The last questions are—Where did they come from? and, How did they get into Egypt? I have at times thought that they came from the mouth of the Indus, or from the Persian Gulf, and entered Egypt by the way of the Red Sea. If Abydos was the first centre of Egyptian power, and the balance of historical argument inclines towards it, there seems to be no other way of accounting for its having been so than by supposing a landing at Myos Hormos, or Berenice, as they were afterwards called. In one of those harbours I can imagine the _May Flowers_ of that old, old world, hauled up upon the beach, and the stout hearts, that had crossed in them the Indian Ocean, preparing for their inland march across the desert hills to the wondrous river. The distance is not great. On the third day they will drink its water. The natives they are to encounter are gentle, and industrious. They will dispossess them of their land, and enslave them. They will take their daughters for wives. They will increase rapidly in their happy valley. The language they brought with them will be lost, and a new language formed by their descendants, which will be mainly that of the people they subdued, and with whom they intermarried. The religion, however, and the arts they brought with them, they will never forget; and as the centuries roll on, and they have increased greatly in numbers, and come to have many goodly cities, and much wealth, they will add largely both to their religion, and to their arts. But by the time they have added to their other arts that one which will enable them to perpetuate the memory of events, so long a time will have passed, that they will have lost all tradition of how their first fathers came into the valley, and how they possessed themselves of it. For them, therefore, the history of Egypt will commence with the discovery of letters; but for us, who are able to recover something of the history of words, of races, and of mythologies, it will reach back into far more distant tracts of time. There is no reason which should lead us peremptorily to decide against their having come by sea. There is no antecedent improbability. The distant voyages and settlements both of the Phœnicians, and of the Normans, show what can be achieved in very small vessels. Evidence to the same point was again supplied by the insignificant capacity of many of the vessels employed by some of our early trans-Atlantic explorers, and circumnavigators. And in the spirit-stirring and invigorating era of the Aryan migrations we may believe that some enterprises of this kind were undertaken. At all events, there is nothing to preclude our believing that, in the prehistoric period, Indian and Arabian vessels were wafted by the reciprocating monsoons, to and fro, across the Indian Ocean. Nor, indeed, are we at all obliged to suppose that those vessels were of insignificant capacity.