The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced toward civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge from barbarism is going much further than we dare.  Their records are the most ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may easily have been other social organisms, other races, to whom the chances of time and nature have been less gentle.  Cataclysms may have engulfed more than one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted for the preservation of man’s buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.

[Footnote 2:  See the Dawn of Civilization, page 1.]

Moreover, the Egyptians may not have been the earliest inhabitants even of their own rich valley.  We find hints that they were wanderers, invaders, coming from the East, and that with the land they appropriated also the ideas, the inventions, of an earlier negroid race.  But whatever they took they added to, they improved on.  The idea of futurity, of man’s existence beyond the grave, became prominent among them; and in the absence of clearer knowledge we may well take this idea as the groundwork, the starting-point, of all man’s later and more striking progress.

Since the Egyptians believed in a future life they strove to preserve the body for it, and built ever stronger and more gigantic tombs.  They strove to fit the mind for it, and cultivated virtues, not wholly animal such as physical strength, nor wholly commercial such as cunning.  They even carved around the sepulchre of the departed a record of his doings, lest they—­and perhaps he too in that next life—­forget.  There were elements of intellectual growth in all this, conditions to stimulate the mind beyond the body.

And the Egyptians did develop.  If one reads the tales, the romances, that have survived from their remoter periods, he finds few emotions higher than childish curiosity or mere animal rage and fear.  Amid their latest stories, on the contrary, we encounter touches of sentiment, of pity and self-sacrifice, such as would even now be not unworthy of praise.  But, alas! the improvement seems most marked where it was most distant.  Perhaps the material prosperity of the land was too great, the conditions of life too easy; there was no stimulus to effort, to endeavor.  By about the year 2200 B.C. we find Egypt fallen into the grip of a cold and lifeless formalism.  Everything was fixed by law; even pictures must be drawn in a certain way, thoughts must be expressed by stated and unvariable symbols.  Advance became well-nigh impossible.  Everything lay in the hands of a priestly caste the completeness of whose dominion has perhaps never been matched in history.  The leaders lived lives of luxurious pleasure enlightened by scientific study; but the people scarce existed except as automatons.  The race was dead; its true life, the vigor of its masses, was exhausted, and the land soon fell an easy prey to every spirited invader.