of the Children of Israel.

But besides that, it is a land which has a most strange and wonderful
story of its own. No other country has so long a history of great Kings,
and wise men, and brave soldiers; and in no other country can you see
anything to compare with the great buildings, some of them most
beautiful, all of them most wonderful, of which Egypt has so many. We
have some old and interesting buildings in this country, and people go
far to see cathedrals and castles that are perhaps five or six hundred
years old, or even more; but in Egypt, buildings of that age are looked
upon as almost new, and nobody pays very much attention to them. For the
great temples and tombs of Egypt were, many of them, hundreds of years
old before the story of our Bible, properly speaking, begins.

The Pyramids, for instance, those huge piles that are still the wonder
of the world, were far older than any building now standing in Europe,
before Joseph was sold to be a slave in Potiphar's house. Hundreds upon
hundreds of years before anyone had ever heard of the Greeks and the
Romans, there were great Kings reigning in Egypt, sending out their
armies to conquer Syria and the Soudan, and their ships to explore the
unknown southern seas, and wise men were writing books which we can
still read. When Britain was a wild, unknown island, inhabited only by
savages as fierce and untaught as the South Sea Islanders, Egypt was a
great and highly civilized country, full of great cities, with noble
palaces and temples, and its people were wise and learned.

So in this little book I want to tell you something about this wonderful
and interesting old country, and about the kind of life that people
lived in it in those days of long ago, before most other lands had begun
to waken up, or to have any history at all. First of all, let us try to
get an idea of the land itself. It is a very remarkable thing that so
many of the countries which have played a great part in the history of
the world have been small countries. Our own Britain is not very big,
though it has had a great story. Palestine, which has done more than any
other country to make the world what it is to-day, was called "the least
of all lands." Greece, whose influence comes, perhaps, next after that
of Palestine, is only a little hilly corner of Southern Europe. And
Egypt, too, is comparatively a small land.

It looks a fair size when you see it on the map; but you have to
remember tha