20 Outlines of European History The Stone Age Egyp- tians Earliest government and taxes margin of the desert where it rolls in thousands of low mounds, covering the graves of the earliest ancestors of the brown men we see in the Delta fields. When we have dug out such a grave to the bottom we find the ancient Nile peasant lying there, surrounded by pottery jars and stone implements (Fig. ii). There he has been lying for over six thousand years, and the stone tools which he used so long ago tell us that he lived all his life without having known anything about metal. Occasional grains of wheat, barley, 'or millet, however, show that his women were already cultivating grain — the grain that later passed to Europe (p. 12). A fragment of linen in such a grave shows us also where Europe derived its flax. The peasant at the bottom of this grave was therefore watering his fields of flax and grain down on the fertile soil of the valley over six thousand years ago, just as the brown men whom the traveler sees from the car windows to-day are still doing. The villages of low mud-brick huts which flash by the car windows fur- nish us also with an exact picture of those vanished prehistoric villages, the homes of the early Nile dwellers who are still lying in yonder cemeteries on the desert margin. In such a village, six to seven thousand years ago, lived the local chieftain who controlled the irrigation canal trenches of the district. To him the peasant was required to carry every season a share of the grain and flax which he gathered from his field ; other- wise the supply of water for his crops would stop, and he would Fig 1 1 . Looking down INTO THE Grave of A Late Stone Age Egyptian An oval pit four or five feet deep, excavated on the margin of the desert. The body is surrounded by pot- tery jars once containing food and drink for the life hereafter. Pieces of metal were beginning to appear with the implements of stone found in the grave
