It has been conjectured that this latter race may have come from Punt, that is, from Southern Arabia, and the opposite African coast of Soumali land, where there are races of a high, civilization at a very early period. This conjecture is based on the fact that Punt is constantly referred to in the Egyptian monuments as a divine or sacred land, while other surrounding nations are loaded with opprobrious epithets. Also the earliest traditions refer the origin of Egyptian civilization not to Lower Egypt, where the Isthmus of Suez affords a land route from Asia, nor to Upper Egypt, as if it had descended the Nile from Africa, but to Abydos and This in Middle Egypt, where the gods were feigned to have reigned, which are comparatively close to Coptos, the port on the Red Sea by which intercourse was most easily kept up between the valley of the Nile and the land of Punt. This conjecture, however, is very vague, and when we come to positive facts we find that the language and system of writing, when we first meet with them, are fully formed and apparently of native growth, not derived from any Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian speech of any historical nation. It is certainly an agglutinative language originally, but far advanced beyond the simpler forms of that mode of speech as spoken by Mongolians. It shows some distant affinities with Semitic, or rather with what may have been a proto-Semitic, before it had been fully formed, and is perhaps nearer to what may have been the primitive language of the Libyans of North Africa. But there is nothing in the language from which we can infer origin, and the pictures from which hieroglyphics are derived are those of animals and objects proper to the Nile valley, and not like those of the Accadians and Chinese, such as point to a prehistoric nomad existence on elevated plains. The only positive fact tending to confirm the existence of two races in Egypt, one rude and aboriginal, the other of high type, is the difference of type shown by the early portraits and the discovery by Mr. Flinders Petrie, in the very old cemetery of Meydoon, of two distinct modes of interment, one of the ordinary mummy extended at full length, the other in a crouching attitude as is common in neolithic graves. For any further inquiries as to the origin and antiquity of Egyptian civilization, we have to fall back on the state of religion, science, literature, and art, which we find prevailing in the earliest records which have come down to us, and which I will proceed to examine in subsequent chapters. But before doing so, I will endeavour to exhaust the field of positive history, and inquire how far the annals of other ancient nations contradict or confirm the date of about 5000 years B.C., which has been shown to be approximately that of the accession of Menes. CHAPTER II. CHALDÆA.