Apparently they have been buried on the floor of the Nile valley under alluvial deposits. The Eolithic and Lower Palæolithic implements are found on the plateau through which the valley stretches; also cemented into conglomerate formed of gravel and stone washed down from this plateau and cut into terraces by the Nile when it still flowed from 30 to 100 feet higher than at present; and on the terraces. Just when these terraces were formed, it is difficult to say in terms of European Pleistocene periods; but not later than the third glacial epoch, it would seem, and perhaps as early as the second. As the Chellean of Europe is put after the third glaciation in the chronology followed in this book, the antiquity of the first flints used, and perhaps deliberately shaped, in Egypt, is carried back to an extremely high antiquity by the specimens imbedded in the terrace cliffs.
About the time of the last glaciation—the Mousterian or end of the Lower Palæolithic in Europe—the Nile ceased cutting down through the gravels that bordered it and began to build up its bed and its valley with a deposit of mud as it does to-day. From excavations to the base of dated monuments it is known that during the last 4,000 years this alluvium has been laid down at the rate of a foot in 300 years in northern Egypt. As it there attains a depth of over a hundred feet, the process of deposition is indicated as having begun 30,000 or more years ago. Of course no computation of this sort is entirely reliable because various factors can enter to change the rate; but the probability is that, other things equal, the deposition would have been slower at first than of late, and the time of the aggrading correspondingly longer. In any event geologists agree that their Recent—the last 10,000 years or so—is insufficient, and that the deposition of the floor of the Nile valley must have begun during what in Europe was part of the Würm glaciation.
This is the period of transition from Lower to Upper Palæolithic (§ [69], [70], [213]) in Europe. The disappearance of Upper Palæolithic remains in Egypt is most plausibly explained by the fact that the Upper Palæolithic, just as later the Neolithic, was indeed represented in Egypt, very likely flourishingly, but that in the mild climate its artifacts were lost or interred on or near the surface of the valley itself and have therefore long since been covered over so deep that only future lucky accidents, like well-soundings, may now and then bring a specimen to light.
For the Neolithic, there actually are such discoveries: bits of pottery brought up from borings, 60 feet deep in the vicinity of one of the monuments referred to, 75 and 90 feet deep at other points in lower Egypt. The smallest of these figures computes to a lapse of 18,000 years—nearly twice as long as the estimated age of the earliest pottery in Europe. It is always necessary not to lay too much reliance on durations calculated solely from thickness of strata, whether these are geological or culture-bearing. But in this case general probability confirms, at least in the rough. In 4000 B.C., when Egypt was beginning to use copper, western Europe was still in its first phase of stone polishing; in 1500 B.C., when Egypt was becoming acquainted with iron, Europe was scarcely yet at the height of its bronze industry. If the fisher folk camped on their oyster shells on the Baltic shores were able to make pottery by 8000 B.C., there is nothing staggering in the suggestion that the Egyptians knew the art in 16,000 B.C. They have had writing more than twice as long as the North Europeans.
The dates themselves, then, need not be taken too literally. They are calculated from slender even though impressive evidence and subject to revision by perhaps thousands of years. But they do suggest strongly the distinct precedence of northern Africa, and by implication of western Asia, over Europe in the Neolithic, as precedence is clear in the Bronze and early Iron Ages and indicated for the Lower Palæolithic.
If, accordingly, the beginning of the Early Neolithic—the age of pottery, bow, dog—be set for Egypt somewhere around 16,000 B.C., about coeval with the beginning of the Magdalenian in middle western Europe (§ [215]), the Full Neolithic, the time of first domestication of animals and plants and polishing of stone, could be estimated at around 10,000 B.C., when Europe was still lingering in its epi-Palæolithic phase (§ [216]). One can cut away several thousand years and retain the essential situation unimpaired: 8000, or 7000 B.C., still leaves Egypt in the van; helps to explain the appearance of eastern grains and animals in Europe around 6000-5000 B.C.; and, what is most to the point, allows a sufficient interval for agriculture and the allied phases of civilization to have reached the degree of development which they display when the Predynastic Local Kingdoms drift into our vision around 4500 B.C. A long Full Neolithic, then, is both demanded by the situation in Egypt and indicated by such facts as there are; a long period in which millet, barley, split-wheat, wheat, flax, cattle, sheep, and asses were gradually modified and made more useful by breeding under domestication. This Full Neolithic, or its last portion, was the Predynastic Tribal Age of Egypt; which, when it passed into the Predynastic Local Kingdoms phase about 4500 B.C., had brought these plants and animals substantially to their modern forms, and had increased and coördinated the population of the land to a point that the devising of calendar, metallurgy, writing, and kingship soon followed.
241. Culture Growth in Dynastic Egypt
The story of the growth of Egyptian civilization during the Dynastic or historic period is a fascinating one. There were three phases of prosperity and splendor. The first was the Old Kingdom, 3000-2500, culminating in the fourth dynasty of the Great Pyramid builders, in the twenty-ninth century. The second was the Middle or Feudal Kingdom, with its climax in the twelfth dynasty, 2000-1788. After the invasion of the Asiatic Hyksos in the seventeenth century, the New Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties arose, whose greatest extension fell in the reign of Thutmose III, 1501-1447, although the country retained some powers of offensive for a couple of centuries longer. There followed a slow nationalistic decline, a transient seventh century conquest by Assyria, a brief and fictitious renascence supported by foreign mercenaries, and the Persian conquest of 525 B.C., since which time Egypt has never been an independent power under native rulers. A waning of cultural energy, at least relatively to other peoples, had set in before the military decline. By 1000 B.C. certainly, by 1500 perhaps, Egypt was receiving more elements of civilization than she was imparting. She still loomed wealthy and refined in contrast with younger nations; but these were producing more that was new.
Copper smelted from the ores of the Sinai peninsula had apparently come into use by 4000, but remained scarce for a long time. The first dynasty had some low grade bronze; by 2500 bronze containing a tenth of tin was in use. Iron was introduced about 1500 or soon after, but for centuries remained a sparing Asiatic import. In fact, the conservatism that was settling over the old age of the civilization caused it to cling with unusual tenacity to bronze. As late as Ptolemaic and Roman times, when the graves of foreigners abounded in iron, those of Egyptians were still prevailingly bronze furnished.
Quite different must have been the social psychology three thousand years earlier. The first masonry was laid in place of adobe brick to line tomb walls in the thirty-first century; and within a century and a half the grandest stone architecture in human history had been attained in the Pyramid of Cheops. This was a burst of cultural energy such as has been equalled only in the rise of Greek art or modern science.