With the exception of a few palasoliths from the surface of the Syrian desert, near the Euphrates valley, not a single implement of the Age of Stone has yet been found in Southern Mesopotamia, whereas Egypt has yielded to us the most perfect examples of the flint-knapper’s art known, flint tools and weapons more beautiful than the finest that Europe and America can show.  The reason is not far to seek.  Southern Mesopotamia is an alluvial country, and the ancient cities, which doubtless mark the sites of the oldest settlements in the land, are situated in the alluvial marshy plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates; so that all traces of the Neolithic culture of the country would seem to have disappeared, buried deep beneath city-mounds, clay and marsh.  It is the same in the Egyptian Delta, a similar country; and here no traces of the prehistoric culture of Egypt have been found.  The attempt to find them was made last year at Buto, which is known to be one of the most antique centres of civilization, and probably was one of the earliest settlements in Egypt, but without success.  The infiltration of water had made excavation impossible and had no doubt destroyed everything belonging to the most ancient settlement.  It is not going too far to predict that exactly the same thing will be found by any explorer who tries to discover a Neolithic stratum beneath a city-mound of Babylonia.  There is little hope that prehistoric Chaldaea will ever be known to us.  But in Egypt the conditions are different.  The Delta is like Babylonia, it is true; but in the Upper Nile valley the river flows down with but a thin border of alluvial land on either side, through the rocky and hilly desert, the dry Sahara, where rain falls but once in two or three years.  Antiquities buried in this soil in the most remote ages are preserved intact as they were first interred, until the modern investigator comes along to look for them.  And it is on the desert margin of the valley that the remains of prehistoric Egypt have been found.  That is the reason for their perfect preservation till our own day, and why we know prehistoric Egypt so well.

The chief work of Egyptian civilization was the proper irrigation of the alluvial soil, the turning of marsh into cultivated fields, and the reclamation of land from the desert for the purposes of agriculture.  Owing to the rainless character of the country, the only means of obtaining water for the crops is by irrigation, and where the fertilizing Nile water cannot be taken by means of canals, there cultivation ends and the desert begins.  Before Egyptian civilization, properly so called, began, the valley was a great marsh through which the Nile found its way north to the sea.  The half-savage, stone-using ancestors of the civilized Egyptians hunted wild fowl, crocodiles, and hippopotami in the marshy valley; but except in a few isolated settlements on convenient mounds here and there (the forerunners of the later villages),