still farther; for next to this Ethiopian-demotic there occurs at a later period, an Ethiopian-Greek, which may be fairly compared with the Koptic, and indeed has borrowed several letters from it. It is found in the inscriptions of Soba and in some others on the walls of the temple ruins of Wadi e’ Sofra. We have now therefore, as in Egypt, two doubtless successive systems of writing, which contain the actual Ethiopian popular dialect. It is customary now to call the old Abyssinian-Geez language the Ethiopic, which has no right to this denomination in an ethnographical point of view, as a Semetic language brought from Arabia, but only as a local term. A Geez inscription, which I have found in the chamber of a pyramid, has evidently been added at a later period. I hope that by the study of the native inscriptions, and the yet living languages, some important results may be obtained. The name Ethiopian with the ancients comprehended much of very various import. The ancient population of the whole Nile valley to Chartûm, and perhaps along the Blue River, as also the tribes in the desert east of the Nile, and the Abyssinians, then probably were more broadly distinguished from the negroes than at present, and belonged to the Caucasian race; the Ethiopians of Meroë (according to Herodotus, the mother state of all the Ethiopians) were reddish-brown people, like the Egyptians, only darker, as at the present day. This is also proved by the monuments, on which I have more than once found the red skin of the kings and queens preserved.[84] In Egypt the women were always painted yellow, particularly during the Old Empire, before the Ethiopian mixture, at the time of the Hyksos; and the Egyptian women of the present day, who have grown pale in the harems, incline to the same colour.[85] After the eighteenth dynasty, however, red women appear, and so it is certain the Ethiopian women were always represented. It seems that the so-called Barâbra nation has much Ethiopian blood mixed with it, and perhaps this may be more fully shown at some time by their language.[86] It is no doubt the ancient Nubian, and has continued under that name in somewhat distant south-westerly regions; for the languages of the Nubians in and about Kordofan are, to some extent, evidently related to the Berber language. That this last, which is now only spoken from Assuan to Dar Shaiqîeh, south of Dongola, in the Nile valley, ruled for a time in the province of Berber, and still higher up, I have found enough proof in the names of the localities.