What we may call, I think, the intentional records began when we find that man began to carve designs on stone of what he had been doing, or to paint pictures showing his doings, and, especially, when he began to cut written words on the stone. When we {9} begin to get records of this kind, then we really do begin to read the story---we begin to know what man was doing. And the first records of the kind are of date some five thousand years before the birth of Christ; that is to say, some seven thousand years ago. [Sidenote: The first records] And what do we find, from these carvings and pictures and writings, that man was doing? The records that we are best able to read now are those which we find in the more westerly of the two great river-courses on which, as we have seen, man congregated. It is along the Nile, in Egypt, that we find the record most clear. I have little doubt that we might find it no less clear along the other great river-courses, those of the Euphrates and Tigris, also, were it not for this difference--that Egypt and the Nile region was very much better supplied with hard stone than the Euphrates and Tigris region. The result of that is that the inscriptions and figures cut on the hard Egyptian stone are legible still. The other, more eastern, records, cut on the brick which, in the absence of stone, the builders made use of for nearly all building purposes, have crumbled to pieces. The wonder, after so many years, is that anything at all should be left, rather than that much has been lost. The Egyptian climate is very dry, except near the river's mouth, at the Delta, and that dryness has helped to preserve the records. If we had the same records for the eastern as for the western river-course, we should find, I expect, that the way the people lived was very much alike in both. We may gather that it was a very pleasant life, on the whole. The climate was delightfully warm; the soil gave them plentiful crops with very {10} little work for it. Probably the eastern people were the more pastoral, that is to say, kept more cattle and sheep, but there were flocks and herds in the Nile region also. And in both there were wild beasts for the hunting. {11} CHAPTER II EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.