Entering Africa by the Isthmus of Suez,[44] the children of Ham were ushered into the fertile valley of the Nile, a region prepared by nature for settled communities and a primeval civilization. In a country bounded by the Red Sea on the one side, and by a wilderness on the other, and presenting but a narrow strip of land for its inhabitants, laws would at once become necessary for mutual protection; and we may suppose that while one portion of the Mizraimites embraced these social restrictions, another, impatient of control, passed beyond the desert barrier on the west, and spreading themselves over the north of Africa, became those nomadic tribes to which the earliest annals give the name of LIBYANS.[45] It follows from this view of the question, that we suppose the Egyptians and Libyans to have been cognate people; that the former were the aboriginal[46] inhabitants of the valley of the Nile; and that their institutions, however modified by intrusive nations in after times, were the offspring of their own minds. It will, however, be very naturally objected that among the Egyptians no gradations are apparent between barbarism and refinement, “It is a remarkable fact,” says Sir G. Wilkinson, “that the first glimpse we obtain of the history and manners of the Egyptians, shows a nation already advanced in the arts of civilized life; and the same customs and inventions that prevailed in the Augustan era of that people, after the accession of the eighteenth dynasty, are found in the remote age of Osortasen, the contemporary of Joseph.” How then could a branch of the Libyan race, a people so comparatively obscure, have become the mighty Egyptian nation? How could families of mankind so widely different in their intellectual manifestations, have been derived from a cognate stock? To which we reply, that the Egyptians and Libyans were not in this respect more widely separated than were the Saracens under the Caliphs, and the wandering Bedouins; yet, both these were branches of the Arabian race. Egypt may perhaps be regarded as the intellectual centre of the posterity of Ham.