Both nations had the various arts of weaving, dyeing, embroidering, working in metals, and the manufacture of glass, and practised them with but little difference in their methods. The fine muslins of India find their counterparts as “woven wind” in the transparent tissues figured on the Egyptian temples. The style of building, the sciences of astronomy, music, and medicine were assiduously cultivated by both nations, and there was direct intercourse between them, perhaps even before historical time begins. Rameses the Great (III.), called also Sesostris, fitted out not only war ships but merchant vessels for the purpose of trading with India, in B.C. 1235, and Wilkinson in his book on the Ancient Egyptians, tells us that in 2000 B.C. there were no less than 400 ships trading to the Persian Gulf. There is, after all, nothing surprising in this when we remember the fact, which is, however, not generally known, I am afraid, that under the reign of Pharoah Necho, a fleet of his ships safely circumnavigated Africa, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, this being in advance of the celebrated voyage of Diaz and Vasco da Gama by no less than 2100 years. No less than seven centuries before Thales went to study in Egypt, astronomical calculations were inscribed on the monuments at Thebes, so that we can see how modern by comparison the Greek philosophy appears. In a note Wilkinson says that “The science of Medicine was one of the earliest cultivated in Egypt. Athothes, the successor of Menes of the first dynasty, is said to have written on the subject, and five papyri on the subject have survived. “They are of the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. “One known as the Papyrus Ebers, from its discoverer, is attributed to the age of Kherpheres or Bikheres. “The second, that of Berlin, found in the reign of Usaphais of the first dynasty, was completed by Senet or Sethenes of the second line. “The third, that of the British Museum, contains a receipt said to have been mysteriously discovered in the reign of Cheops of the fourth dynasty. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * “The curatives employed were ointments, drinks, plasters, fumigations and clysters, and the drugs employed were taken from vegetables, minerals, and animals. “Those for each draught were mixed together, pounded, boiled, and strained through linen. “The doctors belonged to the sacred class, and were only permitted to practice their own particular branch. “These were oculists, dentists, those who confined their practice to diseases of the head, and those again who only attended to internal diseases; they were paid from the public treasury, and were compelled, before being permitted to practice, to study the precepts laid down by their predecessors.”