These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation--the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation--of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of Egypt.[44] And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, of bronze, possibly of iron. The later date, 4000 B.C., probably marks the beginning of the stone-age life corresponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent fuller civilizations-- ‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’ The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 5000 B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old; whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead--for what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens?--recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. But with these co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,--in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldæans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself,--not _quite_ of either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some lofty religious conceptions stretching not only beyond _it_--the animal worship--but