Outlines of Universal History - 1885 Author:George Park Fisher Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Section II. THE EARLIEST GROUP OF NATIONS. CHAPTER I. EGYPT. The Land and the People. — When the curtain that hides the far distant past is lifted, we fi... more »nd in the valley of the Nile a people of a dark color, tinged with red, and a peculiar physiognomy, who had long existed there. Of their beginnings, there is no record. They did not come down the river from the south, as some have thought; but they were of Asiatic origin. Their language, if it seems to have certain affinities with the Semitic tongues in its grammar, is utterly dissimilar in its vocabulary : its modern descendant is the Coptic, no longer a spoken dialect. The Egyptians were of the Caucasian variety, but not white like the Lybians on the west. On the east were tribes of a yellowish complexion and various lineage, belonging to the numerous people whom the Egyptians designated as Amu. On the south, in what was called Ethiopia, was a negro people; and, also beyond them and eastward, a dusky race, of totally different origin, a branch of the widely diffused Cushitcs. The Nile: Divisions of the Country. — Egypt (styled by its ancient inhabitants, from the color of the soil deposited by the Nile, Kern or the Black Land, and by the Hebrews called Miz- raim) is the creation of the great river. " Egypt," says Herodotus, "is the gift of the Nile ;" and this is not only true, as the historian meant it, physically, because it is the Nile that rescued the land from the arid waste by which it is bordered; but the course of Egyptian history — the occupations, habits, and religion of the people—was largely determined by the characteristics of the river. The sources of the Nile have had in all ages the fascination of mystery, and have been a fruitful theme for conjecture. It was reserved for modern explorers to ascertain ...« less