PREHISTORIC HISTORY 9 shall find ourselves dealing with the early civilisations of Egypt and the Euphrates valley j and following upon these the Semitic or partly Semitic Empires in the same regions ; that Fi rs t chapters is to say, in Egypt and in Asia west of the Persian of History. Gulf. Until somewhere about 2000 B.C. the record is meagre. At about this time the record of the Hebrew people, a Semitic race, begins with Abraham; and the records become fuller both for Egypt and for Mesopotamia, the land lying between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. We shall see all these empires finally absorbed in that of Persia in the sixth century B.C. We shall glance also at the establish- ment of the Aryan dominion in India, and the development of the pre-Hellenic and Hellenic civilisations on the Eastern Mediterranean. From that time we may consider ourselves as being in the full light of history deliberately recorded in a literary form.
