eye-paint which the Egyptians loved even at this early period.  These are often carved to suggest the forms of animals, such as birds, bats, tortoises, goats, etc.; on others are fantastic creatures with two heads.  Combs of bone, too, are found, ornamented in a similar way with birds’ or goats’ heads, often double.  And most interesting of all are the small bone and ivory figures of men and women which are also found.  These usually have little blue beads 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 of Egypt at so late a date as the period immediately preceding the XIIth Dynasty, a race which mixed in no way with the native Egyptians themselves, and left no trace of their influence upon the later Egyptians, was one which demanded greater faith than the simple explanation of M. de Morgan.