I. The Discovery of Prehistoric Egypt

II.  Abydos and the First Three Dynasties

III.  Memphis and the Pyramids

IV.  Recent Excavations in Western Asia and the Dawn of Chaldaean History

V. Elam and Babylon, the Country of the Sea and the Kassites

VI.  Early Babylonian Life and Customs

VII.  Temples and Tombs of Thebes

VIII.  The Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires in the Light of Recent
Research

IX.  The Last Days of Ancient Egypt

EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA

In the Light of Recent Excavation and Research

CHAPTER I—­THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC EGYPT

During the last ten years our conception of the beginnings of Egyptian antiquity has profoundly altered.  When Prof.  Maspero published the first volume of his great Histoire Ancienne des Peuples des l’Orient Classique, in 1895, Egyptian history, properly so called, still began with the Pyramid-builders, Sne-feru, Khufu, and Khafra (Cheops and Chephren), and the legendary lists of earlier kings preserved at Abydos and Sakkara were still quoted as the only source of knowledge of the time before the IVth Dynasty.  Of a prehistoric Egypt nothing was known, beyond a few flint flakes gathered here and there upon the desert plateaus, which might or might not tell of an age when the ancestors of the Pyramid-builders knew only the stone tools and weapons of the primeval savage.

Now, however, the veil which has hidden the beginnings of Egyptian civilization from us has been lifted, and we see things, more or less, as they actually were, unobscured by the traditions of a later day.  Until the last few years nothing of the real beginnings of history in either Egypt or Mesopotamia had been found; legend supplied the only material for the reconstruction of the earliest history of the oldest civilized nations of the globe.  Nor was it seriously supposed that any relics of prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia ever would be found.  The antiquity of the known history of these countries already appeared so great that nobody took into consideration the possibility of our discovering a prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia; the idea was too remote from practical work.  And further, civilization in these countries had lasted so long that it seemed more than probable that all traces of their prehistoric age had long since been swept away.  Yet the possibility, which seemed hardly worth a moment’s consideration in 1895, is in 1905 an assured reality, at least as far as Egypt is concerned.  Prehistoric Babylonia has yet to be discovered.  It is true, for example, that at Mukay-yar, the site of ancient Ur of the Chaldees, burials in earthenware coffins, in which the skeletons lie in the doubled-up position characteristic of Neolithic interments, have been found; but there is no doubt whatever that these are burials of a much later date, belonging, quite possibly, to the Parthian period.  Nothing that may rightfully be termed prehistoric has yet been found in the Euphrates valley, whereas in Egypt prehistoric antiquities are now almost as well known and as well represented in our museums as are the prehistoric antiquities of Europe and America.