Although the Egyptian civilization is known to have existed pretty much as we have described it from immemorial antiquity, yet, with the exception of what we learn from Scripture, we know little of Egyptian history, properly so called, anterior to the time when the country was thrown open to the Greeks. Herodotus and Manetho, indeed, have given us retrospective lists of the Egyptian kings, extending back into the primitive gloom of the world; but portions of these lists are evidently constructed backwards on mythical principles. Thus Manetho, preserving doubtless the traditions of the sacerdotal Egyptian caste, to which he is supposed to have belonged, carries back the imagination as far as 30,000 years before the birth of Christ. From this date till B. C. 5702, great divine personages ruled in Egypt; then (B. C. 5702) it came into the possession of human kings, the first of which was Menes. From the accession of Menes down to the incorporation of Egypt with the Persian empire (B. C. 525), Herodotus assigns 330 kings, or, as they are called in Scripture, Pharaohs, whose names he informs us, were read to him out of a papyrus manuscript by the Egyptian priests, who pledged themselves to its accuracy; and Manetho reckons up twenty-six dynasties, some of them native and others foreign, which divided the long period into portions of different lengths. ARABIA. The great peninsula of Arabia was in the earliest times inhabited by a population of the Semitic stock, in all essential respects similar to that which inhabits it now, partly concentrated in cities, partly wandering in tribes through the extensive deserts which mark the surface of the country. The inhabitants of the towns subsist by agriculture and commerce; the wandering tribes by cattle rearing and pillage. In ancient times, as now, the Arabs were celebrated for their expert horsemanship, their hospitality, their eloquence, and their free indomitable spirit. In religion, however, the modern Arabs, who are Mohammedans, differ from the ancient Arabs, who were idolaters, chiefly worshippers of the celestial luminaries, nowhere so beautiful as in the sky of an Arabian desert. The Arabs themselves trace their history back, the older tribes to Kahtan (the Joktan of the 10th chapter of Genesis), the latter to Adnan, a descendant of Ishmael, the offspring of Abraham. It is unnecessary, however, to enter into this history, as Arabia was not incorporated with the Persian empire, and only assumed historical importance in later times, when it sent forth the religion of Mohammed over the East.