At about 2500 B.C. all the civilisation of the world was confined to the regions bordering the whole length of the Red Sea, and extending northwards to Armenia. In the South was Egypt, a powerful monarchy dominant at times from Ethiopia to Asia Minor, and in the North the Chaldee kingdom of Akkad dominant over Mesopotamia and the frontier lands. The country of Egypt was named by its people Keme or Kheme, and their language was called the speech of Keme (out of which the Hebrews made Ham). The name of Ai-Gupt was given to the Delta by its Semitic neighbours and inhabitants, while they called the whole country Mizr (Mizraim) or Misr. The former name has prevailed in European use, as well as furnished the words Copt and Coptic, although this is questionable. The Kheme language was written both in hieroglyphic and in hieratic {9}characters at the year 2500 B.C. The former were the ancient picture-symbols, which were arranged in vertical columns and read from top to bottom and from left to right. This practice was retained to the end, notwithstanding that the Egyptians had been long in contemporaneous possession of the cursive hieratic characters, written in horizontal lines from right to left, just as Hebrew and Arabic. The hieratic character was simply an abridgment of the hieroglyphic, a reduction of the pictorial to conventional forms. The two scripts endured side by side till Christianity supervened, and then the modified Greek alphabet which we call the Coptic came into existence. The demotic script, a still more cursive reduction of the hieratic, had come into use probably a thousand years B.C., but it was only used for private mercantile transactions, and it died out on the establishment of the Coptic. Examples of both hieroglyphic and demotic writing are given in the plates accompanying this sketch.