[Illustration:  038-text.jpg]

Now it is evident that Babylonians and Assyrians, who buried the dead at full length in chests, had some knowledge of embalming.  An Assyrian king tells us how he buried his royal father:—­

     “Within the grave, the secret place,
     In kingly oil, I gently laid him. 
     The grave-stone marketh his resting-place. 
     With mighty bronze I sealed its entrance,
     And I protected it with an incantation.”

The “kingly oil” was evidently used with the idea of preserving the body from decay.  Salt also was used to preserve the dead, and Herodotus says that the Babylonians buried in honey, which was also used by the Egyptians.  No doubt the Babylonian method was less perfect than the Egyptian, but the comparison is an interesting one, when taken in connection with the other points of resemblance mentioned above.

We find, then, that an analysis of the Egyptian language reveals a Semitic element in it; that the early dynastic culture had certain characteristics which were unknown to the Neolithic Egyptians but are closely parallelled in early Babylonia; that there were two elements in the Egyptian religion, one of which seems to have originally belonged to the Neolithic people, while the other has a Semitic appearance; and that there were two sets of burial customs in early Egypt, one, that of the Neolithic people, the other evidently that of a conquering race, which eventually prevailed over the former; these later rites were analogous to those of the Babylonians and Assyrians, though differing from them in points of detail.  The conclusion is that the x or conquering race was Semitic and brought to Egypt the Semitic elements in the Egyptian religion and a culture originally derived from that of the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia, the non-Semitic parent of all Semitic civilizations.

The question now arises, how did this Semitic people reach Egypt?  We have the choice of two points of entry:  First, Heliopolis in the North, where the Semitic sun-worship took root, and, second, the Wadi Hamma-mat in the South, north of Edfu, the southern centre of sun-worship, and Hierakonpolis (Nekheb-Nekhen), the capital of the Upper Egyptian kingdom which existed before the foundation of the monarchy.  The legends which seem to bring the ancestors of the Egyptians from the Red Sea coast have already been mentioned.  They are closely connected with the worship of the Sky and Sun god Horus of Edfu.  Hathor, his nurse, the “House of Horus,” the centre of whose worship was at Dendera, immediately opposite the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat, was said to have come from Ta-neter, “The Holy Land,” i.e.  Abyssinia or the Red Sea coast, with the company or paut of the gods.  Now the Egyptians always seem to have had some idea that they were connected racially with the inhabitants of the Land of Punt or Puenet, the modern Abyssinia and Somaliland.  In the time