Chapter I
THE DAWN OF NILE EXPLORATION
The first men who entered Egypt and travelled up the valley of the Nile came, almost unquestionably, from the east, and were part of those radiations from the central focus of humanity, India. It is possible that the first men who entered the valley of the Nile from this direction may have been of so primitive, simian, and undetermined a type—so “Neanderthaloid”—as not to belong definitely to any one of the three main species of humanity. At that distant time, however (let us say at the end of the Pleistocene period or beginning of the Quaternary Epoch), there was undoubtedly a land connection over the south as well as over the north end of the Red Sea, joining Arabia to Ethiopia as well as to Egypt; and across this bridge came many types of Asiatic mammals, also man,—possibly in the form of a low Negroid, a type represented to-day (much changed and modified, of course) by the Congo Pygmies and South African Bushmen. As regards the history of humanity, however, the valley of the Nile has been divided into two very distinct parts. The southern half of its basin—in common with all Africa south of the Sahara and the fifteenth degree of north latitude—was peopled from the east, through southern Arabia, and by the Negro species in the main. Egypt proper and the adjoining regions of Arabia once lay within the domain of the Negroid Pygmies, but these indigenes were overwhelmed at a relatively early period by more or less “negrified” branches of the Caucasian stock coming from the direction of Syria or from Libya. Before the dawn of the historical epoch—say nine thousand years ago—an element in the population of Lower Egypt certainly showed Bushmen affinities. These steatopygous Bushmen were perhaps Proto-negroes, who may have branched off from the Nigritic stock when first that species reached the Mediterranean regions. This Bushman element in Egypt was for some time distinct, prior to the historical period, as the characteristic type of the servile class. Following on these dwarfish people came races bearing some slight resemblance to the Dravidians of India or the Brahuis of Baluchistan,—a somewhat Australoid stock which has left traces in Elam and around the shores of the Persian Gulf. Then came an aquiline type of nearly pure Caucasian stock, usually known by Egyptologists as the “Khafra” race. This probably arrived from Syria or Cyprus. But the men of the northern half of the Nile basin who fathered the principal, dominating type of ancient and modern Egyptian emigrated seemingly from the direction of Galaland, Somaliland, or Abyssinia. In these countries, or originally perhaps in southern Arabia, there was formed a handsome race mainly of Caucasian stock, but which had mingled somewhat considerably with the Proto-negroes and Dravidians in Arabia and in northeast Africa, and so had acquired darker skins, and hair with more or less tendency to curl. The men of this race, like the modern Somali or Gala, and the inhabitants of southern Arabia, grew thin and wedge-shaped beards. Their lips were full, their noses straight and finely shaped. Their degenerate descendants continue to exist with but little altered facial type in the Danākil, Somali, and Gala of the present day; but in the northern half of the Nile valley they became in time the main stock of the Egyptian population. They also, it would seem, profoundly modified Negro Africa; for while on the one hand they started out by a series of race movements and conquests from the direction of Abyssinia to invade and mould Egypt, on the other (though more faint-heartedly) they advanced in a southwesterly direction to influence Negro Africa. They have formed aristocracies in the countries round the head-waters of the White Nile. Their influence on the Negro races has been widespread, permeating, even though faintly, in a handsome physical type and remarkable form of language, to Zululand on the south and perhaps westward across the continent to the Congo, the Cross River, and the Atlantic coast. This Hamitic race (as it is called for want of a better word), which made its first home—and retains as its last—the highlands of Abyssinia and the plateaux and arid coastlands of Afar, Somaliland, and the Gala countries, has been the mainstay of Ancient Egypt, and also, together with its not distantly related Libyan brethren, the main human agent in saving the Negro from slipping back into the life of the anthropoid ape.
