The close connection between Egypt and Punt in early times is confirmed by the terms of respect in which Punt is spoken of in Egyptian inscriptions, contrasting with the epithets of "barbarian" and "vile," which are applied to other surrounding nations such as the Hittites, Libyans, and Negroes. And the celebrated equipment of a fleet by the great queen Hatasu of the nineteenth dynasty, to make a commercial voyage to Punt, and its return with a rich freight, and the king and queen of the country with offerings, on a visit to the Pharaoh, reminding one of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, shows that the two nations were on friendly terms, and that the Red Sea and opposite coast of Africa had been navigated from a very early period. The physical type also of the chiefs of Punt as depicted on the Egyptian monuments is very like that of the aristocratic type of the earliest known Egyptian portraits. [Illustration: CHIEF OF PUNT AND TWO MEN.] One point seems sufficiently clear; that wherever may have been the original seat of the Aryans, that of the Semites must be placed in Arabia. Everywhere else we can trace them as an immigrating or invading people, who found prior populations of different race, but in Arabia they seem to have been aboriginal. Thus in Chaldæa and Assyria, the Semites are represented in the earliest history and traditions as coming from the South, partly by the Persian Gulf and partly across the Arabian and Syrian deserts, and by degrees amalgamating with and superseding the previous Accadian population. In Egypt the Semitic element was a late importation which never permanently affected the old Egyptian civilization. In Syria and Palestine, the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and Hebrews were all immigrants from the Persian Gulf or Arabian frontier, either directly or through the medium of Egypt and Assyria, who did not even pretend to be the earliest inhabitants, but found other races, as the Amorites and Hittites, in possession, whose traditions again went back to barbarous aborigines of Zammumim, who seemed to them to stammer their unintelligible language. The position of Semites in the Moslem world in Asia and Africa is distinctly due to the conquests of the Arab Mohammed and the spread of his religion. In Arabia alone we find Semites and Semites only, from the very beginning, and the peculiar language and character of the race must have been first developed in the growing civilization which preceded the ancient Minæan Empire, probably as the later stone age was passing into that of metal, and the primitive state of hunters and fishers into the higher social level of agriculturists and traders.