The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Khiti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hapi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, Haikuphtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomitu, Botu, and their country Qimit, the black land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bakhu, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man. Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nutri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.[*] * The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine Land were celebrated in Egypt. A traveller or hunter, crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of the penetrating scent of the _robul (Puliciaria undulata_, Schwbine.), which once followed us throughout a day and two nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever." (Golenischeff).