An entertaining anecdote is connected with the so-called Ferlini discovery at Meroë, and with the recollection of the sojourn of the expedition and their labors there. The natives, naturally, could only regard as treasure-seekers the strange men who busied themselves so indefatigably among the old monuments, who applied measuring line and rule to them, covered them with wet paper, poured plaster over them, gazed at them, note book and pen in hand, and penetrated into their innermost recesses. When one of our colleagues afterwards visited this neighborhood, an old sheik told him that he knew well that the King of the Germans had only acquired the resources to vanquish the French, through the treasures which the Howadji Lepsius had found at Meroë and sent back to his native land. Lepsius’ sojourn in Ethiopia led him to the conviction, only confirmed by all subsequent investigations, that there could have been no ancient and original Ethiopian civilization and culture. In respect to this, all the reports of the ancients which do not rest upon a pure misunderstanding refer only to _Egyptian_ culture and art, which, during the dominion of the Hyksos, had taken refuge in Ethiopia. The outbreak of the Egyptian power from Ethiopia at the founding of the New Egyptian Kingdom, and its advance even far into Asia, was transferred from the Ethiopian _country_ to the Ethiopian _people_, first in the Asiatic and afterwards in the Greek traditions respecting this event; for no knowledge had penetrated to the northern peoples of a still older Egyptian Kingdom, and its proud but peaceful prime. During the long journey which led the expedition once more northward, and towards home, and which was now uninterrupted by side excursions, a number of short inscriptions on the rock were discovered at Semneh[57] and Kummeh. These yielded important historical information, for they proved that the solicitude of Amenemha III. (the Moeris of the Greeks, twelfth dynasty), for the regulation of the inundation of the Nile had extended to this point; that the Sebekhotep must be added, as the thirteenth dynasty, to the twelfth, and that four thousand years ago the river rose higher by twenty-four feet than it does in our day.