Prof.  Petrie has explored other prehistoric sites at Abadiya, and Mr. Quibell at el-Kab.  M. de Morgan and his assistants have examined a large number of sites, ranging from the Delta to el-Kab.  Further research has shown that some of the sites identified by M. de Morgan as prehistoric are in reality of much later date, for example, Kahun, where the late flints of XIIth Dynasty date were found.  He notes that “large numbers of Neolithic flint weapons are found in the desert on the borders of the Fayyum, and at Helwan, south of Cairo,” and that all the important necropoles and kitchen-middens of the predynastic people are to be found in the districts of Abydos and Thebes, from el-Kawamil in the North to el-Kab in the South.  It is of course too soon to assert with confidence that there are no prehistoric remains in any other part of Egypt, especially in the long tract between the Fayyum and the district of Abydos, but up to the present time none have been found in this region.

This geographical distribution of the prehistoric remains fits in curiously with the ancient legend concerning the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians in Upper Egypt, and supports the much discussed theory that they came originally to the Nile valley from the shores of the Red Sea by way of the Wadi Hammamat, which debouches on to the Nile in the vicinity of Koptos and Kus, opposite Ballas and Tukh.  The supposition seems a very probable one, and it may well be that the earliest Egyptians entered the valley of the Nile by the route suggested and then spread northwards and southwards in the valley.  The fact that their remains are not found north of el-Kawamil nor south of el-Kab might perhaps be explained by the supposition that, when they had extended thus far north and south from their original place of arrival, they passed from the primitive Neolithic condition to the more highly developed copper-using culture of the period which immediately preceded the establishment of the monarchy.  The Neolithic weapons of the Fayyum and Hel-wan would then be the remains of a different people, which inhabited the Delta and Middle Egypt in very early times.  This people may have been of Mediterranean stock, akin to the primitive inhabitants of Palestine, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and they no doubt were identical with the inhabitants of Lower Egypt who were overthrown and conquered by Kha-sekhem and the other Southern founders of the monarchy (who belonged to the race which had come from the Red Sea by the Wadi Hammamat), and so were the ancestors of the later natives of Lower Egypt.  Whether the Southerners, whose primitive remains we find from el-Kawamil to el-Kab, were of the same race as the Northerners whom they conquered, cannot be decided.  The skull-form of the Southerners agrees with that of the Mediterranean races.  But we have no necropoles of the Northerners to tell us much of their peculiarities.  We have nothing but their flint arrowheads.