"During all this century in which Egyptian history has been studied at first hand, it has been accepted as a sort of axiom that the beginnings of things were quite unknown. In the epitome of the history which was drawn up under the Greeks to make Egypt intelligible to the rest of the world, there were three dynasties of kings stated before the time of the great pyramid builders; and yet of those it has been commonly said that no trace remained. Hence it has been usual to pass them by with just a mention as being half fabulous, and then to begin real history with Senefern or Khufu (Cheops), the kings who stand at the beginning of the fourth dynasty, at about 4000 B. C. The first discovery to break up this habit of thought was when the prehistoric colossal statues of Min, the god of the city of Koptos, were found in my excavations in his temple. These had carvings in relief upon them wholly different from anything known as yet in Egypt, and the circumstances pointed to their being earlier than any carvings yet found in that country. In the same temple we found also statues of sacred animals and pottery which we now know to belong to the very beginning of Egyptian history, many centuries before the pyramids, and probably about 5000 B. C. or earlier. "The next step was the finding of a new cemetery and a town of the prehistoric people, which we can now date to about 5000 B. C., within two or three centuries either way. This place lay on the opposite side of the Nile to Koptos—that is to say, about 20 miles north of Thebes. At first we were completely staggered by a class of objects entirely different from any yet known in Egypt. We tried to fit them into every gap in Egyptian history, but found that it was impossible to put them before 3000 B. C. Later discoveries prove that they are really as old as 5000 B. C. They show a very different civilization from that of the Egyptians whom we already know—far less artistic, but in some respects even more skillful in mechanical taste and touch than the historical Egyptians. They built brick houses to live in, and buried their dead in small chambers sunk in the gravels of the water courses, lined with mats, and roofed over with beams. They show several points of contact with the early Mediterranean civilization, and appear to have been mainly north African tribes of European type. Their pottery, in its patterns and painting, shows designs which have survived almost unchanged unto the present day among the Kabyles of the Algerian Mountains. And one very peculiar type of pottery is found spread from Spain to Egypt, and indicates a widespread commercial intercourse at that remote day. The frequent figures upon the vases of great galley ships rowed with oars show that shipping was well developed then, and make the evidences of trading between