Long before the period at which our historical knowledge begins, these Egyptian husbandmen had laid the foundations of their civilisation. They still went unclad and delighted to paint their bodies with green pigment; their ruler still wore a lion’s tail at his girdle and a strange savage-looking top-knot on his head; his sceptre was still a staff such as may be cut from the tree; but these staves already ruled a wide domain full of townships large and small. And in each of these there were already nobles, responsible to the king for the government thereof, looking with reverence toward his “great house,” and paying him tribute of their corn and cattle. And in the midst of the clay huts in every place stood a large hut, with wattled walls, the entrance adorned with poles; no other than the sanctuary of their god. Already they carved his image in wood and carried it round the town at festivals. Manifold are the accomplishments which the Egyptians have acquired by this time. They fashion the flint of the desert into knives and weapons of the utmost perfection of workmanship, they make cords, mats, and skiffs out of the rushes from the marsh-land, they are acquainted with the art of manufacturing tiles and earthen vessels from the clay of the soil. They carve in wood and ivory, and their carvings have already a peculiar character wholly their own. Moreover, they have prepared the way for the greatest of their achievements and have learned to record their ideas by drawing small pictures; the character is still for the most part pictographic, but even now certain particular pictures are used to denote sounds. On this primitive period of the Egyptian nation we can only gaze from afar; we do not meet it face to face until the time when the two kingdoms, into which the country had hitherto been divided, were united for the first time by King Menes; this may have taken place after the middle of the fourth millennium. The union must have given a strong impulse to the life of the nation, and but a few generations after the days of King Menes the monuments that have come down to us exhibit most of the features characteristic of Egyptian civilisation in the later centuries. The might of Egypt waxes apace; a few centuries more--at the period we are in the habit of speaking of as the Old Kingdom--and its development has progressed so far that nothing now seems beyond its strength. The gigantic buildings of the IVth Dynasty, whose great pyramids defy the tooth of time, bear witness to this. How proudly self-conscious must the race have been which strove thus to set up for itself a perpetual memorial! And if this passion for the huge is relinquished in succeeding centuries, it is merely a token of the further development of the nation; it has wearied of the colossal scale, and turns its attention to a greater refinement of life, the grace of which still looks forth upon us from the monuments of the Vth Dynasty.