drawings of bears, crioceras-shells, elephants walking over hills, etc., of the most primitive description.  With them were lions’ heads and birds of a style then unknown, but which we now know to belong to the period of the beginning of the Ist Dynasty.  But the statues of Min are older.  The crioceras-shells belong to the Red Sea.  Are we to see in these statues the holy images of the conquerors from the Red Sea who reached the Nile valley by way of the Wadi Hammamat, and set up the first memorials of their presence at Koptos?  It may be so, or the Min statues may be older than the conquerors, and belong to the Neolithic race, since Min and his fetish (which we find on the slate palette from el-’Amra, already mentioned) seem to belong to the indigenous Nilotes.  In any case we have in these statues, two of which are in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, probably the most ancient cult-images in the world: 

This theory, which would make all the Neolithic inhabitants of Egypt one people, who were conquered by a Semitic race, bringing a culture of Sumerian origin to Egypt by way of the Wadi Hammamat, is that generally accepted at the present time.  It may, however, eventually prove necessary to modify it.  For reasons given above, it may well be that the Neolithic population was itself not indigenous, and that it reached the Nile valley by way of the Wadi Hammamat, spreading north and south from the mouth of the wadi.  It may also be considered probable that a Semitic wave invaded Egypt by way of the Isthmus of Suez, where the early sun-cultus of Heliopolis probably marks a primeval Semitic settlement.  In that case it would seem that the Mesniu or “Smiths,” who introduced the use of metal, would have to be referred to the originally Neolithic pre-Semitic people, who certainly were acquainted with the use of copper, though not to any great extent.  But this is not a necessary supposition.  The Mesniu are closely connected with the Sky-god Horus, who was possibly of Semitic origin, and another Semitic wave, quite distinct from that which entered Egypt by way of the Isthmus, may very well also have reached Egypt by the Wadi Hammamat, or, equally possibly, from the far south, coming down to the Nile from the Abyssinian mountains.  The legend of the coming of Hathor from Ta-neter may refer to some such wandering, and we know that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom communicated with the Land of Punt, not by way of the Red Sea coast as Hatshepsut did, but by way of the Upper Nile.  This would tally well with the march of the Mesniu northwards from Edfu to their battle with the forces of Set at Dendera.