The valley of the Lower Nile, however, attracted many invasions from Europe and Asia, and from Libya (northwest Africa), where the dominant race was mainly of Iberian stock.[1] Dynasties rose and fell, often coincident with the invasion of Egypt by one race of conquerors after another. All these races (with the exception perhaps of the Hittites) belonged to various types of the Caucasian species. The Hittites possibly may have introduced a slight element of the Mongolian. In the earliest historical period Egypt and the lower valley of the Nile does not seem to have been markedly severed in its interracial relations from the far greater portion of the Nile basin which lies to the south of the fifteenth degree of north latitude. Egyptians penetrated no doubt without much difficulty up the Nile valley into and among the Negro tribes of the Central Sudan and Equatoria. The Ancient Egyptians may have had--must have had--a certain proportion of Negro or Negroid in their composition; beside the drop of Negro blood in their Hamitic ancestors, they must have absorbed the earlier Negroid population of their country and have imported and intermarried with Negro slaves. But they were fully Caucasian in the vivid interest they took in nature, and in their desire to depict all the striking forms of life around them, especially when such forms had anything of novelty. Prof. Flinders Petrie has, I believe, recently discovered a vase of immeasurable antiquity of the “Pre-Dynastic” period in Lower Egypt which is incised with a delineation of the Kudu antelope.[2] Other and later relics would seem to show that the Egyptians were acquainted with the chimpanzee of the Bahr-al-Ghazal regions, the Pygmies who once inhabited the western part of the Upper Nile basin, and many forms of the Tropical African fauna. But after these early historical times there appears to have come about a severance of relations between Egypt and the Upper Nile, though an overland route to the Land of Punt (Somaliland) either through Abyssinia or to the west of that elevated region nearly always existed unclosed to traffic. It is noteworthy that the Ancient Egyptians themselves do not appear ever to have penetrated up the main stream of the Nile much above its junction with the Bahr-al-Ghazal, no doubt owing to the obstruction of the sudd. Their traders may have travelled into many parts of the Bahr-al-Ghazal region, and possibly even westward in the direction of Lake Chad,--westward, it may be, even across the western Sudan to the Niger,--yet there is not the slightest indication of their ever having journeyed up the main White Nile to the snow-mountains and the equatorial lakes. But they traded for thousands of years with the men of Punt (Somaliland) by sea and by land; and there is evidence to show that the peoples of Somaliland and Galaland (who had by repeated prehistoric invasions permeated the Upper Nile basin and left aristocracies behind them) traded anciently--say, in pre-Islamic