Note 484 — Chapter XI

Recent discoveries of stone objects in Egypt have revived the question of Asiatic or European influence in Africa. While Flinders Petrie, De Morgan, and others suppose that Petrie’s “new race” of the neolithic period which preceded Egyptian civilisation in the Nile valley is related to the Libyans coming from the north-west of Africa, and perhaps from Europe, Schweinfurth (Zeitsh. f. Ethnol., 1897; Verhandl., p. 263) thinks that these neolithic people were immigrants from Arabia (Semites?), who had come into the Nile valley from the south, through Nubia. The recent discovery of chipped flints in the country of the Somalis, as well as considerations of a botanic character, confirm this supposition, without excluding, however, the possibility of the arrival of the Libyans of the north-west in the palæolithic period, and the tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia in historic times. (Evidence: the “Hyksos” of the Egyptian annals, the presence of cuneiform tablets at Tel-el-Amarna, upper Egypt, to which attention was drawn by Sayce, etc.)