their settlements continued to exist
on the outskirts of the desert, and the neolithic culture that
distinguished them passed only gradually away. By degrees, however,
they intermingled with their conquerors from Asia, and thus for