The discoveries of the closing years of the nineteenth century, however, have put an end to all that vagueness, and while our knowledge about the earliest dynastic kings of Egypt is still scanty enough, it is quite solid and real as far as it goes. Not only so, but excavation has resulted in the extension of knowledge to the period before the rise of the earliest dynastic rulers, and such a mass of material has been accumulated bearing on the life of the pre-dynastic Egyptians as to justify Professor Peet’s statement, “it may reasonably be said that we are as well acquainted with the material civilisation of this era as with that of any other in Egyptian history, though at the same time it has to be admitted that our knowledge of its actual history amounts to practically nothing.” With the pre-dynastic tombs, however, and with their comparatively meagre provision for the dead, we have not to do at present. All that need be said is that the pre-dynastic Egyptian buried his dead in a shallow pit cut in the sand or the soft rock, the body being laid on its side in a crouching posture, the knees drawn up towards the chin, and the hands placed in a supplicating attitude before the face. Around the dead man, who was often covered with a reed mat, were placed the vases for food and drink, the various utensils, flint knives, ivory tablets, and suchlike things which were held to be necessary or useful for him in the life beyond, and above all the carved slate palette which was used for grinding the green face-paint in which the early Egyptian delighted, and the material for making the paint itself. From these early tombs we have learned that the pre-dynastic Egyptian was far from being an uncultured savage. His funerary equipment, primitive as it is in some respects, shows us that he had already acquired the rudiments of that art of representing human and animal form which was to be carried to such remarkable heights in the dynastic period; he was an accomplished potter, whose vessels, though he was as yet ignorant of the potter’s wheel, are so perfectly moulded by hand that the absence of the wheel is no loss, and who “belonged to one of those rare and happy periods when the craftsman seems incapable of an error of taste, and in consequence almost every form that leaves his hands is a thing of beauty”; and he had an inexhaustible patience and an amazing skill in the working of vessels of the hardest stone which make the pre-dynastic hard stoneware the standard of quality by which all succeeding periods are judged.