PREHISTORIC EGYPT.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 4 October 1901, Page 4

PREHISTORIC EGYPT.

Modern archaeology is doing much to carry back the beginnings of history farther and farther into the dim past, ‘lire recent” researches of Professor Flinders Petrie, for example, have enabled that distinguished scientist to determine that in Egypt there was a civilised race, wiili an orderly Government and some knowledge of the arts and sciences, at least 7000 years before the Christian era. Searching among the ancient Egyptian tombs, he has discovered that between the years 7000 b.c, and 4700 n. c., approximately, the arc of the potter had become more and more elaborate, flint tools had reached a remarkable degree of' perfection, ivory had been brought into extensixe use, and silver and gold were employed for decorative purposes. Three thousand years before the birth of Araham, the Egyptians were navigating the Kileinboais, furnished with cabins and impelled with oars and sails. Thanks to Professor Petrie’s discoveries at Abydos, and in the pve-clynastic cemeteries at Abadiyeh and Hu, he has been enabled to reconstruct the earliest records of the human race in the Nile Valley, and to connect the early inhabitants with the dwellers in Chaldea, who appear to have imposed a superior civilisation upon the nomadic people of the Nile Valley. There is a strong presumption that an emigration took place from Chaldea, for the new-comers appear to have introduced brick buildings into Egypt, and there is said to bo an astonishing resemblance between the sculptured slate-tablets found at Abydos and those recently discovered in Chaldea. Whoreover they came from, this was the race which, as Professor Petrie says, by entering Egypt from the north-east and absorbing the nomades from the south an?s west, ‘‘enabled the rude people, wrapped in goat skins, to develop within two or three centuries the skilful prehistoric civilisation of Egypt.” Professor Petrie has already succeeded in identifying many of the kings of the two first Egyptian dynasties, and, generally speaking, has done much to clear away the cloud of oblivion which for so many centuries has enveloped the records of prehistoric Egypt.