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Egypt Before the Time Of

RAMESES.

The Basin of the Nile and its First Colonists. - Races of Men known in Egypt Fifteen Centuries before the Birth of Christ. - Pre-Historic Chronology of the Egyptian Empire. - Menes, the First Founder of a Dynasty. - Discordance between Epigraphy and Geology. - The Irruption of the Hycsos. - National Rivalries and Wars. The Eighteenth Dynasty.

I.

WHEN the traveller from Europe directs his course toward the southeast angle of the Mediterranean, he must not expect to see the African country reveal itself to his gaze in those majestic aspects to which the Alpine landscapes of Liguria, the Tyrrhenian Islands, Italy or Greece may have accustomed him. Upon that part of the African coast which directly confronts Asia Minor, there is nothing of the kind; a reddish mist, due, no doubt, to the rarefaction of the atmosphere, heated by the combined action of the sand and the sun, is the first indication of the vicinity of land that appears on the horizon: the second is presented by the sight of a few palm-tree tops reflected high in the air by the refraction of the vapory mass. At length, almost at the moment when you are about to touch it, the low, sandy beach that sustains them is seen, like a thin, reddish line, a feeble boundary between the deep green of the sea and the pale blue of the heavens.