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22 The southern line of Egypt only just touches the tropics; still the climate, influenced by the wide and hot deserts that hem the valley, is semi-tropical in character. The fruits of the tropics and the cereals of the temperate zone grow luxuriantly. Thus favored in climate as well as in the matter of irrigation, Egypt became in early times the granary of the East. To it less favored countries, when stricken by famine,—a calamity so common in the East in regions dependent upon the rainfall,—looked for food, as did the families of Israel during drought and failure of crops in Palestine.

22. The Prehistoric Age in Egypt (from an unknown antiquity to about 5000 ).—Traces of man's existence in the Nile valley during the Paleolithic period have been found in several places, while in numerous localities in all parts of Egypt south of the delta, implements belonging to the Neolithic time have been discovered. Our knowledge of the people inhabiting the country in prehistoric times has thus been greatly increased in recent years. They dressed in skins, lived in mud or reed huts, and hunted the wild animals which inhabited the forests that in those distant times covered the river plains and the now desert plateaus bordering the valley. These aboriginal folk seem to have been of Hamitic stock, being apparently an offshoot of the ancient Libyan race.

About 5000 B.C. there seems to have come into the valley a new people from the region of the Red Sea. These immigrants are believed to have come from some East African or South Arabian territory that had been under the influence of the culture which had already sprung up in the Babylonian plains. They may have brought with them, as has been supposed, implements of copper and bronze, some of the cereals, oxen, sheep and goats, a knowledge of the use of bricks for building material, a system of writing, and other elements of civilization. It is thought by some scholars that the historic Egyptians arose from the union of these invaders with the earlier settlers, while by other Egyptologists it is maintained that there never was any essential change in the Hamitic character of this people.