This is a very plausible hypothesis, and has a great deal of evidence in its favour.  It seems certain that in the early dynastic period two races lived in Egypt, which differed considerably in type, and also, apparently, in burial customs.  The later Egyptians always buried the dead lying on their backs, extended at full length.  During the period of the Middle Kingdom (XIth-XIIIth Dynasties) the head was usually turned over on to the left side, in order that the dead man might look through the two great eyes painted on that side of the coffin.  Afterward the rigidly extended position was always adopted.  The Neolithic Egyptians, however, buried the dead lying wholly on the left side and in a contracted position, with the knees drawn up to the chin.  The bodies were not embalmed, and the extended position and mummification were never used.  Under the IVth Dynasty we find in the necropolis of Medum (north of the Payyum) the two positions used simultaneously, and the extended bodies are mummified.  The contracted bodies are skeletons, as in the case of most of the predynastic bodies.  When these are found with flesh, skin, and hair intact, their preservation is due to the dryness of the soil and the preservative salts it contains, not to intentional embalming, which was evidently introduced by those who employed the extended position in burial.  The contracted position is found as late as the Vth Dynasty at Dashasha, south of the Eayyum, but after that date it is no longer found.

The conclusion is obvious that the contracted position without mummification, which the Neolithic people used, was supplanted in the early dynastic period by the extended position with mummification, and by the time of the VIth Dynasty it was entirely superseded.  This points to the supersession of the burial customs of the indigenous Neolithic race by those of another race which conquered and dominated the indigenes.  And, since the extended burials of the IVth Dynasty are evidently those of the higher nobles, while the contracted ones are those of inferior people, it is probable that the customs of extended burial and embalming were introduced by a foreign race which founded the Egyptian monarchical state, with its hierarchy of nobles and officials, and in fact started Egyptian civilization on its way.  The conquerors of the North were thus not the descendants of the Neolithic people of the South, but their conquerors; in fact, they dominated the indigenes both of North and South, who will then appear (since we find the custom of contracted burial in the North at Dashasha and Medum) to have originally belonged to the same race.

The conquering race is that which is supposed to have been of Semitic or proto-Semitic origin, and to have brought elements of Sumerian culture to savage Egypt.  The reasons advanced for this supposition are the following:—­

(1) Just as the Egyptian race was evidently compounded of two elements, of conquered “Mediterraneans” and conquering x, so the Egyptian language is evidently compounded of two elements, the one Nilotic, perhaps related in some degree to the Berber dialects of North Africa, the other not x, but evidently Semitic.