Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/476

448 almost a thing of yesterday. The history of Egypt, beginning about 4000 years B.C. with the reign of Menes, is the starting-point of the Historic period in the Mediterranean, and is therefore thrice as long as that covered by the records of this country.

Egypt from the very first was the great centre of light in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, on which all eyes were fixed, and it was a mart in which the products of the far east and the far west met together, and into which flowed the merchandise of three continents. As far back as twenty-eight centuries B.C. the Egyptians possessed powerful fleets for purposes of defence and attack; and we read of a naval engagement in the reign of Papi, B.C. 2800. They are said to have taught the Phœnicians how to make glass, and to have instructed the early Greeks in the sciences.

Of their knowledge of the arts every museum is eloquent. It is impossible to walk through the Egyptian courts in the national collections in London, or in the Louvre, or in the Vatican, without carrying away a deep impression of their power and their skill. Yet their high position was achieved without the knowledge of steel. They were acquainted with iron; bronze they used extensively, not merely for ornaments but for daggers and axes of the simple types usually considered characteristic of the early bronze civilisation north of the Alps. Flint knives were sometimes used for religious purposes, beautifully fashioned, and flint daggers such as that in the British Museum with a wooden handle. Pointed splinters of flint also were employed for