The skull-form of the Southerners agrees with that of the
Mediterranean races. But we have no necropoles of the Northerners to
tell us much of their peculiarities. We have nothing but their flint
arrowheads.
But it should be observed that, in spite of the present absence of all
primitive remains (whether mere flints, or actual graves with bodies and
relics) of the primeval population between the Fayyum and el-Kawamil,
there is no proof that the primitive race of Upper Egypt was not
coterminous and identical with that of the lower country. It
might therefore be urged that the whole Neolithic population was
"Mediterranean" by its skull-form and body-structure, and specifically
"Nilotic" (indigenous Egyptian) in its culture-type. This is quite
possible, but we have again to account for the legends of distant origin
on the Red Sea coast, the probability that one element of the Egyptian
population was of extraneous origin and came from the east into the Nile
valley near Koptos, and finally the historical fact of an advance of the
early dynastic Egyptians from the South to the conquest of the North.
The latter fact might of course be explained as a civil war analogous
to that between Thebes and Asyut in the time of the IXth Dynasty, but
against this explanation is to be set the fact that the contemporary
monuments of the Southerners exhibit the men of the North as of foreign
and non-Egyptian ethnic type, resembling Libyans.
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