Page 22 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

six thousands years in the past, when the inhabitants of the Nile
valley had lived altogether differently, ranging the edges of the

forests that then stretched between the cliffs of the desert and the
swamps of the river valley, living on the beasts and birds that they
could bring down with their clubs and boomerangs and arrows

and dwelling in temporary villages of grass huts. To these hunting
savages seed corn and sheep and goats and cattle had gradually
penetrated from the delta to the north, together with the knowl­
edge of sowing and harvesting, of milling and cheese and butter­

making, of spinning and weaving. Centuries had gone to taming
the river valley, to clearing the forest and draining the swamps, to
laying out fields and dikes. Gradually irrigation systems had been

developed to extend the belt of cultivable land up to and into the
watching desert; the plow had been introduced from the delta,
and the revolution of using oxen to draw it; corn had been im­
proved, flax introduced. The papyrus reed had become a com­

mercial crop, when papermaking followed the introduction from
the east of the idea of writing and the development of the native
Egyptian hieroglyphic script. Systems of government and land

tenure had changed and changed again during the slow march
of generation upon generation. Even gods had come and gone
again, as the primitive animism of the hunting peoples was re­
fined. The patron animals that formed the totem of each clan be­

came the animal-headed gods which protected each shire, and
then were amalgamated and related into a closeknit pantheon in
which all the gods were common to all the land—though still par­

ticularly associated with their original shire—and each had its
own attributes, its own sphere of the universal way of fife to con­
trol and guard.
Of how all this had grown up the worker in the fields knows

nothing. Though he has his legends and his myths.
The legends tell him that his earliest forefathers came from
Punt, the Holy Land far to the southward along the coast of the

Eastern Sea. He calls his country the Two Lands, and the great­
est figure in his traditions is King Mena, who united the two
lands, one the river valley and the other the delta, into one king­
dom some fourteen hundred years ago. (It is as far in his past

as King Arthur is in ours.) And he tells tales of the wars and