The use of brick in early Egypt points in the same direction. While Babylonia was a land of clay, Upper Egypt was a land of stone, and it was as unnatural to invent the art of brick-making in the latter country as it was natural to do so in the former. To this day the Nubians build their cottages of stone; so too do the Bedâwîn squatters on the east bank of the Nile; it is only where the population is Egyptian and the influence of the old Egyptian civilization is still dominant that brick is employed. Under the Old Empire the Egyptian Pharaohs built even the temples of the gods of brick; it was but gradually that the brick was superseded by stone. It was the same also in Assyria; here too, in a land of stone, brick was at first the sole building material, and even the great brick platforms which the marshy soil of Babylonia had necessitated continued to be laid. But Assyrian culture was confessedly Babylonian in origin, and the brick edifice was therefore a characteristic of it. It was only by degrees that Assyrian architecture emancipated itself from its early traditions, and at first timidly, then more boldly, superseded the brick by stone. The example of Assyria throws light on that of Egypt, and as the Assyrian employment of brick was due to the Babylonian origin of its civilization, it is permissible to infer that the Egyptian employment of brick was also due to the same cause. Once more we may repeat that there was early intercourse between Egypt and Babylonia--the land of the brick-maker--and that in this intercourse the prevailing influences came from the east. Such, then, is the conclusion to which the most recent research leads us. The “dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians of history, spoke a language which is related to those of the Semitic family; their first kingdoms, so far as we know, were in Upper Egypt, and tradition brought them across the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile. The culture which they possessed was characterized by Babylonian features, and was therefore due either wholly or in part to intercourse with Babylonia. The fact that the use of the seal-cylinder--which, by the way, bore the Semitic name of _khetem_--should have lingered in the valley of the Nile to the very beginnings of the Middle Empire, is an indication that the period of its introduction could not have been very remote. The earliest historical monuments which have been revealed to us by modern excavation may not, after all, be many centuries later than the time when the culture of Babylonia found its way to the Nile.