During the season of 1895, Professor Petrie and Mr. Quibell discovered homes belonging to paleolithic man on a plateau four thousand feet above the Nile.  Thirty miles south of Thebes, there are many large and beautifully worked flints.  Their great antiquity is proved by the fact that they are deeply stained, whereas, in the same locality, there are other flints of an age of five thousand years, which show no traces of stains.

Close by this site was discovered the abundant remains of a hitherto unknown race.  This race has nothing in common with the true Egyptians, although their relics are invariably found with those of the Egyptians of the fourth, twelfth, eighteenth, and nineteenth dynasties.  Petrie declares these men to have been tall and powerful, with strong features, a hooked nose, a long, pointed beard, and brown, wavy hair.  They were not related to the negroes, but rather to the Amorites or Libyans.  The bodies in these tombs are not mummified, but are contracted, though laid in an opposite direction from those discovered at Medum.  The graves are open, square pits, roofed over with beams of wood.  This ancient race used forked hunting-lances for chasing the gazelle, and their beautiful flints were found to be like those belonging to an excellent collection already existing in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford.  They also made an abundant use of copper for adzes, harpoons for spearing fish, and needles for sewing garments.  They used pottery abundantly, and its variety is remarkable no less than the quality, which, unlike the Egyptian, was all hand-made and never fashioned by aid of the wheel.  They entered Egypt about 3,000 B.C., and were probably of the white Libyan race, and possibly may have been the foreigners who overthrew the old Egyptian empire.

The discovery of the name of “Israel” in an Egyptian inscription was in a sense, perhaps, the most remarkable event of the year 1895 in archaeology.  It was first laid before the public by Professor Petrie,* and was treated by Spiegelberg** in a communication to the Berlin Academy, and by Steindorff.***

     * Contemporary Review, May 1896.

     ** Sitzberichte, xxv., p. 593. 3.

     *** Zeitschrift fur deutsch.  Alt. test.  Wiss., 1896, p. 330.

The name occurs in an inscription dated in the fifth year of Merenptah, the successor of Ramses II., and often supposed to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus.  It is there written with the determinative of a people, not of a city or country, and reads in our conventional transliteration Ysiraar, but in reality agrees very closely to the Hebrew [...] the last portion aar being recognised as the equivalent of el in several words.  Merenptah states that “Israel is fekt (?) without seed (grain or offspring), Syria (Kharu) has become widows (Kharut) of or to Egypt.”  We can form no conclusion from these statements as to the relation in which the Israelites stood to Pharaoh