The limestones and sandstones which bound the Nile valley, sometimes rising in precipitous cliffs from the bank of the stream, sometimes receding for many miles beyond the edge of the green alluvial plain, are rocks formed in cretaceous and early tertiary times under the sea, when all Northern Africa and Western Asia were beneath the ocean. When raised from the sea-bed to form land, they were variously bent and fractured, and the Nile valley occupies a rift or fault, which, lying between the hard ridges of the Arabian hills on the east and the more gentle elevations of the Nubian desert on the west, afforded an outlet for the waters of interior Africa and for the great floods which in the rainy season pour down from the mountains of Abyssinia.
This outlet has been available and has been in process of erosion by running water from a period long anterior to the advent of man, and with this early pre-human history belonging to the miocene and pliocene periods of geology we have no need to meddle, except to state that it was closed by a great subsidence, that of the pleistocene or glacial period, when the land of North Africa and Western Asia was depressed several hundred feet, when Africa was separated from Asia, when the Nile valley was an arm of the sea, and when sea-shells were deposited on the rising grounds of Lower Egypt at a height of two hundred feet or more. [64] Such raised beaches are found not only in the Nile valley but on the shores of the Red Sea, and, as we shall see, along the coast of Palestine; but, so far as known, no remains of man have been found in connection with them. This great depression must, however, geologically speaking, have been not much earlier than the advent of man, since in many parts of the world we find human remains in deposits of the next succeeding era.
[64] Hull, Geology of Palestine and adjacent Districts, Palestine Exploration Fund. Dawson, Modern Science in Bible Lands, p. 311 and Appendix. References will be found in these works to the labours of Fraas, Schweinfurth, and others.
This next period, that known to geologists as the post-glacial or early modern, was characterised by an entire change of physical conditions. The continents of the northern hemisphere were higher and wider than now. The details of this we have already considered, and have seen that at this time the Mediterranean was divided into two basins, and a broad fringe of low land, now submerged, lay around its eastern end. This was the age of those early palæolithic or palæocosmic men whose remains are found in the caverns and gravels of Europe and Asia. What was the condition of Egypt at this time? The Nile must have been flowing in its valley; but there was probably a waterfall or cataract at Silsilis in Upper Egypt, and rapids lower down, and the alluvial plain was much less extensive than now and forest-clad, while the river seems to have been unable to reach the Mediterranean and to have turned abruptly eastward, discharging into a lake where the Isthmus of Suez now is, and probably running thence into the Red Sea, so that at this time the waters of the Nile approached very near to those of the Jordan, a fact which accounts for that similarity of their modern fauna which has been remarked by so many naturalists. I have myself collected in the deposits of this old lake, near Ismailia, fresh-water shells of kinds now living in the Upper Nile. If at this time men visited the Nile valley, they must have been only a few bold hunters in search of game, and having their permanent homes on the Mediterranean plains now submerged.
If they left any remains we should find these in caverns or rock shelters, or in the old gravels belonging to this period which here and there project through the alluvial plain. At one of these places, Jebel Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may have been of human workmanship; [65] but after a day's collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were other than accidental fragments. If they really are flint knives they are older than the period we are now considering, and must be much older than the first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings. [66] These gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 'palæolithic' or historically antediluvian men, belonging, like the animals they hunted, to extinct races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late Miss Edwards's charming work, Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers, she was taken to task by an eminent Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. On the evidence of two additional finds of flint implements on the surface, he affirms the existence of man in Egypt at a time when 'the Arabian deserts were covered with verdure and intersected by numerous streams,' that is, geologically speaking, in the early pleistocene or pliocene period, or even in the miocene!
[65] Journal of Archæological Society, 1881. Haynes's Journal of the American Academy of Sciences.
[66] Dawson, Egypt and Syria, p. 149.
Singularly enough, therefore, Egypt is to the prehistoric annalist not an old country—less old indeed than France and England, in both of which we find evidence of the residence of the palæolithic cave men of the mammoth age. Thus, when we go beyond local history into the prehistoric past, our judgment as to the relative age of countries may be strangely reversed.
It is true that in Egypt, as in most other countries, flint flakes, or other worked flints, are common on the surface and in the superficial soil; but there is no good evidence that they did not belong to historic times. A vivid light has been thrown on this point by Petrie's discovery, in débris attributed to the age of the twelfth dynasty, or approximately that of the Hebrew patriarchs, of a wooden sickle of the ordinary shape, but armed with flint fakes serrated at their edges, [67] though the handle is beautifully curved in such a manner as to give a better and more convenient hold than with those now in use. This primitive implement presents to us the Egyptian farmer of that age reaping his fields of wheat and barley with implements similar to those of the palæocosmic men. No doubt, at the same time, he used a harrow armed with rude flints, and may have used flint flakes for cutting wood or for pointing his arrows. Yet he was a member of a civilised and highly-organised nation, which could execute great works of canalisation and embankment, and could construct tombs and temples that have not since been surpassed. Can we doubt that the common people in Palestine and other neighbouring countries were equally in the flint age, or be surprised that, somewhat later, Joshua used flint knives to circumcise the Israelites? [68] How remarkable are these links of connection between early Eastern civilisation and the stone age! and they relate to mere flakes, such as if found separately might be styled 'palæolithic.'
[67] Kahun and Garob, Egyptian Exploration Fund publications.