ds for
eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here
we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with
inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work
this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which
is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric Egyptian
antiquities go. It is almost as good in style as the early Ist Dynasty
objects. Such were the objects which the simple piety of the early
Egyptian prompted him to bury with the bodies of his dead, in order that
they might find solace and contentment in the other world.

All the prehistoric cemeteries are of this type, with the graves pressed
closely together, so that they often impinge upon one another. The
nearness of the graves to the surface is due to the exposed positions,
at the entrances to _wadis_, in which the primitive cemeteries are
usually found. The result is that they are always swept by the winds,
which prevent the desert sand from accumulating over them, and so have
preserved the original level of the ground. From their proximity to
the surface they are often found disturbed, more often by the agency of
jackals than that of man.

Contemporaneously with M. de Morgan's explorations, Prof. Flinders
Petrie and Mr. J. Quibell had, in the winter of 1894-5, excavated in
the districts of Tukh and Nakada, on the west bank of the Nile opposite
Koptos, a series of extensive cemeteries of the primitive type, from
which they obtained a large number of antiquities, published in their
volume Nagada and Dallas. The plates giving representations of the
antiquities found were of the highest interest, but the scientific value
of the letter-press is vitiated by the fact that the true historical
position of the antiquities was not perceived by their discoverers, who
came to the conclusion that these remains were those of a "New Pace" of
Libyan invaders. This race, they supposed, had entered Egypt after the
close of the flourishing period of the "Old Kingdom" at the end of the
VIth Dynasty, and had occupied part of the Nile valley from that time
till the period of the Xth Dynasty.

This conclusion was proved erroneous by M. de Morgan almost as soon
as made, and the French archaeologist's identification of the primitive
remains as pre-dynastic was at once generally accepted. It was obvious
that a hypothesis of the settlement of a stone-using barbaric race in
the midst o