The cemeteries of Abydos were very extensive. Their extent grew out of the wish, very generally felt among well-to-do and educated Egyptians, to be laid themselves where Osiris, the judge of all, had once been laid. As I have intimated, the site of This may, perhaps, cast some faint ray of light on the question of how, and where, the first ancestors of the Egyptians had entered Egypt. It throws, however, a flood of light on the question of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. We have seen that in Egypt, in consequence of the absence, or scantiness of rain, there are no springs, and that another consequence of this want of rain is that the nitre, which the soil collects from the air, is not dissolved and washed away, but accumulates to such a degree as to render the water of the wells, which has percolated from the river through the soil, brackish, and unfit for drinking. Now the distance of This, in a direct line from the river, is seven miles and a half; if, then, we put these points together, we shall see in them another argument for the extreme antiquity of Egyptian civilization, besides those drawn from the use of writing, the mythology, and from the absence of anything like a beginning in the history of the useful arts, and of their social arrangements. The combined force of these arguments amounts to a demonstration that civilization was not in its infancy six thousand years ago, at the era of the Thinite dynasties. Here is the form of this contributory to the demonstration. An uncivilized people would undoubtedly have placed their town on the banks of the river, close to the water. But a people among whom labour is organized, and who will be willing because they are civilized, to go to a great deal of trouble and expense for an adequate object, instead of giving up much good land for a large city, and on a site, too, where it would be troubled by inundations, would prefer to build it at a distance from the river, where the land was not suitable for cultivation, and where it would be safe from inundations. But in order to do this they must cut a canal seven and a half miles long at the least, and so bring the water of the river to the city. These thoughts the Egyptians had, and this work they accomplished, in the ages which preceded Menes. No savage, or semi-savage people would have entertained this scheme of the canal, or would have carried it out. The site of This is thus alone strong evidence of a very advanced contemporary civilization, no one can tell how many centuries before the time of Menes; but at least for a sufficient tract of time to allow of the growth of a powerful state, capable at last in his time of imposing a dynasty on Egypt. The first cities in Egypt must have been on the banks of the river; or in places where the _háger_ was near the bank. The first comers did not cut canals seven and a half miles long at least; and none but a people already powerful could protect such