One of the most striking of these is the proof that Egypt was a new country in the days of Menes and several generations of his successors. The monuments of this period show little of the complicated idolatry, ritual, and caste system of later times, and are deficient in evidence of the refinement and variety of art afterward attained. They also show that these early monarchs were principally engaged in dyking, and otherwise reclaiming the alluvial flats; an evidence precisely of the same character with that which every traveller sees in the more recently settled districts of Canada, where the forest is giving way to the exertions of the farmer. Farther, in this primitive period, known as the "old monarchy," few domestic animals appear, and experiments seem to have been in progress to tame others, natives of the country, as the hyena, the antelope, the stork. Even the dog in the older dynasties is represented by one or at most two varieties, and the prevalent one is a wolfish-looking animal akin to the present wild or half-tamed dogs of the East.[117] The Egyptians, too, of the earlier dynasties, are more homogeneous in their appearance than those of the later, after conquest and migration had introduced new races; and the earliest monumental notice referring to Negro tribes does not appear until the 12th dynasty, about half-way between the epoch of Menes and the Christian era, nor does any representation of the Negro features occur until, at the earliest, the 17th dynasty. This allows ample time--one thousand years at the least--for the development, under abnormal circumstances and isolation, of all the most strongly marked varieties of man. Still Egypt, even under the old monarchy, presents evidence of the continuation of antediluvian culture.[118] It is obvious, in short, that the whole aspect of early Egyptian history presents to us a people already civilized taking possession of that country at a period corresponding with that of the subsidence of the Noachian deluge, and not finding there any remains of older populations. Nor have any remains of such populations been found by modern investigation.[119]