Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konusit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. Bakhu and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and Buto, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa. * The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch, Ebers,--Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in the train of E. de Rouge; but the most extreme position has been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the Babylonian. After having summarily announced this thesis in his _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_, p. 12, et seq., he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, _Der Babylonische Ursprung der agyptischen Kultur_, 1892, wherein he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the cults of Eridu, and would make the name of the Egyptian city Onu, or Anu, identical with that of _Nun-H, Nun_, which is borne by the Chaldean.