It was to this region that classical tradition referred the origin of working in iron. An analysis of the gold of the first six Egyptian dynasties submitted to Dr. Gladstone by Professor Petrie proved that it was mixed with silver, and hence must have been derived from Asia Minor.[61] Egyptian legend made “the followers of Horus,” who founded dynastic Egypt, metallurgists and smiths whose metal weapons enabled them to subdue the older neolithic population. The story as it has come down to us declares the smiths to have been workers in iron; iron, however, must be the substitute of the later version of the story for some other metal, since, though Vyse claims to have discovered an iron clamp in the great pyramid of Giza,[62] and Petrie has found a mass of iron in a Sixth-dynasty deposit in the temple of Osiris at Abydos,[63] ironsmiths can hardly have existed in the pre-dynastic age. It is probable, therefore, that copper was the metal which the dynastic Egyptians introduced into their new home, and which was already in use in Babylonia. But the intercourse with Asia Minor, which the gold of the First dynasty indicates must even then have been going on, makes it possible that it was from this quarter of the world that the earliest knowledge of the manufacture of bronze was brought to the valley of the Nile. Even in the time of the Twelfth dynasty, however, the tools found by Professor Petrie in the workmen’s huts at Kahûn are of copper rather than of bronze.[64] The colossal statue of King Pepi of the Sixth dynasty, discovered at Hierakonpolis, is of hammered copper, and we have to wait for the advent of the Eighteenth dynasty before bronze becomes the predominant metal. That such was the case points to the Hyksos period as that in which bronze succeeded in superseding the older copper. It may be that the Hyksos brought the extended use of it with them from Syria. In Southern Palestine, Mr. Macalister’s excavations at Gezer have shown that bronze rather than copper was largely employed throughout the so-called Amorite period, which went back to an earlier age than that of the Twelfth dynasty, and it is just here that in the time of the Eighteenth dynasty bronze itself began to make way for iron. Mr. J. L. Myres has recently traced the polychrome pottery of Southern Canaan to the Hittite lands of Cappadocia,[65] where the red ochre was found by which it was characterized, and a knowledge of bronze may have travelled along the same road.