I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Although these people along the great rivers probably settled down into the agricultural stage earlier than others, still, that did not prevent them from keeping cattle and hunting wild creatures. The older the inscriptions and records, the more we see of the hunting, so that we may imagine, as we should expect, that the quieter business of farming gradually came to occupy more of their lives as time went on, and that the hunting occupied them less. The wild beasts would no doubt get hunted farther and farther back from the country that man had settled in. An interesting fact is that one of the very oldest of all the Egyptian engravings portrays ostriches, showing that these great birds were inhabitants of Egypt at that time, though they do not appear in any later engravings and are, of course, not living in any part of Egypt now. These ostriches are carved on the face of a sandstone rock, standing as nature placed it, and not worked into any building. It is near a place which in the old days was called Silsilla, and it was nearly at the southern end of the Egypt of those times. For that Egypt did not extend nearly as far {12} south as the country which we call by that name now. It ended at the first cataract, where is now the town called Assouan. In ancient times this Assouan was called Syene. Farther south than this, the country was no longer called Egypt, but Nubia, though some Egyptians inhabited the region a little south of the cataract. Look at your map and you will very likely see that region still written down as the "Nubian Desert." Look to the west of the line of the Nile and you may read "Libyan Desert." Look to the right, again, and there is "Arabian Desert." [Sidenote: The Nile] You will realise now what this means: that these people were here living all along the banks of the great river, and that on either side were deserts--sandy, barren wastes--which, for all they knew, stretched away without end. They lived along this narrow and very fertile strip which depended almost entirely on the river for its fertility, and which that river fertilised in a very peculiar way.