Here, however, we trench on another question, the philological position of the Egyptian language. Egyptian scholars to-day are practically unanimous in believing it to belong, more or less remotely, to the Semitic family of speech. The Berlin school of Egyptologists, who under the guidance of Professor Erman have made Egyptian grammar a special subject of investigation, are largely responsible for the dominance of this belief. I ought to be the last person in the world to protest against it, seeing that I maintained it years ago when the patronage of the Berlin Egyptologists had not yet made it fashionable. At the same time I confess that I cannot follow the Berlin philologists to the extent to which they would have us go. For them the old Egyptian language is not related to the Semitic family of speech “more or less remotely,” but very closely indeed. Indeed in their hands it becomes itself a Semitic language, and as a logical consequence the Egyptian script is metamorphosed into one of purely Semitic invention. But while admitting that Egyptian grammar is Semitic in the sense in which English grammar is Teutonic, the comparative philologist is bound to add that it contains much which cannot be reduced to a Semitic pattern. The structure, moreover, is not on the whole Semitic, neither is a large part of its vocabulary. And among the words in the lexicon which have Semitic affinities there are a good many which are better explained as the result of borrowing than as belonging to the original stratum of the language. In some cases they are demonstrably words which have been introduced into the Egyptian language at a late date; in other cases it seems possible to regard them as loan-words from Semitic Babylonian which entered the language at a “pre-dynastic” epoch. Thus, _qemḳu_, “the wheaten loaf” which was used for offerings, is the Hebrew _qemakh_, the Babylonian _qêmu_, and may have been brought into Egypt along with the wheat which was first cultivated in Babylonia and still grows wild on the banks of the Euphrates. To what an early period the importation of the cereal must be referred is shown by its occurrence in the prehistoric graves of Upper Egypt.[95]